“The body count quickly goes from ‘a couple of mysterious murders’ to ‘heaps of corpses piled in every hallway,’ but Greenwood doesn’t seem to realize that while one death is a tragedy, dozens are just set dressing.”
Tag: The Harpers
“I know what you’re thinking: the Harpers accomplishing something without screwing it up or having it turn into a giant mess? It feels so out of character, and yet so refreshing!”
“If your Western characters all speak fluently and your Eastern characters all sound like ‘Thog discover fire! Cave warm now,’ then you’re implicitly infusing your book with a shitty racist message.”
“Mark Anthony seems like the kind of over-ambitious author for whom Jeff Grubb had to invent his notorious ‘Don’t blow up the moon’ rule.”
“It’s such a relief to spend time with a female character who feels like a real person after slogging through so many women used as sex objects in the recent Ed Greenwood novels.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Is it even possible to write a story of lost cities, dark jungles, and cannibal natives in our modern era without being anachronistic and offensive? Apparently so.”