“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.”
Tag: Troy Denning
“If I were to rank every baby in fiction by how sympathetically they’re portrayed, Kaedlaw would rank just ever so slightly above the keening fetus-beast from Eraserhead.”
“We’re once again in not-quite-the-Realms, where only a single brief reference to ‘the continent of Faerûn’ establishes that we’re actually in the Forgotten Realms and not in some random standalone fantasy trilogy.”
“TSR has finally gotten around to employing several new authors to write Realms material. Do these newcomers bring a fresh set of voices to familiar material, or are they just new line cooks churning out the same old dishes?”
“The basic outline of the plot has promise — important person with dark secret, kidnapped daughter, mysterious forces behind it all — but the implementation is sloppy.”
“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.”
“So what are we to make of this Lawrence of Anauroch? It may be derivative, but it’s certainly not boring.”
“After all, the one thing D&D was really lacking was yet another goddamned word for polearms…”
“It’s not perfect — the pacing drags at points, Adon’s survival feels more preposterous than miraculous, and there are a few duds among the supporting cast — but it’s still a marked improvement over the previous couple of books.”