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

[Rorshach]

On 8/26/2020 at 2:13 AM, IlyaP said:

Not really, sadly. 

@Werthead has written about this at his blog: https://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2020/06/leaving-money-on-table-why-is-there-no.html

That blog post reminded me that Ed Greenwood books exist.

Now I won't sleep tonight.

[Werthead]

20 hours ago, Rorshach said:

That blog post reminded me that Ed Greenwood books exist.

Now I won't sleep tonight.

Ah, Ed Greenwood. An actually extremely good writer of RPG setting material and articles, and very much not a good novelist at all. I was always a bit baffled as to why he became one of the biggest-selling FR novelists (if a very, very distant second to fourth behind Salvatore, and maybe Paul Kemp and Elaine Cunningham as well). I know he created the setting, but that only takes you so far.

[Rorshach]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Ah, Ed Greenwood. An actually extremely good writer of RPG setting material and articles, and very much not a good novelist at all. I was always a bit baffled as to why he became one of the biggest-selling FR novelists (if a very, very distant second to fourth behind Salvatore, and maybe Paul Kemp and Elaine Cunningham as well). I know he created the setting, but that only takes you so far.

I believe you when you say he's a good writer of setting material, I haven't read that. 

I have read a couple of his "novels", though. I feel you're being kind to him 

[Werthead]

3 hours ago, Rorshach said:

I believe you when you say he's a good writer of setting material, I haven't read that. 

I have read a couple of his "novels", though. I feel you're being kind to him 

His contributions to setting material, background lore and even the craziest nuts-and-bolts detail (he once spent weeks looking into river silt build-up to explain the water connection between a sea and a lake that some FR fans had criticised) are quite impressive, not to mention his progressive stance on roleplaying material, making it canon that characters in his setting use magic to change sex whenever they want and no-one GAF and including a lesbian power couple as rulers of one of the Forgotten Realms city-states back in the 1990s. All that stuff is great. It's just that everything goes much, much better when he hands that stuff off to actual novelists and fiction writers to handle.

His own fiction is just really, really poor. Just nope.

[IlyaP]

6 hours ago, Werthead said:

His own fiction is just really, really poor. Just nope.

Wonder how it compares to Douglas Niles. Rob Bricken at io9 has an article up on the first Forgotten Realms novel, Darkwalker on Moonshae. It sounds like it should have received a bit more editorial guidance.

[Werthead]

12 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Wonder how it compares to Douglas Niles. Rob Bricken at io9 has an article up on the first Forgotten Realms novel, Darkwalker on Moonshae. It sounds like it should have received a bit more editorial guidance.

Douglas Niles was competent. Fairly mediocre, but competent. Ed Greenwood approaches competency in his best novels but never quite gets there and frequently falls massively short.

I think the next book on the io9 list is Greenwood's first one Spellfire, so that should be interesting. To be fair Spellfire has a kind of amusing (by 1988 standards) opening but then it collapses.

Spoiler

A bunch of youngsters get together to form an adventuring party at the local inn, strike out for the local magical ruins to find treasure and then, due to ridiculous inexperience and not knowing to run away when the fricking dracolich shows up, they all die horribly, apart from one who turns out to be the protagonist of the book and ends up suffering guilt from it all. It felt like a brief nod at the real consequences of what would happen to people going out half-cocked in search of adventure.

 

[Derfel Cadarn]

I read Darkwalker on Moonshae (and the sequels) about 10 years ago, partly because Salvatore raved about it. Was pretty disappointed. It barely felt like a Forgotten Realms novel, almost as if he wrote a fantasy novel and it was retrospectively drclared Forgotten Realms. Bhaal also feels a bit ‘weird’ compared to his later depictions

[williamjm]

4 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

I read Darkwalker on Moonshae (and the sequels) about 10 years ago, partly because Salvatore raved about it. Was pretty disappointed. It barely felt like a Forgotten Realms novel, almost as if he wrote a fantasy novel and it was retrospectively drclared Forgotten Realms. Bhaal also feels a bit ‘weird’ compared to his later depictions

If I remember correctly, that's exactly what happened. Niles had written the book beforehand as a standalone fantasy and then it got squeezed into the setting.

I read Niles' two Moonshae trilogies back when I was a teenager. I think I liked them reasonably well at the time although in retrospect they were a big collection of fantasy cliches.

I also read Niles' Maztica trilogy which was a lot more original, being based on Spanish conquistadors in the Americas, although I don't remember liking it as much.

I do agree with the article writer that Darkwalker on Moonshae is a good title for a fantasy novel.

[horangi]

I decided to pick up The Crystal Shard as a break from some of the more dense SFF I have been reading recently.  I got a laugh from this quote from the first page of the novel "Icewind Dale, a thousand square miles of barren, broken tundra..."  I wonder how it slipped past the editors that this vast wilderness is roughly the size of Jacksonville.   A quick check on the internet suggests a horse can go 32 miles in about 8 hours, so it will be interesting to see if the characters end up needing to camp outside when the dale has a Skyrim-esque setting where pretty much every evil lair and dungeon in the land should be visible from a high wall of the town at the center of the region and take 4 hours to reach at the most.  (Joking aside, assuming its supposed to be a thousand miles wide, then we should expect month long journeys instead). 

[IlyaP]

The above posts really makes me wish WotC/Hasbro would rerelease *all* the Forgotten Realms novels ever published, in order, but with better cover art. It'd be a sure-fire way to at least renew interest among established fans and hook in new readers as well. 

[Werthead]

17 hours ago, horangi said:

I decided to pick up The Crystal Shard as a break from some of the more dense SFF I have been reading recently.  I got a laugh from this quote from the first page of the novel "Icewind Dale, a thousand square miles of barren, broken tundra..."  I wonder how it slipped past the editors that this vast wilderness is roughly the size of Jacksonville.   A quick check on the internet suggests a horse can go 32 miles in about 8 hours, so it will be interesting to see if the characters end up needing to camp outside when the dale has a Skyrim-esque setting where pretty much every evil lair and dungeon in the land should be visible from a high wall of the town at the center of the region and take 4 hours to reach at the most.  (Joking aside, assuming its supposed to be a thousand miles wide, then we should expect month long journeys instead). 

That's pretty much it. The Ten Towns region is quite small, being about 30 miles across N-S and E-W. The Dale itself is tecnically quite a bit larger, extending east to the Reghed Glacier and south-west to Ironmaster, but given there's nothing out there apart from a few mountain tribes of orcs and goblins and the nomadic tribes, it's not really a big deal.

[Lord Patrek]

Ah, Ed Greenwood. . .

The man published something like 15 novels over the years, some of them with Tor Books if I remember correctly. Great setting creator, but really not a good author.

And that's 15-year-old me saying that! 

[Rhom]

9 hours ago, Lord Patrek said:

Ah, Ed Greenwood. . .

The man published something like 15 novels over the years, some of them with Tor Books if I remember correctly. Great setting creator, but really not a good author.

And that's 15-year-old me saying that! 

Sooo... he was the Sanderson of the late 80s/early 90s?

 

[Lord Patrek]

I would say that Brandon Sanderson is the better novelist.

[Werthead]

That reminds me that I did some new maps of the Realms earlier this year: Faerun, Maztica, Zakhara, Kara-Tur (also, kingdoms of Faerun and the entire planet of Toril).

Icewind Dale is right in the very north-west of the continental mainland of the Faerun map.

[Rhom]

7 hours ago, Mr Meeseeks said:

Douglas Nile wrote some of the worst and some of the best D&D novels. Moonshae is shit but I remember the Aztec inspired one being good, plus most of his DragonLance stuff was far above average.

Was he the guy that wrote a lot of the Solamnic Knight stuff?

[.H.]

Well, I have no idea if it might mean anything for older Forgotten Realms products, but Magic: The Gathering is getting a new set, next year, that is set in the Forgotten Realms.

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, .H. said:

Well, I have no idea if it might mean anything for older Forgotten Realms products, but Magic: The Gathering is getting a new set, next year, that is set in the Forgotten Realms.

It's a reciprocal thing. Two of the Magic: The Gathering worlds got D&D campaign settings published last year, so they're doing a Forgotten Realms MTG game, and maybe other D&D worlds if that's successful.

[unJon]

This thread made me pick up the latest Drizzt trilogy. It was decent. Sort of how I remembered RAS books. Felt a bit like maybe the last Drizzt books he would write. But maybe not. 

[Werthead]

The Icewind Dale Trilogy Book 2: Streams of Silver

Having successfully saved Icewind Dale from the invading army of the sorcerer Akar Kessell - albeit at a high cost - Bruenor Battlehammer, Drizzt Do'Urden, Wulfgar and Regis embark on a new quest. This time their goal is Mithril Hall, the long-lost homeland of Bruenor. Unfortunately, Bruenor was only a child when the hall fell and has no memory of its location. The companions set out for the cities of Luskan and Silverymoon, hoping they will find clues to the Hall's whereabouts. But danger stalks the party, for the assassin Artemis Entreri is on their tail, seeking the halfling Regis, whilst the mages of Luskan are anxious for news of the Crystal Shard and are determined to recover it.

Streams of Silver (1989) is the middle volume of the Icewind Dale Trilogy but mercifully escapes "middle book syndrome" by virtue of Salvatore not planning a trilogy in the first place. The Crystal Shard had to stand well enough alone so that if it bombed, readers would not be left on too much of a cliffhanger for a sequel that would never come. Fortunately, the book did very well and two sequels were commissioned, which are more tightly connected together (the "standalone+duology" school of trilogies, which has an honourable precedent in the original Star Wars trilogy).

Streams of Silver is a less tightly-plotted book than The Crystal Shard and less epic in terms of having large armies clashing, but it's much more of a traditional Dungeons & Dragons adventure. We have our party, who even now get a cool name (The Companions of the Hall™) and they have a quest which takes them across the Savage North of the Forgotten Realms. Many, many later books would also focus on this region but it's interesting to see it in a nascent state here with a lot of the worldbuilding still in a fairly embryonic stage, to the point where Salvatore overlooks the existence of the later very high-profile city of Neverwinter, which is amusing, and Alustriel Silverhand, one of the infamous Seven Sisters, only has two sisters at this juncture. We get a nicely varied story as well, taking in political-magical intrigue in the city of Luskan, a semi-comic interlude in the whimsical wizard hamlet of Longsaddle, a more desperate long-running battle across the troll-infested Evermoors, an angsty stay in the city of Silverymoon (a bastion of peace and enlightenment where Drizzt hopes for respite, only to be turned away because of his dark elven heritage) and a final descent into Mithril Hall, presumably thoroughly checked by TSR's legal team to stave off the J.R.R. Tolkien Estate suing them into the next universe.

An interesting parallel storyline emerges where the assassin Artemis Entreri is hot on our heroes' trail and assembles an "evil party" to bring parity to their encounter, complete with its own wizard, tracker, magical construct and a reluctant guide in the form of Catti-brie, Bruenor's adopted daughter now turned hostage. Given that Catti-brie was barely even in the first book, it's good to see her have some character development in this volume.

There's a lot more female characters in general, including several among the villains, which remedies one of the oddities of the first book. There's a fair bit of action, although not quite as breathlessly over-the-top as in the first book (sadly Drizzt and Wulfgar don't get to take out two dozen giants single-handed, which was stretching credibility just a bit), and Salvatore's writing calms down. No more excited exclamation marks after every other sentence! His prose can still veer towards the cheesy (especially whenever he decides Drizzt needs to be introspective and ponder on the unfairness of the world), but it's easily accessible and straightforward. There's still more enthusiasm than skill here, but it's surprising how much fun that can be.

The novel is very much still in the "Big Mac with extra fries" mode of fantasy literature, but it does make some clumsy nods towards engaging with a big theme when it comes to racism. Drizzt is a dark elf or drow, whose people were cursed and outcast from the rest of elven civilisation ten thousand years ago after betraying the other elven peoples during the Crown Wars. As a result, Drizzt encounters extreme hostility from pretty much everyone he meets. Later Forgotten Realms fiction would cast this event as a grand tragedy, with many tens of thousands of innocent and "good" dark elves punished for the crimes of their evil brethren, with many drow fighting for redemption under the banner of the goddess Eilistraee. At this early stage in the setting's history, though, the worldbuilding is more that all the drow are evil all the time (apart from a small number who are merely totally amoral instead), and Drizzt is the only exception in the whole world. On that basis it's hard to make Drizzt's story about racism work when virtually all the other drow we meet are inherently evil (shades of Dragon Age trying to make a story about bigotry against its mages because the run the risk of being overwhelmed by evil forces, despite the fact that almost every single mage we meet does go insane and get possessed by a demon at one point or another). Later books, which introduce more nuance to the setting, do deal with the issue more successfully.

Streams of Silver (***½) is a reasonable follow-up to The Crystal Shard. Salvatore has improved as a writer, although this is still very much at the enjoyable pulp end of the literary spectrum, and makes a couple of nods at larger themes around racism, homelands and belonging in this book, which are not altogether successful. He does deliver a readable, action-packed story which moves with verve through an interesting setting. With the success of this novel a bit more assured, there's a cliffhanger ending leading into the concluding book in the trilogy, The Halfling's Gem.