“Imagine a chase scene in a movie: cars careening around corners, explosions going off, gunfights between moving vehicles, that sort of thing. It’s exciting and fun, right? Then imagine that the chase scene goes on for nine solid hours.”
“Has there ever been a Dungeons & Dragons class as maligned as the poor bard? Next to a guy who chops monsters up with a sword as big as he is, or a mage who can drop fiery comets on her foes’ heads, a friendly fellow whose special power is singing songs has always felt pretty weaksauce.”
“If this is the Harpers’ general level of competence, it’s hard to imagine why the Zhentarim don’t run the world yet.”
“Stealing a scene is lazy writing, which is occasionally forgivable. Assuming that your readers are too uneducated to notice is condescending, which is not.”
“Hold everything. We have to talk about this cover.”
“I’d love to see more Forgotten Realms authors run with this depiction of godhood, which gives the gods a delightfully alien feel. Alas, I suspect that everyone else is going to keep writing them as powerful, slightly dim humans and I’ll continue to be annoyed.”
“The reason this review is up later than I expected is because I kept putting the book down out of sheer boredom every time I came to another six-page stretch of ‘And then they killed a bunch of goblins.'”
“Imagine that someone read The Lord of the Rings, then said to themself, ‘That was cool, but you know what this story really needed? An entire book devoted to the Scouring of the Shire!’ Because that’s pretty much what we have here.”
“Five out of Niles’ nine books have featured wicked, venal, self-righteous priests of Helm as major villains. What’s the deal here? Did the author have a bad run-in with a mall security guard in his youth and now seeks revenge on the anthropomorphized concept of guards and watchmen?”
“The nice thing about a mixed bag like this is that even when you suffer through a badly-written story, you know it’s going to be short and you’ll probably get to a better one soon. Beats slogging through a bad 300-page novel, that’s for sure.”
