Nomads of Zyden

Off-topic, but I've just self-published my eighth book, a swords-and-sorcery fantasy titled "Nomads of Zyden." Synopsis:

When a tribe of ghoulish monsters wipes out her mountain clan, a fierce warrior named Marta sets out on a mission of revenge. But while she grew up fighting giant beasts in the frigid wastelands, she isn’t prepared for the culture shock of meeting people from the lowlands.

During her epic journey she befriends a jester, a fairy, and a woman with whom she shares a magical bond. Together they take on a much larger quest in which they must explore ancient temples and fight ruthless monsters, all to retrieve a set of artifacts that will help them defeat an all-powerful evil. Their time is short and the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

I don't always post it here when I release a new book, but since this one takes place in a fantasy setting, I thought it my interest this blog's readers. You can get it (and my other books) here:

Books by Xine Fury

Blood Samples

 I've just published my fourth "book," though this one is just a collection of six short stories. It's called Blood Samples, and it's a prequel to my other books. It's also free on most e-retailers (99 cents on Amazon). You can get it here: Amazon  Other Stores

If you like it, please check out my other books here:

Xine Fury's Books

And if you haven't already, make sure you check out my writing blog:

Bloodhunters Blog

First Impression: The Wild Beyond the Witchlight

I'm a sucker for the Feywild.  While others might prefer the more grounded, "King Arthur meets Lord of the Rings" campaigns, I tend to favor the fairy tale aspects of RPGs.  I don't always buy campaign books, but I knew "The Wild Beyond the Witchlight: A Feywild Adventure" was going to be mine as soon as it was announced. 

So what's in this book?  It's mostly an adventure set in the Feywild, with a few pages of Feywild-related character options.  

The introduction includes a chart of 100 Feywild-related trinkets, followed by two new backgrounds: Feylost and Witchlight Hand.  Feylost are people who spent a few years of their youth lost in the Feywild.  Witchlight Hands are people who work at the carnival where this module's adventure begins.

Next we have two new races:  Fairy and Harengon (Rabbitfolk).  These races are slightly updated from their previous appearance in Unearthed Arcana.  Most of the changes are just wording, though the fairy did lose its "Fey Passage" ability from the UA.  This book does not include the Owlfolk or Hobgoblin races from the same UA.

The adventure is designed to take characters from level 1 to level 8, though you can start at level 3 for an easier campaign.  I haven't read through the entire adventure yet, but supposedly every combat has a non-violent option, in case you want to make a pacifist run.  However, only clever players will be able to find ways around every combat.

The story begins at the Witchlight Carnival, a traveling fair that visits many dimensions.  It only visits this plane every eight years, so there is some pressure to accept the quest before it packs up and leaves.  While the theme is similar to the Carnival domain in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, they aren't related as far as I can tell (Edit: Turns out they do share a connection, but they are not the same carnival).  So apparently there's more than one dimension-hopping carnival in the D&D universe.

There are two possible plot hooks.  One involves the PCs looking for something they lost at the Carnival in their youth, such as their ability to smile or their sense of direction.  In the other hook, a retired warlock hires you to find his missing patron.  If you pick the first hook, the locations of the lost items are determined randomly (similar to the Tarokka reading in Curse of Strahd), giving the adventure more replay value.

While exploring the Carnival, the PCs eventually find a Fey Crossing that takes them to the Feywild Domain of Prismeer.  Prismeer is divided into three lands: Hither, Thither, and Yon.  The adventure culminates in the centrally-located "Palace of Heart's Desire".  

After the adventure, there is a section on new magic items.  Of note, there is a "Pole of Collapsing" that reminds me of Diana's weapon in the 80s cartoon.  Then we have a section on factions of Prismeer, which describes important members of each faction.  This includes some familiar faces from classic D&D, such as Kelek, Warduke, and Strongheart.  I used to have some of their action figures, and I can't wait to see how they figure into the adventure.

Next we have a section on monsters used in the adventure.  It's nice to see the Campestri (happy singing mushrooms) again.  It appears this book is full of classic D&D references, and I'm probably not even catching half of them.  

Then we have some roleplaying cards and story trackers meant to make running the campaign easier.  It looks like you're meant to photocopy these pages, so you can cut out the cards and write on the trackers.  At least I hope people aren't cutting up their books and writing in them.

Finally there is a fold-out map, meant to show to the players.  One side is a layout of the carnival, and the other side is a general map of Prismeer.  I'm not crazy about the maps, as they aren't really detailed enough to be useful, and including maps only hurts the resale value of the book when the maps inevitably get damaged or lost.  Even tearing out the map leaves a sort of torn mess at the back of the book, but leaving the map in makes the pages turn funny... look, I'm just not a fan of removable maps.

While I can't really comment on the adventure itself yet, I like what I've read so far.  I do wish they had included more playable races, but it is meant to be a campaign book, not a sourcebook.  Overall, I think the book is worth the money.

Books: Queen of the Demonweb Pits

Queen of the Demonweb Pits
by Paul Kidd
Published 2001
Part 3 of the Justicar Trilogy

The final book of this trilogy is just as good as the previous two.  The first book, White Plume Mountain, introduced us to the Justicar and Escalla.  The second book, Descent into the Depths of the Earth, gave us Escalla's background story and had her face her past.  So naturally, this third book does the same for the Justicar.

Unfortunately, his origin story is fairly mundane.  While Drizzt's beginnings took an entire trilogy to tell, the Justicar's backstory doesn't even make up a quarter of this novel.  That's too bad, because I like these characters a lot more than anyone in Salvatore's novels.

This book also gives more screen time to Henry and Enid.  Henry has taken a level in badass, having trained with the Justicar between novels.  Enid was always a monster, but she never got to do much fighting in the previous books.  Even Polk gets a couple of chances to be a hero in this one, though he's still mostly there for unfunny comic relief.

It's interesting how the gods are represented.  I don't know if this is true of Greyhawk, or just this author's interpretation of it, but the gods in this book are basically just really tough mortals.  Lolth reminds me a lot of the Queen of Hearts in Tim Burton's version of Alice in Wonderland: she has a huge ego, is very demanding, and a bit whiny.  Her marilith secretary, Morag, reminds me of Kif from Futurama.  There are a lot of funny interactions between the two.

The story itself is epic level.  I don't know what levels the characters would have been in the previous books, but in this one they're traveling to other planes to directly challenge gods.  It seems like an especially huge jump for Henry, who was extremely green when he was introduced in the second book.

Again, the series is written in a modern style that might annoy a lot of serious readers, but I enjoyed the lightheartedness.  The author sneaked in a lot of movie quotes and other little geek jokes.  If the nearly fourth wall humor bothers you, just think of it as an aspect of Escalla's fairy magic.  She comes from a race that specializes in planar travel, so it's no surprise they pick up language from all over the multiverse, including the real world.

I'm sorry to see the end of this trilogy, and I wish the characters had appeared in more books.  If you're looking for some D&D books for some light reading, you could do a lot worse than this trilogy.

Books: Descent into the Depths of the Earth

Descent into the Depths of the Earth
by Paul Kidd
Published 2000
Part 2 of the Justicar Trilogy

The previous book in this series, White Plume Mountain, had one of the most "gamey" plots I could imagine for a D&D module.  The dungeon is very obviously set up like a stereotypical RPG dungeon.  Some fantasy stories (or gaming modules) have flimsy explanations as to why such a large variety of creatures have an ecosystem in the villain's catacombs, but WPM actually makes these dungeon tropes part of the plot.  Upon entering the dungeon, our heroes are greeted with a message along the lines of, "Come explore this dungeon, fight its monsters, avoid its traps, and discover its treasures."  It's as if they were advertising a live action video game. 

At the end of the book they find out the reason for all this.  (Spoiler Alert)  The dungeon's owner needs souls for a ritual, but only the best of the best souls will do.  By using the dungeon's traps and monsters to weed out the not-quite-epic adventurers, the villain can make sure that only the strongest souls reach the heart of the dungeon.  It's a simple plot, and the author could easily have churned out a few generic heroes and just followed the module.  Instead, he created what are now two of my favorite characters, and gave them a decent plot leading them to the dungeon's entrance.  Considering the genre, I thought it was above and beyond the call of duty, and I ate it up with a spoon.

The second book of the trilogy, Descent into The Depths of the Earth, feels much less like a module.  Keep in mind that I haven't played any of these modules, so I have no idea how closely the books follow their plots.  The first half of the book - Actually, let me interrupt myself here.  Now that I've read five or six of these Greyhawk Classics, I've noticed a pattern.  Apparently it's boring to simply add lots of flavor text to a module and call it a novel.  So most of these books spend the first half introducing the characters and setting up their motivations for entering the Lair of Unspeakable Doom.  One thing I've noticed looking through my past reviews, is that I'm always surprised that the heroes don't reach the dungeon until the final third of the book.  I should know better by now.

So, as usual, the first half of this book is character development and plot.  The Justicar, Escalla, Polk, Cinders, and Enid get lost on their way to Hommlet, and end up pawns in fairy politics.  It turns out that Escalla's dubious boasts of royalty in the first book are actually true, and her parents try to force her into a kingdom-uniting arranged marriage.  When she tries to escape this fate, she finds herself falsely accused of murder.  The gang has to flee the fairy court and solve the crime while on the run.  The trail eventually leads them into the Underdark, and that's where the adventure really begins.  There's a lot of action as it gets closer to the climax, but it never reminds me of the way a D&D module is laid out.  I kept wondering what the actual module is like.

I like that there's actual character development in this book.  Escalla and Polk both mature a lot, and the Justicar actually shows a sense of humor now and then.  I haven't seen much of that in the Greyhawk books so far.  But then, most of the these books are one-offs with characters you never get to read about again.  I wish more Greyhawk books had been able to reuse and develop their characters.

You know how when the Justice League would fight a villain that Superman could easily beat, Superman would happen to be off on some deep space mission at the time?  Well, there's a bit of "Holding Back the Phlebotinum" with Enid the sphinx.  It's like the author didn't know what to do with her, so he kept finding excuses to leave her behind while the gang had adventures.  I hope she gets more screen time in the third book.

In Enid's place, the book adds two new party members.  Private Henry is a rookie soldier, who doesn't show a lot of personality in the book.  Hopefully he shines more in the next book, but so far he's practically an NPC.  Benelux is a sentient sword with a personality like C3-P0.  The sword even has a gold blade, which strengthens the 3P0 connection in my mind.  Henry was okay (if bland so far), but I'm not yet sold on Benelux.  Once again, the Justicar seems like the straight man for a party of comedians, and I'm not sure another comic relief character was the best addition.

Classic Lolth

The drow feature heavily in this book, especially in the second half.  Having read most of the Drizzt books, I mostly knew what to expect from the species.  However, these Greyhawk drow don't seem to be quite the badasses I'm used to from Salvatore's Forgotten Realms novels.  One tiny thing that bugged me was the appearance of Lolth.  The book describes her using the older appearance, back when she was just a spider with a drow's head.  Maybe it's because I got into 4e's lore first, but I've always thought classic Lolth to be very goofy looking.  Heck, she even made an appearance in that "Stupid Monsters" page.  Picturing the scene as described in the book made me laugh at times that were supposed to be scary.  The later, drider-like version of Lolth is much cooler.  But this book came out well before that design; it's not like I expect the author to predict the future. 

Bottom line:  Great book, just as good as the one before it.  It's got a fairy-heavy plot that will probably turn some people off, but as a fairy-lover I was quite happy.  I'm already sad that there's only one more book with these characters. Coming up next: Queen of the Demonweb Pits.

Books: White Plume Mountain

White Plume Mountain
by Paul Kidd
Published 1999
Part 1 of the Justicar Trilogy

When I started reading these D&D books, I wasn't expecting good writing.  I knew that these were basically just assignments that D&D's marketing department tossed out to different authors, in the hopes of cashing in on another form of D&D merchandise.  I've only been buying them because they're cheap now, and I've only been reading them to feed my appetite between game sessions.  Some of the books have been better than others, but none of them have really exceeded my expectations.

Until now.  This is the first D&D book I've actually looked forward to reading each day.  I'll find myself at work looking at the clock, waiting for my lunch break so I can read more.  I'm not saying this is quality literature, not in the classic sense or even in the modern/popular sense.  You're not going to set down a Dean Koontz novel to pick up this one.  But within the specific genre of gaming-based spin-off fiction, this is probably the best book I've read.  I would definitely put down a Drizzt novel to read this one.

The story stars a brooding ranger called "The Justicar".  His personality is very similar to Batman - He's very focused on his mission, he cares little for luxury, and he has almost no sense of humor.  He has a shaven head, and looks a little like Vin Diesel on the book cover.  He wields an enchanted black-bladed sword, and wears a sentient telepathic fire-breathing hellhound pelt named Cinders.  Again like Batman, the Justicar is less of a party joiner and more of a one-man army.  I'm not really into the whole "brooding anti-hero" archetype, but a lot of D&D players love that sort of character.  Despite my own aversions, I think the Justicar is every bit as interesting as Drizzt, and I do wish this series had experienced the success of Salvatore's novels.

Eventually the Justicar teams up with Escalla, a shapeshifting fairy with an excess of personality.  She constantly cracks anachronistic jokes, many of which almost break the fourth wall.  She acts a lot like Lidda in The Savage Caves, but Escalla is written so much better.  Some readers might find her annoying, especially when her lack of seriousness puts lives in danger.  That kind of character can be risky to write, as you don't want to risk having a Jar Jar on your hands.  I never thought she crossed that line, but maybe I'm a little biased, since I've always wanted to play a pixie.  As an extreme introvert, I don't know if I'd have the energy to pull it off.  I have played similar characters in NeverWinter Nights, though.

The Justicar and Escalla mix together about as well as you would think, making it feel like a cop buddy-film.  "He's an obsessed loner.  She's a perky pixie.  They fight crime!"   They remind me of Spike and Chester from Loony Tunes.  Also along for the ride is Polk, an annoying NPC who provides more comic relief.  I found Polk to be a completely unneccessary addition to the story, since we already have plenty of humor with Escalla and the fire-obsessed Cinders.  By surrounding the one serious character with all these jesters, the Justicar becomes the embodiment of the "Only Sane Man" trope.  It's like having Wolverine team up with Snarf, Orko, and Scrappy Doo.  But as much as I disapproved of Polk's presence, he didn't drag things down too much.

And really, the humor was one of the things I liked most about the book.  There were some groaners (there'a "pixie stick" pun that made my eyes roll), but there were also a lot of great moments that hung a lampshade on D&D's most prominent tropes.  There were jokes about the standard adventuring gear, particularly the ten-foot pole.  It made fun of outfits adventurers (especially female characters) wear.  There was even a subtle joke about staying "in character".  Granted, I'd heard a lot of these jokes before (Escalla makes a "Did I say three wishes?" joke ripped straight from the Far Side), but it was still a lot of fun reading them in a novel.

And of course, Escalla makes fun of the Justicar's name.  I wish I knew how Justicar was meant to be pronounced.  It could be just-uh-car, or jus-tiss-er, or even just-aye-sir.  The character named himself, and he makes it clear that he meant the name to mean "one who delivers justice."  Therefore I'm inclined to go with justice-er, even though justicer is already a real (differently spelled) word.  There's a Justicar in Mass Effect 2, where it's pronounced just-a-car.  The fact that he insists on being called "THE Justicar" (because it's a self-imposed title) only makes it more cumbersome.  I'll admit that does add to his Batman-esque cool factor, but it also makes some of the sentences a bit cumbersome to read.  Eventually they do start calling him "Jus" for short, which makes things a bit easier.

So, let's talk party balance.  The Justicar, Cinders, and Escalla make a neat trio.  It's the kind of party you wouldn't see much in a real D&D game due to balance issues.  All the characters fill multiple combat roles, so it's the kind of party that pretty much breaks the overly-structured Fourth Edition.  If this is the kind of party we typically saw in older editions, it really makes me want to try them out sometime.  Would Cinders even be considered a party member (played by a separate player) or just equipment?  I'm guessing the latter, since there are sentient swords and the like in D&D.  But he's a developed-enough character that I think it would be neat to play something like him in a game.  A character who can't walk, is worn by another PC, but can still help out the party through skill checks and his breath weapon.  Sure, he won't be the next great action hero, but it would still make for some interesting sessions. 

This is part one of a trilogy, and I'll be starting on the second book ("Descent Into The Depths Of The Earth") soon.  If the rest of the books are even half as good as this one, I'm sure I'll enjoy them.

Books: The Savage Caves

"The Savage Caves" was the first in a series of D&D books released in 2002-2003, which followed the adventures of some of the more iconic characters in the D&D universe.  This book stars Regdar the fighter, Jozan the cleric, Lidda the rogue, and Naull the wizard. I can't find anywhere that says what universe this is, so I'm assuming it's the generic "Points of Light" setting they use in the Players Handbooks.

I'm generally an optimistic reviewer, so if I don't like something, you know there's a problem.  I didn't exactly dislike this book, but I can't possibly recommend it to anyone else.  It's written with the generic tone of a newspaper article, with no discernible style whatsoever.  Actually, it reminded me of the writing style used in "Choose Your Own Adventure" books (minus the choices and second person POV), so maybe they had a young audience in mind.  Even if so, I've read much more interesting children's books.

That said, it did remind me more of an actual D&D session than most books.  Most real DMs are not professional writers, and the writing style definitely made me think of the way DMs describe things.  Like the players in a D&D game, the characters use a lot of modern slang (especially Lidda).  This kind of thing bothers some people, but I'm okay with it.  This is a fantasy world, not medieval England, so I see no reason they should stick to the Queen's English.  Who's to say this universe didn't evolve slang similar to modern day America?  I already ranted on R.A. Salvatore's use of fortnight in a Forgotten Realms book, so maybe it's safer if writers avoid attempting Shakespearean English in the first place.

I didn't like some of the interactions between the female party members; there was some inappropriate giggling and sophomoric innuendo that reminded me of how boys think girls act.  It was enough to make me want to look up author "T. H. Lain" on Wikipedia to see if they were a male of female.  The answer was interesting - there is no T. H. Lain, it's a pseudonym for nine WOTC employees, in order to keep this series of D&D books shelved together.  This particular book was really written by Philip Athans, then-managing editor at Wizards.

In my "Keep on the Borderlands" review, I gave an example of characters rationalizing in-game mechanics (fighting monsters to get experience points).  But there's a line early on in the Savage Caves that really takes the cake.  While Regdar is looking for someone, it says:  "Regdar had never been trained to hide, but he had been trained to seek."  So I pulled my copy of "Dungeons & Dragons for Dummies" off the shelf, since I knew it had a level one version of Regdar in it.  Sure enough, he has Search and Spot listed as skills (though he's very low in them), and no ranking for Hide.  But wow, that's a silly sentence to put in a novel.

But that's hardly the only mention of such mechanics.  Jozan makes reference to spontaneous casting - specifically he gives Lidda a speech about how if he heals a particular creature, it will use up a potentially more useful spell he might need later that day.  Naull also makes some references to the possibility of spell failure due to trying to concentrate during battle, but these passages are actually pretty well done and make the original game mechanics that much more believable.

I thought it was fun reading about characters I'd already seen so much in the PHBs.  Their personalities were a bit one-dimensional, but that worked in a way.  It almost felt like real players were running them.  Okay, so picture those "examples of play" sections you see in every PHB.  Now imagine an entire book written in that style.  No, it's not actually that bad, but the impression was there.  I could almost see this book being adapted from somebody's session notes.

It's a bit of lost opportunity, because they could have given these characters truly unique, memorable personalities.  Instead they just play them the way any convention-goer would after picking up a pregen.  You've seen all these characters before with different names.  Lidda is basically just Tasslehoff the kender from the Dragonlance novels, and so on.  It's not such a horrible thing, but it does make the book a little bland.

My favorite character was Naull.  She seemed slightly deeper to me than the other three adventurers.  Lidda and Jozan were just too stereotypical (for their classes), and I have something of a personal grudge against the existence of Regdar (See this article).  In a magical world filled with sapient mythological creatures, the last thing D&D needed as an icon was a white, male, human fighter.  But, any time this gets to me I just look at page 297 of 4e's PHB, and then I feel a little better.

NeverWinter Nights spider

There were a few parts where I really felt the book was bad about descriptions.  Sometimes I had trouble visualizing what the author was trying to say, which is sad considering how dumbed-down the book is.  Sometimes this trouble came from missing details.  For example, early on they fight some giant spiders.  The book doesn't say how big they are, just that they're huge.  Over and over, it just describes them as big/large/huge, without saying being more specific.  So, having fought plenty of spiders in NeverWinter Nights, I pictured their size somewhere between a sheep and a cow.  But once that was firmly in my head, the spiders started climbing up someone, or hanging on to their shield, which meant they were actually closer to the size of a small dog.  But to be fair, it's possible I missed a sentence somewhere.

The final lines of dialogue in this book are so trite that... well, back in high school I used to draw (very cheesy) comic books, and I once ended a story with the exact same piece of dialogue.  But remember, "The Savage Caves" was not written by a serious author trying to create literature, so much as a marketer trying to advertise a product.  Maybe I should have gone into marketing.

Overall, I did enjoy reading the book, but that doesn't make it good.  (In fact, I'm starting to wonder just how bad a book has to be for me to give it a bad review.)  I liked this book in more of a "so bad it's good" way, like the movies you see on MST3K.  I also had fun reading it because the anachronisms reminded me of actual D&D sessions, kind of like "Knights of the Dinner Table" but not as funny.  I might still read some of the others in the series, but only if I find them very cheap.

Books: Keep on the Borderlands

Wait, just "Keep on the Borderlands"?  Not "THE Keep on the Borderlands"?  Without the "the" there, it sounds more like a command than a location.  Like, "Hey you kids!  Stay on the Borderlands!  No touching the edges!  The edges are lava!"  ...Anyway... 

After reading the high level adventure The Tomb of Horrors, this book felt like starting a new campaign at level 1.  The characters in it are by no means inexperienced, but overall the story felt a lot more mundane than I've become used to.  At first, it also felt like a low magic world.  I was well into the book before I came across anything that couldn't happen in real life.  With a few minor adjustments, Keep on the Borderlands could have been released as historical fiction.  But that works in the book's favor.

Most of the characters didn't really feel like "classed" in a D&D sense.  They would use any weapon available, freely switching from sword to bow, and picking up hammers or clubs if their swords were broken.  I'm so used to characters that are optimized for their favorite weapon, that it felt weird to read about generic fighters.  I liked that - it made me feel nostalgic for editions of D&D I never really played.

Almost exactly halfway through the book, the heroes return from having defeated a bandit camp.  As a "reward", the lord of the Keep offers them a new quest, to explore the Caves of Chaos.  Sounds like a true DM.  When the heroes are discussing whether to accept the new mission, we get this bit:

"C'mon, Eddis, why not?  If we do find caves and monsters and all that - well, we get better at what we do, we probably find a lot of gold and gems they've stolen from travelers, and we come back heroes."

"We get better at what we do" as an excuse to accept a mission?  That's right, a character in the book tries to justify undertaking a quest in order to get experience points.  It's always fun when the novels try to explain game mechanics, but this one's darn near Lampshade Hanging.

This book doesn't really feel like a D&D module, at least not at first.  The way the heroes are given multiple missions, it feels like several sidequests rather than a novel.  It does eventually introduce an actual villain who might be responsible for the presence of all these monsters... but he doesn't show up until the last 30 pages, and I don't think he's ever even given a name.  It's light on plot, even by "disposable paperback based on a D&D module" standards.  But then, from what I've seen, the actual module also seems to be one of the lighter ones. 

As usual, author Ru Emerson does a great job of describing the mundane aspects of adventuring, like making camp.  Some of the combat is less "heroic" than I usually see as well.  Fighters don't just shrug off all but the most direct hits.  Getting hit on the shield actually causes pain, and recovery isn't limited to bandaging open wounds.  Arms go numb, people get winded, and weapons are actually heavy.  I don't know how realistic the book actually is, because like most people, my knowledge of science has been ruined by television.  But it certainly felt more real to me than most D&D books I've read.

I'd like to point something out to anal, by-the-book DMs: After several combat encounters, there's mention of characters retrieving any unbroken arrows they can find.  See?  It can be done!  And in good fiction, no less!  So remember that when you run your campaigns.  I don't care what your PHB says, it's not necessarily unrealistic to allow characters to retrieve ammunition.  Also, sometimes a character would shout "Arrow!" and his companions would drop so the enemies could be hit.  While some rulesets impose a penalty for firing into melee, this novelist understands what teamwork is.

That teamwork was one of my favorite things about the fight scenes.  There often wasn't enough room for everyone to fight at once, so the fighters would form lines.  When the front line got winded, they would switch places with the fighters behind them, so the freshest fighters were always in front.  I wish D&D had a mechanic that let two allies use their movements simultaneously to switch places, to help with fighting in narrow hallways.  Some 4e powers let you do this, but I'd love it if was a standard ability for everyone.

I have a thing for female characters (no, really?), so I was pleased that the book's primary character is a swordswoman.  Eddis is well-developed (for a short novel, anyway), and very competent. By the end of the book I knew a lot about her: childhood, favorite foods, and so on.  That's some good detail for such a thin book.  But then, it's not a very deep module so I guess it had to be padded a bit.

One of my favorite things is when these books make me think about the morality of dungeon crawling.  At one point the party is forced to execute some bandits they had captured.  They don't feel good about it, but all the alternatives would have endangered the mission.  Later, when they clear out the first kobold cave, there's a bit of a discussion about whether to kill the females and their young.  This scene was especially funny to me because I read that chapter right before I ran a friend through the same cave in the D&DNext Playtest.  He chose not to kill the females/young, and if we hadn't had to call the session short, I probably would have made it bite him in the ass.

These are the kind of things some players do to NPCs without even thinking twice about it.  But in a novel, it makes me feel uncomfortable.  When I read the scenes of kobold slaughter, I kept meantally replaying it from the kobolds' point of view.  They're just sitting at home in their caves doing kobold stuff, when this group of humans bursts in and starts killing everyone.  Sure, the kobolds had previously ambushed human caravans, but the the two races had a history of killing each other, so who knows which race originally started it.

The only thing that really bothered me about the plot was the little girl.  At one point the heroes rescue this child from a bandit camp, and they take her back to the Keep.  When they're given the next mission to clear out the caves full of deadly monsters, they take the girl with them.  They had their reasons - the girl had imprinted on two of the main characters and might have regressed to a feral state if they'd left her behind - but I still don't see taking her on such a dangerous quest.

Bottom line - I liked this book.  It was light on plot and felt more like a couple of short stories than a novel, but that didn't bother me.  I wouldn't want to read a lot of books written that way, but the novelty of it was pretty cool.

Books: The Tomb of Horrors

This is the third "Greyhawk Classics" novelization I have read, the other two being The Temple of Elemental Evil and Against the Giants.  Like the others, this is what I call "disposable fiction", but that's really not a bad thing.  In fact, I'm really starting to prefer the genre.  I don't have to commit myself to reading an entire series, I don't have to worry about anyone spoiling the ending for me, and I don't have to remember any of the characters' names after I'm done reading it.  Sure it's the literary equivalent of Cool Whip on a Honey Bun, but sometimes that's just what I'm in the mood for.  (Figuratively speaking.)

The writing style is just okay. Like the other Greyhawk Classics, there's nothing really memorable about the prose, but it gets the job done. I didn't see as many typos in this one as in Against the Giants, though I did see some missing punctuation here and there.  Some sentences were repetitive in a way that annoyed me. Such as: "Tears continued to roll down Kaerion's face, and he, powerless to stop it, let them fall unchallenged down his face." See, the problem with that kind of sentence is you never know if it was under-edited, or meant to sound artsy. Personally I would have eliminated the last three words, or maybe broken the whole thing up into two sentences. But then, I'm not a professional writer.

The main character is a former paladin, filled with self-loathing after his fall from grace.  The rest of the party consists of a pompous fighter, a venerable wizard, an elf ranger, a cleric of Heironeous, a multi-talented bard, and a gaggle of generic guards who serve as the book's red shirts.  Wait, you're going into one of the most trapped-filled dungeons ever devised without a rogue?  Luckily the bard has some decent rogue skills, and the wizard also keeps some appropriate spells prepared.

The ex-paladin's name is Kaerion. I'm not sure how the author intended it to be pronounced, though I'm wondering if it's an allusion to "carrion". But whenever I saw the name, I got a song stuck in my head: "Kaerion my wayward son... there'll be peas when you are done..." (True paladins always finish their peas.)  I suppose there's worse earworms; I should be thankful his name wasn't "Kallmemaybe." He was a pretty deep character, at least for this genre, with a tragic backstory gradually revealed over the course of the novel. If his character had been more shallow, the book probably would have been half the length. I've yet to play through the ToH module, but I'm guessing it must be fairly light on plot, since the book's author to felt the need to devote so many pages to characterization. But it works.

My favorite member of the party was the bard, Majandra. She was well-written and I could always relate to her motivations. Or maybe I just have a thing for red-haired, female, half-elf bards. Unfortunately, the rest of the group wasn't as fleshed-out.  Some characters were more developed than others, but few of them were much deeper than the description you'd see on a typical character sheet.  Well, one of my character sheets, anyway.

One thing Against the Giants was lacking was a decent villain. But Tomb of Horrors has an entire party of interesting baddies. We have an evil cleric, a monk (and his young apprentice), a rogue/assassin, a sorceress, a golem, and a small army of cultist minions (a.k.a. evil red shirts). The enemy party is what made this book interesting to me. The ToEE and AtG novels played out like D&D modules - the party learns of an evil, investigates the temple/dungeon/fortress, has a lot of fights, defeats a final boss, and saves the day. But in Tomb of Horrors, we follow two rival parties, both intent on facing the dungeon for different reasons.  This really makes the book more interesting, and I could easily see some readers rooting for the evil team.

It took the story a long time to get to the titular Tomb.  The party spent a large number of pages getting ready and even more time trudging through the swamp. It was an interesting journey, but I found myself wondering if the actual module also includes so much travel time, or if the author just couldn't find enough interesting things in the tomb itself to flesh out a full book.  If I remember correctly I had some similar criticisms about The Temple of Elemental Evil novelization.

But once they actually reached the tomb, I understood pretty quickly why it didn't take up more pages.  This type of dungeon might be fun as a D&D module, but as a book it would get kind of repetitive.  Constantly checking for and disabling traps does not make for an interesting read.  Still, the author managed to throw in just enough trap-wrangling to capture the feel of D&D without bogging down the story.  Fans of the module will appreciate all the gory deaths these traps cause.

I spotted a lot of the tropes you see in a typical D&D campaign.  Sometimes the characters were so genre savvy it almost broke the fourth wall.  For example, they used 10-foot poles to search for pit traps, which is something I've always heard about in classic D&D, but I'd never seen in a novel.  One of my favorite passages involved one character suggesting they all split up, and another explaining to him why you should never split the party.

For the most part, the action scenes are exciting and well done. However, there are times when the sequence of events doesn't seem to fit together right. Like when two things are happening at once, but one of the things should be taking a lot longer than the other. There's one scene in particular that really flaunts the "Talking is a Free Action" trope.  To paraphrase: "The monster is coming right at me! I only have seconds before it gets here! It's only inches away! Quick, throw me my sword! Hurry, it's almost upon me!" I'm exagerrating, but you get the idea. And not long afterwards, there's a death scene that takes the "Final Speech" trope to an almost humorous extreme. Sometimes I think reading tropes has ruined fiction for me.

The climax was predicable, and the falling action almost nonexistent, but I don't care.  The book has its flaws, but it's my favorite Greyhawk novel so far.  It's not real literature, but these books aren't meant to be true art. Let's face it, it's a novelization of a D&D module. Heck, that's probably lower on the totem pole than the comic book adaptations of movies based on video games. So I really appreciate that these authors worked as hard as they did, when they could have just transcribed the original module into a more book-like format and collected their paycheck.

Thumbs up.

Books: Against the Giants

Last year when I was playing in the Temple of Elemental Evil campaign, I decided to go all-out by playing the computer game and reading the novel as well.  The book was a bit forgettable, but it was nice to read something that felt like an actual D&D game.  Previously the only D&D books I'd read were the first 20 or so Drizzt books.  Those were fun and all, but lets face it, they don't really feel like D&D.  Drizzt is more like a super hero than a character you'd roll up in D&D, and I can see why many gamers don't like the influence he's had on munchkin players.

But the ToEE novelization was different.  It didn't have any break-out characters who had abilities beyond their class, just the normal RPG mainstays you might see in any tabletop party.  I wouldn't call it an important work of fiction, but there are worse ways to pass the time.  So with that attitude in mind, I recently picked up "Against the Giants" by Ru Emerson.  I was actually impressed.  Okay, it still wasn't a masterpiece by any standards, but it really captured the feel of D&D and I enjoyed that a lot.  It was also a light read - I don't get to read often so books usually take me forever, but I managed to finish this one in about two weeks.

I think it was the little details that enthralled me the most.  While the action scenes were adequate, I preferred all the dungeoneering aspects - searching for traps, using noise-blocking spells to keep the fights from attracting reinforcements, preparing food, finding spots to hide for long rests, choosing spells to prepare, and so on.  There are varying motivations among the party members - vengeance, duty, treasure - which results in the occasional in-party conflict.  For example (slight spoiler), at one point the party has a huge disagreement over whether to kill a helpless enemy, and it reminded me of some of the best moments I've had in my own groups.  So while Ru Emerson might not be one of the best writers I've ever read, I'd love to have her as my DM.

My only real gripes with the story came when I start to think of it in terms of game mechanics.  I kept trying to figure out what level the group was.  They definitely weren't newbies:  They were able to take out a lot of giants with little difficulty, and the party wizard had a wide variety of decent spells.  But the main character, Lhors, was a farmboy with some training but no real combat experience.  He had the background of a level 1 character, but he managed to take out a giant with one hit fairly early in the book.  (Must have rolled a crit.)  It was believable enough in the book, but it shows exactly why it's problematic to think in gameplay rules.  Even when playing the actual game, a good DM will nudge the rules aside now and then for the sake of a good story, so I have no problem with the author taking these dramatic liberties.

Also, I hate to nitpick, but the book also had a lot of typos.  Sometimes I think I should have been a proofreader, because typos just really stand out to me.  So it's a personal beef; knowing that I'm catching things that other people were paid to catch (and still failed).  But that's just me.

Anyway, if you like D&D fiction and want a quick read, there's worse books you could try.  It might not be particularly memorable, but I found it more entertaining than any of the Drizzt books.  Next up, I'm reading the Tomb of Horrors.  I think I could get addicted to the novelizations of classic Greyhawk modules.

Drizzt Thoughts

When I got the Drizzt board game a while back, I was a little embarrassed to admit it.  It was hard to say exactly why; it just seems like there's a bit of a stigma against Drizzt fanboys.  Or if there isn't, maybe there should be.  I was looking back at some older blogs, and found one I wrote when I was still reading the Icewind Dale trilogy.  This is what I wrote:

Icewind Dale: The Crystal Shard
by R.A. Salvatore

I'm halfway through the second book in this trilogy, and so far it's pretty good. The first book, The Crystal Shard, introduces us to Drizzt Do'Urden, one of the most well-known characters in D&D lore. Drizzt is a Drow (that's a dark elf, for you non-gamers), but he's a good guy, which is rare for a Drow. Which of course, means he's an outcast - his own people think he's too nice, and other races think all dark elves are evil. Drizzt is the ultimate "fan service" character, the kind of hero Todd McFarlane would design if he wrote novels instead of comics. There is absolutely nothing about this character that isn't "cool". He fights with a pair of scimitars, he can summon a black panther, he can hide like a ninja, he knows magic, and he's nearly untouchable in battle. Even his weaknesses are badass: he's allergic to sunlight, and he's a social outcast; so he stays in the shadows and wears concealing hoods. This is exactly the kind of "ultimate" character you would design if you were a twelve-year-old boy.

That said, the book is surprisingly absorbing. Salvatore, who some might remember for killing a major Star Wars character in Vector Prime, is actually a pretty good writer. I didn't care for his Star Wars writing at the time, but here he seems to be more in his element. I think he has more freedom here, even within the boundaries of D&D's strict rulebooks, because he's using his own characters. While Drizzt is obviously Salvatore's favorite, the other characters get plenty of time to shine. They aren't nearly as deep as Drizzt (a couple of them feel like they walked right off a standard Character Sheet), but they have their moments. I do wish the book had a stronger female presence, though. The only major female character, Catti-Brie, gets very little screen time. I hope she has a larger role later in the trilogy.

If you've been wanting to try any books set in the D&D universe, I would definitely start with this one.

...so it looks like I enjoyed the books early on, and had high hopes for the future.  After that, I kept reading them for a while, but they gradually got worse and worse.  Now Salvatore isn't the world's worst author, and obviously I found him acceptable enough (since I've read more than 20 of his books), but he does bug me sometimes.

Some specific things that get on my nerves:

1. He reuses certain annoying phrases a lot. For example, several times he describes Wulfgar's height as "closer to seven feet than to six." There's so many ways he could say the same thing - "Nearly seven feet tall", "Built like an orc", or even a literal "Six-foot-(whatever)-inches." But no, Wulfgar is perpetually "closer to seven feet than to six." It's such an eye-catching phrase. I might have thought it poetic if he'd just used the phrase once or twice and let it go, but he makes sure to use that exact phrase at least once in every book where Wulfgar appears.

He also uses the phrase "or tried to" a lot during his action scenes, in a way that undoes the bit of action you just read.  Things like, "Artemis slashed Drizzt's arm with his dagger... or tried to, but the drow was too quick." ...or... "Wulfgar smashed the ogre with his hammer... or tried to, but his hammer was deflected by the ogre's shield." ...or... "Bruenor broke out of his shackles, overcame the prison guard, escaped the evil temple, burned it down, and saved the entire world... or tried to, but the shackles were too strong."  Okay, I exaggerate, but you get the idea.  I actually enjoyed most of the Drizzt books... or tried to, but little issues like this got in the way.

2. He kills off a lot of characters I like, while constantly bringing back characters better left dead/retired. Eventually I got pretty sick of Drizzt's past constantly coming back to haunt him. It's like Salvatore mines his older books looking for characters who might have a grudge against Drizzt, so he can make them come after him. Continuity is commendable, and sometimes it's cool to see the return of a good villain, but it's also a big world out there full of brand new villains Drizzt could be fighting.

3. Okay, this is an extremely anal little nitpick, but... in one book, he uses the word "fortnight". Hey, I know, it's a medieval-esque universe, so all historical references are fair, right? Except... in the Forgotten Realms, a week is 10 days long. I just can't imagine a reason these people would have developed a word that means "14 days".

4. In the books, he doesn't give a lot of clues as to how to pronounce Drizzt's name. I hate authors who do this, because you get used to pronouncing it one way, and it's hard to unlearn it later. In at least one interview Salvatore himself has pronounced it "Drits" (which makes no sense, and may have been a slip of the tongue), and other sources say it's supposed to be pronounced "Drist".  (For more insight, see "The Ultimate D&D Pronunciation Guide" on ENWorld.)  I seem to remember a scene in one of the books that basically makes fun of readers who pronounce it "Drizzit", which is kind of a jerk move IMO.

5. He spends a lot of time going down certain tangents, only to change his mind and undo it later. I won't give examples because they'd contain spoilers. Besides, some of this can be blamed on the release of 4e. When Salvatore decided to start preparing for 4e's timeline (which meant advancing his universe 100 years), he altered a lot of plotlines so he could wrap up some of the characters' stories. So I'll give him a pass on some of it...  but it still felt like a big waste of time seeing him undo things that he'd spent entire books putting together.  And now that 5e's coming up, I do wonder if they're going to advance the timeline again, and what Salvatore will do about it.  If 5e elves still only live around 200 years, then there's only so many times they can advance Drizzt's timeline.

I could go on with minor nitpicks.  For example, Guenhwyvar seems to change sex an awful lot more than most panthers.  But I'll just say "A Wizard Did It" and move on.  Anyway, it's pretty easy for a layman like myself to criticize, dismissing all the work that goes into these books.  I don't actually think Salvatore is a bad author, though I do think he's a bit overrated.  I see the Drizzt books as the kind of cheap paperbacks you buy to read on an airplane, and never think about again.  And really, there's nothing wrong with that.

Despite all my misgivings about Drizzt, I do think he's a marketable character, and I wish the right people would realize that.  Given how GI Joe eventually became "GI Joe featuring Snake-Eyes" and the X-Men is often billed as "Wolverine and the X-Men", I seriously think Drizzt is the kind of character that could pull D&D into a more mainstream level of popularity.  Sure, D&D fans think Drizzt is already overexposed.  But I'd bet most non-gamers have never heard of him.  A lot of players would probably prefer their hobby remain underground, but personally I find it annoying to support a company that always acts like it's on the verge of bankruptcy.

My God, what have we done?

So at the risk of overpopularizing a character I don't really like, I think a well-done Drizzt movie, if seen by enough people, could make D&D a lot more popular.  Drizzt is exactly the kind of fanboy-driven breakout character that sells products.  Eventually we'd see Hasbro action figures and plastic scimitars on the toy shelves, a cartoon series, and even Drizzt candy.  I can't say it's a better world, but maybe with a better budget WOTC could do something really... interesting.

ToEE: Afterthoughts

Another unnecessary rambling encouraged by my having a week off.

So, our 4e Temple of Elemental Evil campaign is officially over, even though we didn't quite make it to the end.  We finally called it quits after too many cancelled sessions, combined with some of the group's dissatisfaction with 4e.  I also finished the computer game and the novel a while back.  Just for closure reasons, I thought I'd post a few afterthoughts on all three.

The tabletop campaign:
It's probably our fault, but I was expecting more plot.  Based on my meta-knowledge of the campaign, we missed a lot of opportunities to interact with the villains, and instead opted to systematically take out each room one by one.  The difference between being in town and being in the Temple itself was like playing two different RPGs; you could almost hear the *click* as the players switched from roleplay mode to fight mode.

Still, I had fun.  It was a little off-putting at first, but once I realized how it was going to be, I embraced it whole hog.  I even switched to a more front line character so I could get the most out of the action.  But it also made me realize that I needed to try a few other gaming systems.

The novel:
The book was nothing to write home about, it's just your typical cheap paperback.  It had the usual assortment of party member stereotypes, but few characters I actually cared about.  It didn't always follow the same path as the module or computer game, but it was always neat when it would describe a familiar-sounding room and I'd think, "Uh oh, watch out for the skeletal gnolls!"  It was brief, but fun to read, and I will probably read more module-based novels if I find them.  But it didn't have any particular writing style, and it's the kind of book you immediately forget about once you finish it.

The computer game:
The ToEE computer game is a bit dated by today's standards... Okay, fine, it was pretty ugly five years ago.  It's easy to see how rushed it was - it was released in 2003, a full year after the much superior Neverwinter Nights.  While NWN features 3D environments, for some reason ToEE uses pre-rendered static backgrounds and feels like a throwback to older computer games like Baldur's Gate.  Sometimes I don't realize how spoiled I am until I get frustrated over my inability to rotate the camera to see behind the house.

I really wanted to take my time with this one, talk to every NPC, find all the subquests, and pick up all the plot we skipped with the tabletop version.  But that got boring after a while, and I kept screwing things up and/or running into quest-breaking bugs.  For example, I might attempt to join one of the temples and do some jobs for them, but sooner or later a faction script would mess up and the wrong NPC would attack me.  This would either break the quest sequence entirely, or cause the entire temple to go aggro.  So eventually I just decided to kill everything and make my way to the end.

Towards the climax of the game things got really frustrating.  The visits to the elemental planes used SFX that would frequently lock up the computer, so I had to save often.  Keep in mind, my computer is several years newer than the game, and way more powerful than ToEE should require.  Even so, I had to turn down a lot of the graphical settings just to complete those areas.  Also near the end I discovered a Good Bad Bug that I couldn't resist.  Basically, each of the four elemental bosses drops one of the four gems you need to get to the final boss.  Those gems can also be used to summon monsters to help you... but some of those summoned monsters drop additional gems if they get killed.  So you can end up with multiple copies of each of the elemental gems, allowing you to summon lots of crap and cast several of additional spells during the final battles.

But other than a little Save Scumming and Level Grinding, that was the only time I really cheated my first time through.  I beat the final boss, watched the underwhelming ending, and reloaded to try some different options.  There's some choices you can make towards the end that change the ending slightly, but all the endings are equally boring.

Now that I'd played it through semi-legitimately, I decided to go back through and smash the world to bits.  I built a party of five destructive cheaters.  I named them War, Famine, Pestilence, Death, and Cindy.  I used some cheat codes to raise all their levels to 10, set all their stats to 50, unlocked all the spells for the casters, and made them rich.  I used the crafting skill to make some ungodly powerful items, weapons which would often cause instant death, wielded by characters who attack several times a round.  I had them make some uber armor as well, but I quickly discovered that even the best armor couldn't come close to their DEX bonus, so my evil party rampaged au naturale. 

I made it my goal to kill every single NPC in the game.  Making sure I first spoke to enough people to unlock all the locations I'd need later, my five horsewomen of the apocalypse left a bloody trail of naked horror all across the kingdom.  I actually managed to kill everyone in Nulb, and I probably got about halfway through Hommlet before I got bored (that's a lot of ground to cover).

Yes, I have issues, why do you ask?