Author: Pauli Kidd (published as Paul Kidd)
Published: December 1996
This book was lucky to have been printed at all. By this point in late 1996, years of terrible business decisions had finally caught up with TSR. Once they were the juggernaut of the nascent RPG industry; now they were crushed under a mountain of debt, harried by competition, and locked into a toxic business model that made it nigh-impossible for them to recover. In early 1997, both TSR’s distributor (Random House) and the printing company who made their books (J.B. Kenehan of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin) refused to do any more business with them due to the vast piles of unpaid bills they’d accrued. TSR managed to survive for a few more months, flailing about for a solution, but with no way to print or ship any products their fate was sealed. Wizards of the Coast, flush with cash from Magic: the Gathering sales, bought them in April 1997 with some change they found under their couch cushions.
That makes this the final Forgotten Realms novel published by TSR. In previous posts I was under the mistaken impression that Finder’s Bane by Grubb and Novak was the final TSR novel, but when I dug deeper I found a variety of contradictory release dates for it on the Internet — different sources said April, July, or August. In any event, I can’t see how it could have been released before the buyout if TSR had no way to print it or get it into stores. That means this, the seventy-sixth review I’ve posted, is the final entry for the Forgotten Realms before I move onto Dragonlance. It’s a bittersweet moment, since the Realms were the setting I spent the most time reading about and playing in as a D&D-obsessed teenager.
The Council of Blades is by the final newcomer to TSR’s stable of Forgotten Realms authors: Pauli Kidd. She was a video game and tabletop RPG designer who published her first fantasy novel in 1995 with TSR, but hadn’t written any D&D-based material before. I wonder if I’ll ever get around to reviewing TSR’s standalone non-D&D-related novels? They published a fair number of them in the 1990s, but nowadays they’re almost completely forgotten. In the meantime, I always look forward to reviewing books by authors who are new to the series — they tend to have interesting takes that, even when they’re not good, are fun to write about afterwards.
But before we get into talking about the novel, let’s talk about war.
This book is set in a heretofore undescribed location in the Realms, a small valley around the Akanamere far to the southeast of the Heartlands. The author has invented a pseudo-Italian Renaissance city-states culture here called the Blade Kingdoms, ruled by a fractious bunch of nobles whose primary source of entertainment seems to be battling one another. But these are civilized folk, you see, so they’ve formalized the process into something where only the participants get hurt or killed and the peasants are safe from collateral damage:
Yet even in war, the scientific mind could rise above brute emotion; war could be confined to pure military contest, leaving the daily lives of simple subjects quite alone. And so each summer, the great armies marched across the hills in dazzling, intricate campaigns, making move and countermove like ploys played in an all-consuming game.
Frankly, reading all that made me angry. Reducing war to a harmless game of chess where no non-combatants are ever inconvenienced is both a tone-deaf way to handle a grim subject and too historically inaccurate for me to buy even in a fantasy novel. In real life, pre-modern armies were as dangerous to the friendly territory they passed through as they were to the enemy. Imagine an entire city’s worth of people slowly moving across the landscape, and everyone in it is some combination of bored, stressed, underpaid, accustomed to violence, and heavily armed. Even an army that took great pains to not antagonize the civilian population (and most didn’t!) would still denude the landscape of food everywhere it passed, often leaving starvation in its wake, because before the invention of the railroad that was the only possible way to feed that many mouths. And if pay wasn’t forthcoming in a timely manner, all bets were off. People have always fantasized about making war into a game that can be played without guilt, keeping the fascinating aspects of armed conflict while dispensing with all the uncool suffering and human misery that accompanies it. But you can’t have one without the other, and to try to divorce them is to trivialize something horrible.
The practical aspects boggle the mind. How could such a society even form? War is extraordinarily expensive, a vast investment of state money, resources, and manpower, and to waste all that on an annual back-and-forth that yields nobody any lasting strategic benefit — just because it’s fun for the generals — is madness. The city-states would be beggared by the cost in short order, especially since the “no civilian damage” rule means there are no opportunities for plunder or land redistribution.
For a fantastic in-depth treatment of the subject, I highly recommend Bret Deveraux’s series of essays about the logistics of pre-modern armies — it’s not nearly as dry as it sounds. (His entire blog is a masterpiece of classical scholarship, and I highly recommend it if you’re looking for more to read in the intervals between my posts.)
Still, for a book set in a warlike society where battle is a regular part of life, we sure spend very little time at war and a lot of time watching the romantic entanglements of very silly nobles. Which brings us to the…
Plot
The Council of Blades is basically two separate books welded together. One is a gritty story of intrigue and warfare between rival political factions, with scenes of surprisingly gruesome violence and a generally grim tone. The other is a romantic comedy with a couple of hapless lovers where everything runs on cartoon logic and it’s funny to watch people get hurt. I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed a book whose tone was such an absolute train wreck.
Romantic comedy is a genre whose story beats are as predictable and inflexible as the Stations of the Cross, and the romcom subplot in this book hits all of them in the proper order. Tomboy princess Miliana randomly meets Lorenzo, her clumsy, bookish betrothed, but neither of them knows who the other is or that they’re actually engaged to each other. The meet-cute is as stereotypical as you could possibly imagine: exaggerated clumsiness, mistaken identity, accidental innuendo, et cetera. They initially don’t get along, with Miliana dismissing the infatuated Lorenzo as a fool, but warm up to each other over time through a variety of contrived circumstances. (Most of their disagreements could be resolved in five minutes if either of them were able to communicate like normal humans, but such an ability is unthinkable in a romantic comedy.) They realize their true feelings when they’re separated, and then Lorenzo has to perform some sort of grand gesture (inventing the helicopter in the process) to reunite them. Cue the happy ending!
This subplot also functions as a deliberate parody of Disney-style princess stories, where all the characters know how the fairy-tale story is supposed to go and then make fun of it whenever reality doesn’t measure up:
“A princess for my friend Lorenzo!” Luccio diligently poured himself more wine, never once noticing that he had an empty bottle. “She will be blonde and fair of visage, as princesses are wont to be—and she will also have either a curse, a prophecy, or a thing about unicorns; possibly all three.”
I’m trying to get immersed in the narrative here, but the author just can’t stop trying to be clever. Almost everything has a distinctly exaggerated tone, always larger, more theatrical, and sillier than life. It’s the worst of all worlds; its attempts at humour are broad and not particularly funny, the characters become caricatures that are hard to care about, and it’s impossible to build up suspension of disbelief for the handful of serious scenes. The author tries to insert some graver moments among the levity, like the occasional discussion of class issues or Miliana drunkenly talking about her fears, but once you’ve spent so much time watching these characters act cartoonishly ridiculous, you can’t suddenly switch over to taking them seriously.
It’s as if the author is winking at the audience, saying “Isn’t all this fluff about princesses and kingdoms and such just silly?” They can’t do a full-on parody, but they can’t bring themselves to take it seriously either, and the result is a mess. As a general rule, if the author can’t take their own work seriously, the readers won’t either.
The political subplot, on the other hand, is apparently intended to be taken completely seriously. A couple of scheming nobles conspire to overthrow the comfortable equilibrium of the Blade Kingdoms, replacing the annual ritualized battles with a Clausewitzian total war for control of the entire region. (Why nobody has ever before thought “Hey, we have all these soldiers, why don’t we take everyone else’s stuff?” is not explained, of course.) They’re evil, heartless sadists, naturally, and their rivals are noble and upstanding, because it would be terrible if the reader were confused about whom to root for. The tone suddenly switches from screwball comedy to G.R.R. Martin:
A blade shot out of the Blade Captain’s sleeve; Svarezi stabbed the soldier in the throat, ripped open his windpipe, and rammed the dripping blade into his victim’s heart. The guard fell, clawing at the ground as blood hissed up to splash stinking streams across Svarezi’s boots.
And then the next scene will be more romantic comedy, leaving my poor brain reeling from the whiplash. The two plots overlap because the evil guys are getting Lorenzo, an absent-minded inventor, to build them a death laser. (Yes, really.)
The comedic parts are broad, obvious, and rarely funny. Any time a character says “I’m sure glad we brought X!”, the other person will say “Wait, I thought you brought the X!”. Any time a character says “X could never happen!” or “I sure hope that X doesn’t happen!”, it’s guaranteed to happen in the very next paragraph in a humorous manner:
“No, it should not be leaking. And no, it isn’t dangerous.”
A metal sphere burst with a thunderous bang; chemicals lashed across the room, chewing into the stonework wherever they chanced to land. Luccio shook pieces of smoking shrapnel from the crown of his hat, and used a rapier blade to clear himself space upon a chair.
“I see.”
In short, it’s by-the-numbers comedy. And rather than ramping up the tension as the book progresses, the author ramps up the implausible and ridiculous nature of the comedic situations until they become unbearably, mind-shatteringly dumb.
“So! We have uncovered your perfidiousness at last!” The titanic woman somehow moved aside to reveal a squad of home economics tutors armed with rolling pins and knives.
“Slaughter the male, but keep the girl for punishment.”
The overall effect is that you’re watching a 1960s sitcom randomly intercut with scenes from a bad cable-TV fantasy drama, which makes the world feel like a cheap stage instead of a real place inhabited by real people we’re supposed to care about. You can’t have it both ways — you can’t do lowest-common-denominator pie-in-the-face sitcom-type comedy and also have us take the world seriously. You can do subtler comedy and have an engrossing setting, à la Terry Pratchett, or you can do zany off-the-wall comedy and have a paper-thin setting, à la the Marx Brothers, but the territory in between has the downsides of both and the benefits of neither.
Characters
To be perfectly blunt, everyone in this novel has the character depth of a cartoon breakfast cereal mascot. Each character has two or three traits that completely describe their personality, and then the author exaggerates those traits to the point of absurdity. It left me scratching my head trying to figure out what the tone was supposed to be — is this a comedy? A parody of fantasy novels? A badly-done political drama? It’s sort of “all of the above” blended into an unappetizing slurry. Are we supposed to empathize with these people and care about their problems, or laugh at them? Are their situations serious and life-threatening, or comical and silly? It’s just such a dog’s breakfast, trying to have it both ways and succeeding at neither.
The closest thing to a protagonist in this novel is Miliana Mannicci, the daughter of a powerful noble. Technically a princess — but she’s not like the other girls, you see. All the other noblewomen are brainless twits whose only interests are makeup, clothes, and marriage, whereas Miliana is a loner tomboy who’s interested in scholarship and magic. She’s looked down on by her archetypal wicked stepmother because she’s so hopelessly unfeminine.
The “not like the other girls” trope is an ugly, toxic bit of sexism that I wish would just die already. It’s a backhanded compliment — the unspoken corollary to “It’s so cool that you’re not stereotypically feminine” is “…because being feminine is a bad thing.” There are no noteworthy female characters in this novel who both have feminine traits and are depicted positively, which demonstrates the grim no-win situation for women: society conditions you to behave a certain way, and then people treat you like an idiot for behaving that way. I’m not here to psychoanalyze the author, but it sure feels like there’s some degree of internalized misogyny going on.
“I’ve just met the most amazing person. Well—girl.” Lorenzo blinked. “Woman. I mean—she’s sort of a woman, but a person too!”
“Do tell?”
“Well, I mean, she’s a girl but she’s…” The scholar groped his hands blindly through the air searching for adequate words. “She’s not like a girl at all! I mean—she only talked about real things—magic and mechanics and sociopolitical infrastructures—you know what I mean.”
Jesus Christ. Furthermore, the author is trying to set up Miliana as a misunderstood sympathetic protagonist, but I found her insufferable. She’s self-centred, obnoxiously obstreperous, and hostile to everyone around her — a real “nobody understands me!” teenager archetype. After her first several scenes, I had long since stopped caring what happened to her.
I at least have to give the author credit for being even-handed, though, because Miliana’s love interest is a case of “not like the other boys.” Lorenzo Utrelli da Lomatra is a hapless inventor who’s too introverted and meek to mesh with his warlike, status-obsessed peers. He’s basically this setting’s Leonardo da Vinci, bursting with ideas for inventions that are centuries ahead of their time, like the parachute, the phonograph, and the… laser? Wait, what? Really? I’m willing to accept a fair amount of deviation from the medieval stasis of the Realms, but inventing the laser requires a 20th-century understanding of materials science and the physics of light, not just a basic knowledge of optics.
Fittingly for a parody of a Disney princess, Miliana has a parody of the obligatory cute animal companion: a giant firebird named Tekoriikii. He’s a foolish kleptomaniac who leaves a trail of destruction in his wake, leading to several sitcom-style comic scenes where people have to hide his presence or cover up for his antics. He talks in nonsense words like “glub glub” and “yonk squonk,” yet Miliana has no trouble understanding him. Everything about him seems designed to make the world feel like a wacky cartoon.
The only character in this book whom I genuinely enjoyed was Luccio, Lorenzo’s comic foil. This drunken young rake seems to be the only character in the novel who knows he’s in a comedy and doesn’t take it seriously, so his cocksure antics are a welcome diversion from all of the ludicrous tomfoolery in Miliana and Lorenzo’s subplot.
“Not now! I need five minutes.”
“Five minutes?” Luccio puffed out his chest like a fighting rooster and nearly capsized a pile of glassware with his waving arms. “Lorenzo, my dressing routine has been disturbed. The delight of a hundred eager young damsels hangs in the balance! I have not a minute to spare, let alone five!” Pained by the potential disaster, Luccio hurtled himself against the portal in theatrical dismay.
“Think, Lorenzo, think! Consider their anguish; the screams, the wails, the suicides! Temples swamped as vast columns of poor, disillusioned girls sorrowfully line up to take their chastity vows.”
The villains aren’t much to speak of. Gilberto Ilego, a conniving nobleman, enlists Ugo Svarezi, a brutal militia captain, in a plot to unite the Blade Kingdoms by force. Both of them are just evil for evil’s sake, the usual “I’m ambitious so I do bad things” villains with no human attributes or motivations beyond “I want power.” They casually kill a bunch of random extras to demonstrate what bad guys they are, but that’s about all the characterization they get.
All the other characters, including Miliana’s father and stepmother, are simple caricatures. I’m having a hard time thinking of anything to say about them.
Themes
I’ve already covered this book’s strange treatment of war. Only the two villains seem to see how bizarre and unrealistic it all is:
“A game has an end. This—this yearly posturing has no purpose except its own continuance. To preserve the game, you have lost sight of its final goal!”
“Ah.” The prince held out a hand and felt it filled with a chilled glass of wine. “And what, pray tell, is our unremembered goal?”
“To win the game, my lord. To destroy the other kingdoms and seize the board as our own.”
But having a basic awareness of realpolitik is one of the many attributes that make these guys awful, apparently.
If there’s anything resembling a theme in here, it’s “people bucking social norms.” Miliana and Lorenzo are both labouring under their society’s unrealistic and burdensome expectations; by the end, they’ve stayed true to themselves and broken free of their social constraints. Ilego and Svarezi, on the other hand, cause widespread havoc when they cast off their society’s norms for the niceties of civilized warfare. I’m not sure whether the author has an actual point to make here, since social expectations are apparently a bad thing in the former case and a good thing in the latter, but it comes up often.
Writing
One reason why this review took so long to get around to is that the writing style constantly got on my nerves. It’s always trying so hard to be clever, usually unsuccessfully and at the expense of the reader’s immersion, and it quickly becomes tiring. Every sentence seems to have a couple of extra words or an unnecessary clause, even when what it’s expressing is very simple. Here, for example, is a description of someone yelling:
Propelled by feminine lungs strengthened by untold years of gossip and complaint, the summons pealed out through the corridors and palace towers until it set the chandeliers shivering like autumn leaves.
And the elaborate descriptions don’t necessarily even make sense:
On the dance floor, half a hundred brilliantly clad men and women turned and stepped to the intricate measures of an arrogant pavane.
How exactly can a dance be arrogant? Or this little gem:
The young artist sniffed at the air with a frown crossing his eyes.
The narration oscillates wildly between deadly serious and a dry, light-hearted tone:
All across the city, dogs began to howl. Fresh milk curdled, the chickens mislaid, and something rather unpleasant happened to all the cheese.
Useless adverbs are everywhere. The villains hiss evilly and contemptuously toss things aside; other people stroke chins slowly, gaze off thoughtfully, hold up their hands pathetically, and wander disconsolately. Worse, the narration is packed to the gills with violations of the “show, don’t tell” rule — the narrator tells you what everyone is feeling at all times, and often explains what just happened in case you missed it.
If I had to sum all this up in three words, it would be “trying too hard.” The writing isn’t quite godawful, but it’s intrusive and barnacled in a way that kept kicking me out of the story. I will, however, give it credit for the most inventive threat anyone’s come up with yet in any of these books:
“I’m going to make you eat bricks of your own sun-dried urine!”
Sheesh.
Conclusion
Grade: F
Quite frankly, this book is an unmitigated disaster. I started off thinking “Well, maybe this is a D+?” And then with every scene of formulaic, immersion-destroying comedy I kept revising my score lower and lower. By the time Miliana was having a serious political argument with a giant talking snail and Lorenzo was conquering the battlefield with Rube Goldberg-style tanks, I was praying for it to be over. In the end I asked myself “Would I rather reread this book, or read Pools of Darkness again?”, and found that it was an easy decision. This is two completely different books jammed together; neither of them are all that good on their own, and together they undermine each other to create something even worse.
This review took a very long time to get around to, and I’d like to apologize to my faithful readers for that. Part of the delay is that life has been a real trial lately, with little energy to spare for non-essential activities. But part of it was simply that this book was deeply frustrating, neither enjoyable to read nor bad in entertaining ways. I kept picking it up and putting it down again because it was hard work to get through it. Every aspect of it — characters, plot, setting, tone — are flawed in interconnected ways that make it impossible to imagine how this book could be improved, because it would basically require changing everything. It’s a shame that this is how the TSR Forgotten Realms novels ended, because it’s an awful note to go out on. Hell, there’s nothing here that even makes it feel like a Forgotten Realms novel — you could publish this as a standalone fantasy novel with very few edits required.
If there’s anything to learn from this novel, it’s this: tone matters. All of an author’s choices about characters, plot, setting, and diction convey a particular mood and tone to the reader, and every switch between tones is exhausting for them. You can make it work with compatible tones, like “grimdark + dark humour” or “zany comedy + adventure”, but when you start mixing incompatible tones it utterly destroys the reader’s faith in your story. Ultimately, even if it had been executed well — and it wasn’t — “wacky sitcom” just doesn’t work in the context of the Forgotten Realms.
So what’s next, you might ask? Well, I’ve already started working on the first Dragonlance trilogy, but it might be a while before I have something to publish. Given that the Dragonlance Chronicles were by far TSR’s most successful and culturally significant works, I’m thinking that they merit extra-long posts to really dig deep into the details. After Chronicles and Legends, we’ll see what I feel like doing next; I really don’t relish the idea of trying to review three anthologies in a row. But that’s a problem for another day! For now, be excellent to one another and keep being awesome.
Wow, congrats on finishing this project! I stumbled across your blog two weeks ago (I was playing a game that used an epigram from Pool of Twilight, of all things, and was looking to jog my memory of the book) and just hoovered up the archive in a nostalgia-fueled binge, and had resigned myself to the last book going un-reviewed, so it was especially exciting to check back on a lark and see the update. I’ve really enjoyed your writing and analysis, so thanks for your dedication!
I’m definitely curious to see your takes on the Dragonlance books, since those were my favorite when I was a kid, albeit when I look back over the list I’m seeing a fair number of clunkers and prequels that seemed unnecessary even at the time… I seem to recall the Tales anthologies were actually pretty good, though, so hopefully it won’t be too tough going?
As for this book, yeah, it really does feel like something that could have come out of the generic TSR fiction line but instead was awkwardly inserted into the Realms. Honestly, some of the comedy prose isn’t so terrible to my eye, I feel like if the author had excised the grimdark plot and just leaned into the Wodehouse-y romantic misadventure side of things might have been barely acceptable if it was just a standalone fantasy thing? (I do remember a couple of the books from that line not being terrible — though since the two of them that stand out in my memory are Nine Gates, a fantasy-China story written by a white dude, and something called “Captains Outrageous” I may be very wrong about that…)
Thank you for the kind words! I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t love it — even if the occasional book makes me regret my life choices.
Wodehouse-y? Christ, I wish this were more like Wodehouse. He had a rapier wit and a keen sense for just how far you could push an absurd situation before it collapsed. This is just… the kind of comedy where you expect to hear a canned laugh track after every line. You’re right, though, that it would have been better if it weren’t married to the political plot and just leaned in hard on the romantic comedy angle. It’s better to do one thing halfway right than fail at two things.
My recollection of the Dragonlance novels is that the first two Weis/Hickman trilogies are surprisingly good, the Tales anthologies are a mixed bag, and then things go downhill very fast after that. I remember enjoying a couple of outliers (Stormblade and Weasel’s Luck spring to mind), but there were a lot of very bad Dragonlance books. Then again, my recollections are decades old at this point, so I’m looking forward to seeing how I engage with them as an adult.
Very interesting; I’m a big fan of Pauli Kidd’s Greyhawk Adventures novels, enjoyed her Gamma World one, and recently read her two most recent novels (The Dungeoneers and Earth-Kin). That said, while I’ve enjoyed all her novels, I won’t say they are the most consistent; Mixing the light-hearted and the very dark is something she does a lot in her older novels; I keep thinking my fiance (who prefers things more along the lines of Legends and Lattes) would like them, and then there will be a sudden scene of a drow mass-sacrifice, or a slave revolt to escape drow captivity ongoing and a multi-novel character dying contrasted with defeating a goddess using high-proof alcohol. While I generally think of her Greyhawk novels as her best work, that is one trait that I don’t mind her leaving in the past!
I do want to read this one now to compare my opinion to yours; I’d been avoiding it, as I’ve not got fond memories of The Nobels series, but I’ll probably get around to it after The GeneStorm series.
I’m quite willing to believe that she got better at writing over time, but this was only her second novel. It looks like she’s written a couple dozen more since then, so she’s had a lot of chances to practice.
You’re not wrong about the Nobles series, though. The only one of them I would consider re-reading is King Pinch, and even that one had some issues. The rest were just… dire.
Alright! I knew our esteemed host wouldn’t let us down! And with that…
-As Canageek alluded to, Pauli Kidd’s Greyhawk novels are pretty well-received in that fandom. Part of that might come from what a weird adventuring party she put together, ranging from a ranger who acts more like a paladin to a sentient hellhound hide to a valley girl-esque fairy. I haven’t read them myself, but I have heard about them. And they couldn’t possibly be worse than Ru Emerson’s Against The Giants novel…
-How seriously did Kidd play up the actual conflict between the nobles’ various armies? Was there full-on contact bloodshed with actual death? Or was it something like a series of war games or mostly non-lethal combat like jousting tournaments and archery contests? I can see some the villains noticing how well-trained the militaries have become, and potentially using them for something more ‘glorious’ than just allowing different nobles to show each other up?
That might have been what Kidd was trying to convey, and there’s even some real-world precedent. The Iroquois used lacrosse as a way to keep their combat skills sharp and to provide a natural outlet for aggressive energies. Even today, sports arguably serve as an outlet for aggression that, while far, far from perfect, is still less lethal than full-out war.
-Sadly, the nobles’ engaging in war for their own personal glory is all too real in history. The British army sold commissions for centuries, allowing idiots like Lord Cardigan (of the Charge of the Light Brigade) to try and make themselves look good; the French King Louis XIV played up the glory of his armies’ military victories; and literature in the years leading up to World War I were rife with jingoism and the glory that come with combat. So the action of the Blade nobles is somewhat more believable to me.
-Much like R.A. Salvatore, it’s likely that Kidd stepped up her game since this novel, but Salvatore, for all our esteemed host’s problems with his writing style and my problems with his tendency to show rather than tell, was never this bad.
-Given our esteemed host’s criticisms of trying to mix comedy and high drama both here and in the Cleric Quintet, I’ll be interested in our esteemed host’s opinions of the interplay between Flint and Tasslehoff in the Dragonlance Chronicles. I have mixed feelings about it, as it sometimes makes Flint come across more as Grampa Simpson than Gimli. Flint seemed to be a comic relief character for a lot of the first novel, in fact. Not to mention our esteemed host’s view on anything and everything to do with Fizban…
-I’ve mentioned before how much I dislike heavy-handed ‘Author Tracts’ where the story comes in second to whatever political message the author wants to beat the audience over the head with. I also dislike these kinds of winking references at the audience too-they undermine suspension of disbelief for me. How well does Kidd actually fit this into the context of the story?
I admittedly have done something similar myself in one of my Marvel fanfics where I had a C-list villain fight and kill an A-list villain who got overconfident because of their standing on the ‘pecking order’, but then the C-list villain tells his dying opponent that the whole concept of ‘lists’ is utter bullshit, motivated by my hatred of the C List Fodder trope. I hoped that it at least made sense in the context of the story.
-Besides the whole ‘feminism can’t be feminine’ idiocy our esteemed host rightly ridicules, are Lorenzo and Milianna another case of the goofy nerd ending up with the gorgeous woman who should be well out of his league?
-To build on our esteemed host’s excellent comments about the importance of tone in the writing itself, I’d add the importance of the overall tone of the setting, particularly a shared one like the Realms. Pseudo-tanks and lasers don’t fit into it at all, and neither does the kind of slapstick comedy Kidd uses here. If she’d created her own setting where she set out the initial tone or was able to use something like Eberron, it’d probably be a lot easier to swallow.
-I’m kind of bummed our esteemed host won’t be reviewing Finder’s Bane , since I had a good rant worked up about my dislike of Finder Wyvernspur as a god. Namely, his portfolio is really wonky (transformation of art), he seems to break the rules of divinity (besides killing Moander despite being a mortal, he somehow hoards Moander’s portfolio and converts it to something else even though it should’ve gone to somebody like Talona), and his CN alignment doesn’t seem to mesh with his dogma of promoting freedom and artistic expression, which seem more CG. How would a CE priest of Finder even work in practice?
-And a final message to our esteemed host: Take however much time you need to deal with real life issues that are more important than this blog. Your personal needs take priority over this. As you can see, your readership is willing to wait.
How seriously did Kidd play up the actual conflict between the nobles’ various armies? Was there full-on contact bloodshed with actual death?
Yep, it’s actual war with entire armies killing each other. This is no non-lethal ritualized combat.
Sadly, the nobles’ engaging in war for their own personal glory is all too real in history…
Sure, but self-aggrandizement isn’t what makes it feel unrealistic to me. Clausewitz was correct when he wrote that “War is the continuation of policy with other means.” In other words, throughout human history, war has always been something that people do for a reason, with a goal in mind. Sometimes it’s economic (seizing territory and resources), sometimes it’s social (can’t afford to look weak, historical vendetta, etc.), sometimes it’s personal (megalomanaical ambition, Helen of Troy, etc.). But there’s always a goal. The Blade Kingdoms, on the other hand, treat it like seasons of a league sport. Nobody gets any lasting benefit from winning except for transitory social status.
I can’t think of any historical parallel for that sort of warfare. War always has a reason — not necessarily a good reason, but people don’t just wake up one day and think “Hey, let’s have a war!” the same way they’d think “Let’s have a picnic!”
Given our esteemed host’s criticisms of trying to mix comedy and high drama both here and in the Cleric Quintet, I’ll be interested in our esteemed host’s opinions of the interplay between Flint and Tasslehoff in the Dragonlance Chronicles.
I have finished reading Dragons of Autumn Twilight already, and let’s just say that I have opinions on that subject. There are parts of Dragonlance that do a very good job of mixing light and dark material… and then there’s Flint.
I also dislike these kinds of winking references at the audience too-they undermine suspension of disbelief for me. How well does Kidd actually fit this into the context of the story?
Not well. In general, anything that references modern popular culture in these novels stands out like a sore thumb, and this is no exception. You can get away with it if your setting and tone are oriented towards comedy, but in the Forgotten Realms it merely explodes the reader’s suspension of disbelief. A perfect counterpoint would be Discworld, whose Leonardo da Vinci parody invents the bicycle-powered submarine and the atomic bomb, but it’s funny and makes sense in context because it’s a setting where you expect that kind of thing to happen.
Are Lorenzo and Miliana another case of the goofy nerd ending up with the gorgeous woman who should be well out of his league?
Fortunately, no! They’ve avoided that particular trope. She’s explicitly described as plain and unremarkable — in fact, the author keeps harping on it as a means of emphasizing how unlike a stereotypical princess she is.
I’m kind of bummed our esteemed host won’t be reviewing Finder’s Bane, since I had a good rant worked up about my dislike of Finder Wyvernspur as a god.
You’re right; he’s kind of a weird case. I think the idea of having him steal Moander’s divinity at the conclusion of Song of the Saurials isn’t a bad one in theory. It’s a great thematic capstone for his personal journey from selfish shithead who can’t stand anyone messing with his art to a literal patron saint of artistic change. But it’s a weirdly narrow portfolio that doesn’t particularly catch the imagination, and it feels like chaotic good would be a more natural alignment for him at the end of that journey.
Thank you for the thoughtful encouragement! Here in the Northern Hemisphere the sun has returned and so has my energy, so I expect that more posts will be following before long.
I’m elated to do my bi-monthly check on your site and see new content–glad to see you’re back! Like some others have mentioned, I remember enjoying Kidd’s Greyhawk novels, so it seems she improved. I was also amazed to recently learn that Kidd was the project lead on the SNES Shadowrun game, as that was a childhood favorite of mine.
Thank you! It’s good to be back. I’ve probably got one more update coming in the next week or so, and then there’ll be a drought of maybe a month. July is going to be a busy period for me, I’m afraid. I’m pleased to hear that Kidd’s later stuff is better than her juvenilia! Some authors don’t seem to improve over time, so I’m always happy to hear when one does.
I think the idea of medieval war as a puerile, unrealistic, foolish thing comes from Itallian diplomat and thinker Nicola Macchiavelli. He believed in replacing mercenary feudal armies with permanent “national” armies raised from levies. In his most famous book (the Prince), he painted an unfavorable image of Italian warfare in the XV-XVI century.
In his narrative, mercenary captains didn’t fight real battles, but some king of espectacle to amuse and fool his princely patrons. A campaign was full of maneuver, conteurmaneuver, in a chess-like style. But with little bloody gore, becouse (according to Macchiavelli) a mercenary wouldn’t risk his way of living (his company), and his rival was often another member of the same club (another mercenary leader). So wars were expensive, but they didn’t solve anything. And when a real army came to Italy (the French one, in 1494, with the smell of the 100 years war still in the nose), Italians discovered all they pretentious “science of war” was useless.
Of course, that was just a political argument. Italian mercenaries could be duplicious sometimes, but another times they fought hard battles and sieges, and were willing to die for their patrons (in fact 1494 -95 French invasion almost ended in disaster). But as Machiavelli had said they were goons, many people after that simply repeat his arguments. “Fancy Renaissance Southerner buffoons as the meek Italians couldn’t resist Northern brave hairy fighters, and blah blah blah.
And I see now “Big Nick” arguments were also used in Council of Blades. Oh, my!
I’ve been away from your site for a while and discover you neck deep in Dragonlance!
A shame the Realms novels end here, I would indeed have liked to have heard your thoughts on Finder’s Bane. Thank you so much for keeping up the good work! (And helping me know which books to grab and which to avoid when I’m frequenting secondhand bookstores!)