Sometimes it's so, so obvious...

[telophase]

The Crystal Shard by R. A. Salvatore, published by TSR in 1988, p. 44

In this place [the dwarf Bruenor] found his dreams, and ever they took him back to his ancient home. Mithril Hall, home of his fathers and their's [sic] before them, where rivers of the shining metal ran rich and deep and the hammers of dwarven smiths rang out in praise to Moradin and Dumathoin. Bruenor was merely an unbearded boy when his people had delved too deep into the bowels of the world and had been driven out by the dark things in dark holes. He was now the eldest surviving member of his small clan and the only one among them who had witnessed the treasures of Mithril Hall.

Dude! You forgot "Drums! Drums in the deep!"

I know that D&D and the whole heroic-fantasy RPG movement started in large part as a desire to play in Tolkien's world, but you think they'd file the serial numbers off a little more thoroughly.

(Not a complaint against Salvatore in this particular post, as he's forced to adhere to the worldbuilding, setting, and characters created by the company as a tie-in writer, just to the concept as a whole.)

Comments

[ebony14.livejournal.com]

No, no. Complain against Salvatore. Drizzt Do-Everything-Better-Than-Thou and his buddies are some of the Sue-est Sues that ever Sued. It's all crap.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I'm storing that up for a giant Post o' Doom. I'm willing to hand Salvatore a little slack for this one instance. XD

[vestaka.livejournal.com]

I'm totally waiting for that post of doom now. *laughs*

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I have a bunch of sort-of unrelated things in my head about it, but I need to sort out which are me complaining about TSR's worldbuilding, and which are me complaining about RAS' writing. Because I have massive issues with each. :D

[akaihyo.livejournal.com]

I look forward to your rant as I am an anti-fan of Wizard of the Coast's (remember they bought out TSR sometime back) game fiction and the Forgotten Realms in general.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

:) TSR had plenty of blame even before WotC's buyout. XD And I say that as someone who was a total Dragonlance fan back in the day. XD

[ebony14.livejournal.com]

A small select few of the TSR novels are fun reads. From what I can tell, they're ones that have no other stories set in whatever game universe they're set in, and they've been written by writers that write things other than TSR game fiction prior to writing for them. Salvatore isn't one of them, although his non-TSR stuff shows that he can improve.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Good to hear he can improve - I'm aware that I'm currently reading stuff written at the beginning of his career, and that it was aimed at a certain audience that expected certain things, among which was not deathless prose or even serious thought put into the setting.

[akaihyo.livejournal.com]

Well, you are right, TSR does have to bear its share of the guilt . . .

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I suspect it's a good thing that I read most of these during a period of college where I could spare no intelligent thought for pleasure reading. Actually, I think Forgotten Realms (most of the backlog at the time) and romance novels are all I read for a year or so there.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

Early D&D definitely had lots of stuff directly lifted from Tolkien (copies of the original set that use the terms "hobbit" and "ent" instead of "halfling" and "treant" are quite rare now), but unlike some other people I could mention (Terry Brooks being the most notable example) they did at least borrow elements from other sources. E.g., the magic system, which was inspired by Vance's Dying Earth stories.

[seawolf10.livejournal.com]

To be fair, Salvatore did improve.

Eventually. Slightly. (At least he was willing to let Wulfgar grow into something other than a bad Conan knockoff.)

[seawolf10.livejournal.com]

No, Salvatore's character Cadderly and his bunch (The Cleric Quintet. Save your money.) are the "Sue-iest Sues that ever Sued." For all Do'urden's flaws he never REVERSED THE FUCKING AGING PROCESS (twice!) and blew it off like it was nothing...

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure as the blame shouldn't still lie, at least in part, on Salvatore's doorstep. IIRC, Weis and Hickman had a good amount of control over their world-building.

[viridian5.livejournal.com]

I read Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance while in high school to early college, so the fact that everything was a rip-off of other fantasy stuff didn't bother me much. I even liked Drizzt at the time, though he eventually ascended to Stu heights I could no longer support.

I bought some of the art books, so I know that artist Larry Elmore was responsible for a lot of the actual character traits for at least the Dragonlance books that made the characters a little bit more than stereotypes. (His one portrait of Tika and his listed thoughts for how he presented her and her armor showed more thought than her written portrayals.)

Meanwhile, Dennis L. McKiernan should pay the Tolkien estate every time he publishes a book. It's that blatant.

The Iuz Wars were hell on earth, but for one Ranger they were... practice

[amberley.livejournal.com]

Paul Kidd's 3 D&D novels were fun reads: White Plume Mountain, Descent into the Depths of the Earth, and Queen of the Demonweb Pits, featuring "A remorseless ranger, a sentient hell hound pelt with a penchant for pyromania, an irksome pixie who sells intrigue and information", and a reincarnated badger. To say nothing of the freckled sphinx.

But they were set in Greyhawk, not Forgettable Realms, and are sadly out of print.

In the realm of game fiction written by authors of good non-game novels, I quite liked Stephen "Art of Arrow-Cutting" Dedman's Shadowrun novel A Fistful of Data, and have not yet worked up the nerve to read Sean Stewart's Star Wars Yoda novel, Dark Rendezvous, or James Alan Gardner's Tomb Raider novel, The Man of Bronze, although I own them.

[ninja-tech.livejournal.com]

I just wanted to say that I'm in love with your Kyo icon and it makes my day when I see it. *happy sigh*

Lol

[darkelf105.livejournal.com]

I cannot believe I missed that you were reading this book! Lol, I can't wait for the post of dooooooom, because as near and dear as these books are to my heart (I was too young to know they were crap, honestly, I swear!), they are soooooooooo particularly bad, that even I (who was quoted in a Salvatore press release for The Orc King), have to make fun of them.

Re: The Iuz Wars were hell on earth, but for one Ranger they were... practice

[seawolf10.livejournal.com]

I remember those. They were hilarious -- not least because Kidd hung lampshades on a lot of D&D tropes.

Tel, if you can find them, they're worth reading.