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The Legend of Drizzt Series by R.A. Salvatore (the fast food of fantasy)


Werthead

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The Icewind Dale Trilogy Book 1: The Crystal Shard

Published way back in 1988, The Crystal Shard was the debut novel by R.A. Salvatore, the first novel in The Icewind Dale Trilogy (a trilogy notable for two-thirds of it taking place outside Icewind Dale) and the first in the much longer Legend of Drizzt mega-series, which now encompasses thirty-six books (thirty-nine if you count associated spin-off volumes focusing on other characters). It was also only the second novel published in the Forgotten Realms setting, the most popular fantasy shared-world setting in history, and a key reason why that setting exploded in popularity in the following months and years. It is also one of the biggest-selling and most popular Dungeons & Dragons spinoff novels of all time, possibly the biggest-selling (although it shares mighty competition from Dragons of Autumn Twilight).

As the ship that launched a thousand sub-series, it's a curiously unassuming book. The stakes are relatively low - the fate of the world is not in the balance, just a backwater wilderness way beyond the northern edge of most maps - and there's a distinctly old-fashioned feel to the book. There's a fair bit of exposition and characters are prone to making declarative statements that end in exclamation marks! Not every line, but enough to feel like you reading a book where everyone is slightly deaf and has to shout to make themselves heard. The absolute near-absence of female characters in the otherwise extremely egalitarian Forgotten Realms (only one, Catti-brie, has any lines of dialogue) is also baffling, and was somewhat odd at the time, let alone today. It's something Salvatore does fix in later books (where Catti-brie becomes a major player and more female characters appear) but I had forgotten how hugely imbalanced this first book is.

If you can overlook that, although the novel is very much not High Art, it is definitely fun. It's riper than three-year-old Stilton, but Salvatore makes up for a lack of technical skill with unbridled enthusiasm. There's fast and frenetic action scenes, and the characters may adhere to broad archetypes but they are executed well. Drizzt lacks his later mopiness at this stage and is even allowed to have some character flaws (his weakness for treasure and finding valuable magical items is something rolled back later on, but is amusing here). Indolent and morally suspect Regis gives us an answer to that question of what would have happened if one of the dodgier Sackville-Bagginses had joined the Fellowship of the Ring, and Bruenor is the most dwarfish dwarf who ever dwarfed. The only one of the core cast it's hard not to entirely like at this stage is Honourable Barbarian Warrior Wulfgar, Who Is Honourable And Stuff. Wulfgar is the kind of guy who has his own special rock where he goes to sit and be stoically honourable on (to the unbridled amusement of Catti-brie, who seems to have some kind of metatextual awareness of Wulfgar's character and needles him mercilessly about it, in one of the more modern-feeling touches to the novel). It's unsurprising that Salvatore seems to tire of Wulfgar - originally supposedly the hero and main protagonist - quite quickly and instead refocuses on the quirkier characters like Drizzt and Regis.

The book also has a splendid feel for the wider community of characters. In books like this it would be very easy to have our core foursome (Drizzt, Regis, Bruenor and Wulfgar) undertake valiant deeds that save Ten-Towns from oblivion, with the people they are saving reduced to faceless background roles. Instead, the people of the towns are depicted as fierce and independently-minded, always eager to mix it up with the various invaders and with their own internal politics that are well-described, and even bit-characters are given some complexity. Kemp, the spokesman for Targos, is both a selfish political game-player and a brave warrior eager to get to grips with the enemy. Surprisingly, Salvatore makes you care slightly more about these people more than you would for the otherwise amorphous blobs of "people we must save" in such stories.

The characterisation of the villain is also quite interesting: Akar Kessel, the mage who finds the Crystal Shard, is a complete and total imbecile and the semi-sentient Shard has to do a lot of work to mould him into a credible threat to Ten-Towns, to the point of often despairing at his total ineptitude. This is sometimes played for laughs, although darker character traits are hinted at: the fate of various "wenches" that Kessel mind-wipes into becoming his playthings - in another outbreak of 1980sness in the text - is mercifully left unaddressed. Kessel's ultimate fate is also darkly amusing.

The Crystal Shard (***½) - the literary equivalent of a Greggs Festive Bake - has not aged as well as might be hoped, but it's still a cracking adventure yarn which is well-paced, entertaining and occasionally surprising, if you can get through the wincing generated by some of the book's more dated aspects. Salvatore shows more enthusiasm than skill here, but does improve as a writer over the next few volumes. The book is available now in the UK and USA.

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I've only read The Dark Elf trilogy (Homeland, Exile, and Sojurn). It didn't particularly inspire me to read further - though I remember thinking that Homeland in particular was pretty decent, albeit that it suffered from mediocre prose. Zak struck me as more interesting than Drizzt.

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I cannot even remember if I read further than Homeland. I am certain I read this and maybe Exile and/or Sojourn. (Does Drizzt meet the blind ranger who trains him already at the end of Homeland?)

And the first trilogy with the mad wizard. That first one really reads mostly like a written out RPG campaign (or three). It's been around 25 years, so the description above sounds certainly better than I remember an almost enticing me to read it again. Wulfgar is a bore and the characterization of Regis is spot on. There is also a good antagonist in the assassin Entreri.

The writing is generally rather poor and some of the typical RPG/forgotten Realms elements are ridiculous but Drow society is a pretty fascinating construction and the underdark could really be a very atmospheric setting in the hands of a more capable writer.

Overall, the handful I read are a bit like Dragonlance in that some plot elements, characters and settings are very promising but a lot of the execution is mediocre (only that this gap tends to be even larger in Dragonlance).

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7 hours ago, C.T. Phipps said:

I very much enjoyed the series. I think the Dark Elf books are the best of them.

Sadly, I think the Spellplague derailed the series something fierce.

The series went downhill long before the Spellplague. What really torched it was Salvatore saying "Nope, that's enough" and wanting to kill Drizzt after Siege of Darkness, creating three very solid trilogies, and TSR threatened to take the series off him and give it to someone else (they actually did; another guy wrote an entire Drizzt novel that's never seen the light of day) and he caved and agreed to keep writing them until the sun explodes. The next three or four books, from what I recall, were soulless zombie books, phoned in because he had no choice.

After WotC took over, they gave Salvatore more leeway and he got his mojo back a little, but it was clear that he was now writing it for the money more than out of a genuine creative endeavour. I didn't get too far into the second half of the series, but there seems to be some consensus that in some books Salvatore feels a bit more energised and writes something competent, and in other books it's on autopilot.

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That first one really reads mostly like a written out RPG campaign (or three). It's been around 25 years, so the description above sounds certainly better than I remember an almost enticing me to read it again. Wulfgar is a bore and the characterization of Regis is spot on. There is also a good antagonist in the assassin Entreri.

Oddly, this was one series that was never based on an RPG campaign. Salvatore never ran or played Drizzt in a D&D campaign, he created him on the telephone with the editor on the spur of the moment.

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Actually, I believe the best Drizzt books after the Homeland Trilogy were written after Siege of Darkness. The 1000 Orcs and its sequels are easily my favorite in the series.

Also, the two Artemis Entreri and Jaxarle novels.

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6 hours ago, C.T. Phipps said:

Actually, I believe the best Drizzt books after the Homeland Trilogy were written after Siege of Darkness. The 1000 Orcs and its sequels are easily my favorite in the series.

Also, the two Artemis Entreri and Jaxarle novels.

Agreed, those are good.

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Yeah, I would disagree that the books after Siege of Darkness are bad. The Silent Blade, Servant of the Shard, and Spine of the World are all pretty enjoyable, with Servant and Spine both being fairly different than all the other books. If they are zombie books, well then, Salvatore deserves even more credit for making them as enjoyable as they are.

I honestly never really cared that much for the Icewind Dale books and I first read them back in my late teens when RPG fiction was still a new, exciting world of quick, fast-paced action reads for me. The Crystal Shard is a fun romp, nothing spectacular, but not especially terrible. Salvatore really comes into his own in the next two trilogies, with the Dark Elf Trilogy especially being something I might be able to read and enjoy nowadays without reservations. 

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15 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

I was mainly a science fiction reader before playing Baldur's Gate and D&D books like this got me into reading fantasy. I would have avoided books with horrible fantasy covers like GoT before that. https://images2.medimops.eu/product/7e2bba/M03442247292-large.jpg

Every time I think the US has bad covers... some European market says “Hold my beer.”

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Oh, I remember that book.

On 8/21/2020 at 11:15 PM, Werthead said:

 I was confused because I was told it was the first book of the Drizzt series but it was actually mostly not Drizzt, lol. I seem to remember it was mostly about Wulfgar. It was fun but I like the Dragonlance books better than the Forgotten Realms.

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I got the Icewind Dale trilogy in 1999, drawn to it due to Drizzt appearing in the Baldur's Gate game. The writing wasn't great (I'd just started reading fantasy in 1998, and was used to Jordan, Martin, Feist, Gemmell). The second book seemed to be a rip-off of The Hobbit merged with LotR's Moria sequence. The Halfling's Gem was an interesting chase across the Sword Coast.  An odd trilogy in that it feels more lighthearted than the prequel trilogy and following books.  Drizzt is less angsty, and I liked his weakness for looking for loot and treasure, which fits the idea of D&D.

Also, it doesn't quite gel with the other books, as Errtu thinks of the 'Drow Lords' when the prequel trilogy reveals it to be a matriarchy.

Homeland is possibly his best work, really develops the Drow society. Though having the evil elves being black and ruled by women feels a bit 'eh'. Exile and Sojourn aren't quite as good, though it is interesting seeing Drizzt's first days on the surface.

The next trilogy feels more like the Dark Elf trilogy than the Icewind Dale trilogy, and the upbeat confidence the Companions have from the original trilogy is shattered with a death. Siege of Darkness dates the books by linking it to the Time of Troubles. Passage to Dawn was weaker but returned the characters to Icewind Dale, which the author keeps doing only to send them off again.

The series imho dips a bit after, loosing a lot of the fun the original trilogy had and felt a bit directionless, and Salvatore seemed to be trying to be a more 'serious' writer. Spine of the World explored the trauma a resurrected character felt after years of torture in Hell, but is probably my least favourite of the books.  Servant of the Shard was better, focusing on Entreri and Jarlaxle, though was retconned to being book 1 of The Sellswords trilogy. Sea of Swords finally reunited the Companions and was stronger than some of the previous works, and once again returned the cast to Icewind Dale. Only to leave again!

The timeline goes a bit wonky with the Hunter's Blades trilogy; it starts a few months after Sea of Storms, but there seems to be too few years between the books. But it is a fairly strong trilogy, although I didnt like what happened to the Delly Curtie character.

The whole Gantlegrym plot seems to be a rehash of the search for Mithral Hall, albeit stretched over multiple books. The issue of long-lived characters hanging with short-lived is explored in later books. I've got the latest trilogy (book 3 just arrived) and I'll read them soon.

 

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Also, it doesn't quite gel with the other books, as Errtu thinks of the 'Drow Lords' when the prequel trilogy reveals it to be a matriarchy.

Not all of the drow cities are matriarchies, many are ruled by men or by both regardless of gender. Menzoberranzan is specifically a matriarchy though. Errtu notes that he has worked with the drow many times, specifically in Menzoberranzan and elsewhere.

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I haven't kept up with since some book circa late 00's wherein some Drow who were possibly hunting Drizzt were convinced he was actually Lolth's champion or something since he spread Chaos wherever he goes.

 

Do Forgotten Realms tie-in novels still exist outside of Drizzt books?

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