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RPG/Drizzt/Forgotten Realms rambling, part the second
More random rambling on my recent RPG reading. Part the first, for context.
I'll eventually get to Drizzt himself, but in the meantime, here's some more rambling on this book.
Okay. The Crystal Shard is a stand-alone book, but IIRC is the start of a series and introduces the main party members, er, characters. I can't fault that it's structured like an RPG and that you can often almost see the dice rolling because, after all, it's an RPG tie-in novel. These things are not necessarily bad in such a book. They may be bad if you're trying to expand your audience, perhaps, but if you're aiming for a core RPG audience which isn't turned off by them, I got no problem with it.[1]
The basic setup is that a demon has lost a powerful and evil magic item, a crystal shard with a sort of sentience. It's found by a no-talent loser of an apprentice wizard who's just killed his master and was double-crossed by the people who paid him to do so. (Apparently because writing a less evil character who becomes corrupt would provide more interest to the story?) The crystal tempts and corrupts the wizard even more, and raises a magic tower at soem vague point in the mountains.
(If you have any fondness for Tolkein whatsoever, you may want to put any drinks down, and perhaps find a nice padded surface upon which to bash your head.)
The tower is named Cryshal-Tirith.
The mage and the crystal draw in a bunch of various races - these lonely, snowy, bleak mountains apparently support an enormous amount of biomass - and enslave them, then manage to summon the demon that originally had the shard and convince it to work with them for a while. Other than the occasional scene change back to the tower every so often to show the mage sending out a random group of monsters for random monster encounters to increase the main characters' hit points and experience levels, to show the mage discreetly indulging in slave girls (it's a PG-rated book, after all), or, near the end of the book, setting the barbarians in motion, we can more-or-less forget about the mage and the demon until the climax of the book, when we have the big boss fight against the demon.
The primary part of the plot starts with a halfling, who despite being three feet tall, with furry feet, and liking good food and good times, is TOTALLY NOT A HOBBIT. He lives in the Ten-Towns area (introduced in my previous rant) after having stolen a gem from a Thieves' Guild guildmaster -![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rachelmanija would die if I didn't mention the guildmaster is named Pasha Pook - that allows him to persuade people to his point of view.
Despite showing up in the story off and on and occasionally persuading someone to do something, he really has no use in the story at all and is there mostly because either R. A. Salvatore or the game designers felt that no game party is complete without ahobbit halfling. He ends up traveling with the others at the end of the book, so presumably has some sort of active role in subsequent plots. Maybe.
There's a collection of tundra barbarian tribes that are massing to raid the Te-Towns area (for descriptions of the tribes, read the comment thread between me andsmillaraaq here, which also features bonus ranting about predators and the envirnoment. I am not the daughter of a wildlife scientist for nothing.) The entire purpose of this is to make it reasonable that one of the local dwarves, Bruenor, would adopt a young barbarian teenage boy and make him work in his smithy as an indentured servant for five years in return for the attack. Which in turn explains why we have a barbarian tundra nomad named Wulfgar who wields a magical dwarven warhammer[2] and who travels with Bruenor and Bruenor's friends later on.
As you may have guessed by now, this book is mostly the backstory for the adventuring party, telling how and why they came to be together and ended up heading off into the wild blue yonder to have further adventures.
Bruenor has an adopted human daughter named Cattie-brie, who I mentioned briefly in the previous rant. She gets to be actively useless in this book, which I'll get to in a bit. I am told that in other books she eventually develops a personality, but she is not besmirched by a single iota of one in this book.
And then, we come to the euphoniously-named Drizzt Do'Urden.[3] Drizzt is a drow, or dark elf. A dark elf is the opposite of a regular elf, which means that they're evil by nature, have ebony-black skin and white hair, live underground, and can't stand the touch of sunlight. (More on the racial politics in the next rant.) Drizzt is a special snowflake, being a renegade drow who has a conscience. He also has lavender eyes and a giant black panther magical spirit companion, I shit you not. But he gets his own rant. We're expected to just accept the existence of this renegade drow in this book, because he gets his own trilogy later.
So. The party is more-or-less formed: Bruenor and Drizzt are longtime friends, Drizzt lurking around the edges of the towns because the nasty single-minded humans don't trust him even when he brings them news that the barbarians are about to raid and allows them time to rpepare and fight back, Bruenor doing whatever dwarves do in the mountains as Wulfgar and Cattie-brie grow up, and Regis hanging out fishing and doing scrimshaw on trout bones. Nothing happens outside of random encoutners for a while. Well, I think that's so because I sure as hell can't actually remember anything happening.
Eventually, Wulfgar comes to the end of his period of indenture, gains his magic hammer, trains to fight with Drizzt, and plot starts happening - the evil mage and evil crystal shard mentioned earlier send a bunch of giants to spy on the Ten-Towns area[4], and enthrall the current leader of the barbarians to plan another raid on the Ten-Towns[5]. Wulfgar realizes he's got to depose the barbarian leader to stp the raid, so sets off to slay a dragon. Salvatore remembers that oh yeah, he's got a female character who hasn't had a line in a hundred pages and Cattie-brie is all understanding about Wulfgar's need for whatever-it-is at Drizzt, who then deduces that Wulfgar is going to go kill a dragon and follows him.
Wulfgar, because he can't take over the barbarian tribes' leadership unless he's done a great deed, heads off to the (mentioned for the first time here, all of a sudden) to the lair of the great, evil, mad, bad, dangerous white ice dragon Icingdeath. Yes, Icingdeath.[6] He makes his way over dangerous territory to the caverns of the dragon, and spectacularly fails to kill it until Drizzt shows up, drops a magical sphere of darkness over the dragon's head, and shoots it in the eye with an arrow, whereupon Wulfgar can land the killing blow. Wulfgar is not angry with this.
Wulfgar takes over the barbarian tribes, the armies of the evil mage descend upon the Ten-Towns, the barbarians show up and fight for the side of the townsmen, surprising the mage, Drizzt gets the boss fight with the demon, and Cattie-brie does nothing useful. End of plot, none of the main characters have any sort of loss of anything important to them, and at the end of the book they head off for further adventuring.
I started taking notes around page 157. I'll just put them here.
p. 157 - Dwarves, Wulfgar, and Drizzt fight against the giants (also known as 'verbeeg' Very Big. Ha ha ha.). The dwarves field ballistae, which later on bust trhough reinforced wooden doors, but at this point are described as merely scattering the giants, not killing them. BALLISTAE. Yeah, right.
p. 170 When a drow is ebon-skinned, as he is described, how can you tell if he's bruised?
(page number not mentioned) Drizzt, our Gary Stu, like treasure. But not for the wealth, oh no, but only for the pleasure of uncovering it for the first time.
p. 189 Awful dialect. "'We have come before ye to help ye save yer homes and yer kin!' he roared. 'Might be that ye believe us and ye'll do something to survive. Or might be that ye'll hear the words o' the dog o' Targos and ye'll do nothin'. Either way, I've had enough o' ye! Do as ye will, and may yer gods show ye favor!'"
Also note that R. A. Salvatore has something against the word "said." In this scene, which is a council scene, characters growl, answer, sneer, roar, spit, command, tell, continue, add, hiss,[7] taunt, challenge, reply, echo, and explain. At no point does anyone ever say anything.
The dragon's official name isn't Icingdeath. That's just what it's called. The dragon's real name is Ingeloakastimizilian, which Salvatore apparently came up with by letting his cat loose on his keyboard.
p. 204 - Wulfgar protects himself from the bitter cold by killing a deer and melting its fat until it has the consistency of fresh paint, then smearing it on his body. I think Salvatore has not actually ever melted any sort of fat in his life - first, you don't melt it, you render it, and second, it goes from Lump o'Fat to Thin Very Very Hot Oil very quickly past a certain point. Also, he calls it 'blubber' two pages later, which is something ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, not a synonym for any kind of fat.
I'll mention again that the barbarian's deerskin mead hall is namedHeorot Hengorot.
Salvatore also has a habit of making up words. At one point, Drizzt is remembering something but it's hard because since he last learned whatever it was, his memory had "fuzzied." And later on, when Wulfgar defeats the leader of the barbarians in combat, he is "coronated." THAT IS NOT A WORD, SALVATORE. Use a dictionary! You are CROWNED at a CORONATION. And let's not get into the fact that "crowned" and "coronation" jsut don't apply to nomadic cultures.
On p. 284, as the dwarves are getting ready for the coming battle, Salvatore remembers that he hasn't mentioned Cattie-brie in a while and has her ask her dwarven father what she can do. He says she can stay in the tunnels and collapse them with a lever if the enemy attacks so that nobosy can occupy the dwarf halls. She points out, quite sensibly, that she'd then be trapped in collapsed tunnels all alone, and he asks if she wants to come up and fight beside them, saying she's fair enough with a sword and that he'll be right beside her. She decides not to, that she'd rather chance solitary burial.
That's all for now. Next time: the drow and Gary Stu!
---
[1] I actually have a slight preference for semi-picaresque-style novels which are strings of events happening with very little overarching plot other than that necessary to set up the world, such as Scalzi's Old Man's War. And RPG ti-in would seem to fit that quite well, but the problem is that too often you can vizualize the GM rolling the dice, looking up the results in a table, and announcing that the party has just run into a hook horror, instead of some sort of encounter that arises more naturally from the nature of the world. I think the difference is that you get the sense, in the novels I like, that the characters/beings encountered by the protagonists have an existence and purpose outside the encounter, while the bad ones feel like they were just spawned by the game engine a few milliseconds ago. Does this make sense?
[2] I like warhammers. I just do.
[3] Does anyone else feel that with a name like 'Drizzt' he should actually be some sort of large bee? Drizzt. Drizzzzzzzzzzzzzt.
[4] Because when you think of discreet spies, you naturally think giants.
[5] Because the last time that worked so well.
[6] It occurs to me that non-American/British readers may possibly not be aware that icing is a sweet topping for a cake. Sometimes called frosting, sometimes icing and frosting refer to different toppings. It all depends on region and dialect and industry terms.
[7] "'Or perhaps you had other motives,' Kemp hissed, again eyeing Agorwal." Please try to hiss that sentence. There's only one "s" in the entire thing!
I'll eventually get to Drizzt himself, but in the meantime, here's some more rambling on this book.
Okay. The Crystal Shard is a stand-alone book, but IIRC is the start of a series and introduces the main party members, er, characters. I can't fault that it's structured like an RPG and that you can often almost see the dice rolling because, after all, it's an RPG tie-in novel. These things are not necessarily bad in such a book. They may be bad if you're trying to expand your audience, perhaps, but if you're aiming for a core RPG audience which isn't turned off by them, I got no problem with it.[1]
The basic setup is that a demon has lost a powerful and evil magic item, a crystal shard with a sort of sentience. It's found by a no-talent loser of an apprentice wizard who's just killed his master and was double-crossed by the people who paid him to do so. (Apparently because writing a less evil character who becomes corrupt would provide more interest to the story?) The crystal tempts and corrupts the wizard even more, and raises a magic tower at soem vague point in the mountains.
(If you have any fondness for Tolkein whatsoever, you may want to put any drinks down, and perhaps find a nice padded surface upon which to bash your head.)
The tower is named Cryshal-Tirith.
The mage and the crystal draw in a bunch of various races - these lonely, snowy, bleak mountains apparently support an enormous amount of biomass - and enslave them, then manage to summon the demon that originally had the shard and convince it to work with them for a while. Other than the occasional scene change back to the tower every so often to show the mage sending out a random group of monsters for random monster encounters to increase the main characters' hit points and experience levels, to show the mage discreetly indulging in slave girls (it's a PG-rated book, after all), or, near the end of the book, setting the barbarians in motion, we can more-or-less forget about the mage and the demon until the climax of the book, when we have the big boss fight against the demon.
The primary part of the plot starts with a halfling, who despite being three feet tall, with furry feet, and liking good food and good times, is TOTALLY NOT A HOBBIT. He lives in the Ten-Towns area (introduced in my previous rant) after having stolen a gem from a Thieves' Guild guildmaster -
rachelmanija would die if I didn't mention the guildmaster is named Pasha Pook - that allows him to persuade people to his point of view.Despite showing up in the story off and on and occasionally persuading someone to do something, he really has no use in the story at all and is there mostly because either R. A. Salvatore or the game designers felt that no game party is complete without a
There's a collection of tundra barbarian tribes that are massing to raid the Te-Towns area (for descriptions of the tribes, read the comment thread between me and
smillaraaq here, which also features bonus ranting about predators and the envirnoment. I am not the daughter of a wildlife scientist for nothing.) The entire purpose of this is to make it reasonable that one of the local dwarves, Bruenor, would adopt a young barbarian teenage boy and make him work in his smithy as an indentured servant for five years in return for the attack. Which in turn explains why we have a barbarian tundra nomad named Wulfgar who wields a magical dwarven warhammer[2] and who travels with Bruenor and Bruenor's friends later on.As you may have guessed by now, this book is mostly the backstory for the adventuring party, telling how and why they came to be together and ended up heading off into the wild blue yonder to have further adventures.
Bruenor has an adopted human daughter named Cattie-brie, who I mentioned briefly in the previous rant. She gets to be actively useless in this book, which I'll get to in a bit. I am told that in other books she eventually develops a personality, but she is not besmirched by a single iota of one in this book.
And then, we come to the euphoniously-named Drizzt Do'Urden.[3] Drizzt is a drow, or dark elf. A dark elf is the opposite of a regular elf, which means that they're evil by nature, have ebony-black skin and white hair, live underground, and can't stand the touch of sunlight. (More on the racial politics in the next rant.) Drizzt is a special snowflake, being a renegade drow who has a conscience. He also has lavender eyes and a giant black panther magical spirit companion, I shit you not. But he gets his own rant. We're expected to just accept the existence of this renegade drow in this book, because he gets his own trilogy later.
So. The party is more-or-less formed: Bruenor and Drizzt are longtime friends, Drizzt lurking around the edges of the towns because the nasty single-minded humans don't trust him even when he brings them news that the barbarians are about to raid and allows them time to rpepare and fight back, Bruenor doing whatever dwarves do in the mountains as Wulfgar and Cattie-brie grow up, and Regis hanging out fishing and doing scrimshaw on trout bones. Nothing happens outside of random encoutners for a while. Well, I think that's so because I sure as hell can't actually remember anything happening.
Eventually, Wulfgar comes to the end of his period of indenture, gains his magic hammer, trains to fight with Drizzt, and plot starts happening - the evil mage and evil crystal shard mentioned earlier send a bunch of giants to spy on the Ten-Towns area[4], and enthrall the current leader of the barbarians to plan another raid on the Ten-Towns[5]. Wulfgar realizes he's got to depose the barbarian leader to stp the raid, so sets off to slay a dragon. Salvatore remembers that oh yeah, he's got a female character who hasn't had a line in a hundred pages and Cattie-brie is all understanding about Wulfgar's need for whatever-it-is at Drizzt, who then deduces that Wulfgar is going to go kill a dragon and follows him.
Wulfgar, because he can't take over the barbarian tribes' leadership unless he's done a great deed, heads off to the (mentioned for the first time here, all of a sudden) to the lair of the great, evil, mad, bad, dangerous white ice dragon Icingdeath. Yes, Icingdeath.[6] He makes his way over dangerous territory to the caverns of the dragon, and spectacularly fails to kill it until Drizzt shows up, drops a magical sphere of darkness over the dragon's head, and shoots it in the eye with an arrow, whereupon Wulfgar can land the killing blow. Wulfgar is not angry with this.
Wulfgar takes over the barbarian tribes, the armies of the evil mage descend upon the Ten-Towns, the barbarians show up and fight for the side of the townsmen, surprising the mage, Drizzt gets the boss fight with the demon, and Cattie-brie does nothing useful. End of plot, none of the main characters have any sort of loss of anything important to them, and at the end of the book they head off for further adventuring.
I started taking notes around page 157. I'll just put them here.
p. 157 - Dwarves, Wulfgar, and Drizzt fight against the giants (also known as 'verbeeg' Very Big. Ha ha ha.). The dwarves field ballistae, which later on bust trhough reinforced wooden doors, but at this point are described as merely scattering the giants, not killing them. BALLISTAE. Yeah, right.
p. 170 When a drow is ebon-skinned, as he is described, how can you tell if he's bruised?
(page number not mentioned) Drizzt, our Gary Stu, like treasure. But not for the wealth, oh no, but only for the pleasure of uncovering it for the first time.
p. 189 Awful dialect. "'We have come before ye to help ye save yer homes and yer kin!' he roared. 'Might be that ye believe us and ye'll do something to survive. Or might be that ye'll hear the words o' the dog o' Targos and ye'll do nothin'. Either way, I've had enough o' ye! Do as ye will, and may yer gods show ye favor!'"
Also note that R. A. Salvatore has something against the word "said." In this scene, which is a council scene, characters growl, answer, sneer, roar, spit, command, tell, continue, add, hiss,[7] taunt, challenge, reply, echo, and explain. At no point does anyone ever say anything.
The dragon's official name isn't Icingdeath. That's just what it's called. The dragon's real name is Ingeloakastimizilian, which Salvatore apparently came up with by letting his cat loose on his keyboard.
p. 204 - Wulfgar protects himself from the bitter cold by killing a deer and melting its fat until it has the consistency of fresh paint, then smearing it on his body. I think Salvatore has not actually ever melted any sort of fat in his life - first, you don't melt it, you render it, and second, it goes from Lump o'Fat to Thin Very Very Hot Oil very quickly past a certain point. Also, he calls it 'blubber' two pages later, which is something ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, not a synonym for any kind of fat.
I'll mention again that the barbarian's deerskin mead hall is named
Salvatore also has a habit of making up words. At one point, Drizzt is remembering something but it's hard because since he last learned whatever it was, his memory had "fuzzied." And later on, when Wulfgar defeats the leader of the barbarians in combat, he is "coronated." THAT IS NOT A WORD, SALVATORE. Use a dictionary! You are CROWNED at a CORONATION. And let's not get into the fact that "crowned" and "coronation" jsut don't apply to nomadic cultures.
On p. 284, as the dwarves are getting ready for the coming battle, Salvatore remembers that he hasn't mentioned Cattie-brie in a while and has her ask her dwarven father what she can do. He says she can stay in the tunnels and collapse them with a lever if the enemy attacks so that nobosy can occupy the dwarf halls. She points out, quite sensibly, that she'd then be trapped in collapsed tunnels all alone, and he asks if she wants to come up and fight beside them, saying she's fair enough with a sword and that he'll be right beside her. She decides not to, that she'd rather chance solitary burial.
"Besides," she added with a smile, "it was stupid of me to worry. I know that you will come back to me, Bruenor. Never have you, nor any of your clan, failed me!" She kissed the dwarf on the forehead and skipped away.So. Our Cattie-brie has ONE JOB TO DO, to collapse the tunnels if the enemy attacks so that nobody will occupy the homes of the dwarves. And on page 322, when she meets back up with Wulfgar after the battle...
Bruenor smiled after her. "Suren yer a brave giel, my Cattie-brie," he muttered.
[Wulfgar asked] "You have seen Bruenor?"So. ONE JOB and she FAILS TO DO THAT. Somebody else DOES IT FOR HER. Way to go, Salvatore. Way to go.
"In the tunnels," Cattie-brie explained. "Some orcs found their way in--perhaps I should ahve collapsed the tunnel. Yet there weren't many, and I could hear that the dwarves were doing well on the field above.
"Bruenor came down then, but there were more orcs at his back. A support beam collapsed; I think Bruenor cut it out, and there was too much dust and confusion."
That's all for now. Next time: the drow and Gary Stu!
---
[1] I actually have a slight preference for semi-picaresque-style novels which are strings of events happening with very little overarching plot other than that necessary to set up the world, such as Scalzi's Old Man's War. And RPG ti-in would seem to fit that quite well, but the problem is that too often you can vizualize the GM rolling the dice, looking up the results in a table, and announcing that the party has just run into a hook horror, instead of some sort of encounter that arises more naturally from the nature of the world. I think the difference is that you get the sense, in the novels I like, that the characters/beings encountered by the protagonists have an existence and purpose outside the encounter, while the bad ones feel like they were just spawned by the game engine a few milliseconds ago. Does this make sense?
[2] I like warhammers. I just do.
[3] Does anyone else feel that with a name like 'Drizzt' he should actually be some sort of large bee? Drizzt. Drizzzzzzzzzzzzzt.
[4] Because when you think of discreet spies, you naturally think giants.
[5] Because the last time that worked so well.
[6] It occurs to me that non-American/British readers may possibly not be aware that icing is a sweet topping for a cake. Sometimes called frosting, sometimes icing and frosting refer to different toppings. It all depends on region and dialect and industry terms.
[7] "'Or perhaps you had other motives,' Kemp hissed, again eyeing Agorwal." Please try to hiss that sentence. There's only one "s" in the entire thing!
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"Dang it! I have to give this thing a cool name. What can I name it?!?!" *bashes head against keyboard in frustration* *looks at screen* "Oh, that works.
I managed to forget all about how Cattie-Brie has the chance to do something...and passes on it. Then gets a task...and decides it doesn't need doing.
I wonder, though: What's worse? Being Cattie-Brie with no personality and nothing to do, or being a very Special Snowflake like Drizz't?
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Cattie-brie deciding to chance being trapped in the tunnels, to die a slow death of thirst and starvation if everyone else dies, annoyed the hell out of me, but it annoyed me even more that she apparently froze and didn't do even that!
ETA; I dunno. Drizzt at least gets to get out and about a bit.
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Based on the excerpt(I barely remember the book) she didn't even feeze, she just shrugged it off until
GimliBruenor came along and made the decision. I guess if you're female, you can't make any decisions...no subject
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was that castle there a moment ago?
Absolutely. In parageography* the term for the latter is Generated Landscapeas contrasted with Inherent Landscape and a reasonable test is to ask "Would X be there if I was not observing this?" Works for castles, monsters, bowers of bliss, towns, computer virus, etc...
Even my RPG obsessed 11 year old is having a hard time finishing a Forgotten Realms book he was lent. When I mentioned your earlier rant his only comment was, "It's ALL pretty dumb, Mom."
*The study of imaginary places. Yep, I have college credit for a classics class about fictional worlds.
Re: was that castle there a moment ago?
Re: was that castle there a moment ago?
At least that's the way I remember it!
Re: was that castle there a moment ago?
Re: was that castle there a moment ago?
Re: was that castle there a moment ago?
Re: was that castle there a moment ago?
Re: was that castle there a moment ago?
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Also, no mention of RAS's favoritest word ever, my stoic friend? I mean, I feel that it needs to be pointed out as you stoically type at your keyboard and wipe the stoic sweat from your stoic brow. Because that's stoic.
Also, check out the Val Semieks (sp) graphic novel of The Crystal Shard if you get a chance. Drizzt has a tumor chin and Regis, erm, he looks like Vladimir Harkonen.
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(I think there's something to be talked about in all the various interpretations artists have had of "ebon-dark skin." And the covers of the editions of the Drizzt origin trilogy I have appear to feature Drizzt's grey-skinned great-great grandfather, instead of the young drow we all know and love.)
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Lol, the whole damn series has such problems with race and gender. I have always loved that Drizzt is such a good guy, he's so good he's positively genocidal. But, Salvatore seems to be trying (whether he is successful or not is definitely up in the air, with me leaning towards not) to make up for that in his newer books. It is implied, *gasp*, that orcs might be people, too.
Look out for the stoic, it's there, I swear!
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Yes. This is the basic problem with the whole concept of wandering monster tables, which Salvatore is apparently mimicking the use of. There's nothing necessarily wrong with players in an RPG having some random encounters - heck, I encounter people randomly - but they should be random within a sensible framework, or the GM should work to make them seem organic (there could be a reason the hook horror is there).
It would be interesting (for certain values of "interesting") to tease apart the crap in this book that was dictated by TSR's background (e.g., drow) and the crap that Salvatore brought to it (e.g., the prose quality). I don't know where I'd put this - wandering monsters are certainly an AD&D game mechanic, but there was (probably) nothing that said that Salvatore had to make the book seem just like a by-the-book AD&D campaign.
But presumably not Warhammer, which is like this but with bonus crazed adolescent power fantasies and bizarrely-spelled words.
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And, yeah, I've never played Warhammer. :D I just have always liked warhammers, for no reason I can name. XD Much how I like siege engines.
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But every time I read bee boy's name, I always think of that one artist. D'terlizzi? I can never spell that right. But that's who I think of whenever anyone writes drizzt.
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Also, I shall defer to Stephen Fry. J.K. Rowling mentioned in an audio interview I listened to at some point that she came to one of the sessions when Fry was recording Harry Potter, and he pulled her aside and pointed out that from the actor's point of view, he couldn't hiss any sentence that had no S's in it, and after that she always made sure to write any sentence a character hissed with lots of S's. :)
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"You roll a 76... You have just left the supermarket when you spot a giraffe walking down the street heading towards you. No one else seems to have noticed it yet. What do you do?"
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I have heard stories by authors that lead me to believe that this might be the pernicious work of an editor. Evidently, some editors feel that repeating dialog verbs like "said" too many times in a row is bad, and will wield their mighty red pens in an effort to "diversify" the vocabulary, occasionally to silly results. Did 'ejaculated' ever show up?
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"Ejaculated" hasn't shown up. But I have a non-RPG story about that word - a few years ago when I was volunteering in the fossil lab at the Dallas Museum of Natural History, cleaning dinosaur bones with a miniature air hammer, I spent the time listening to Georgette Heyer audiobooks. Heyer, in case you didn't know, pretty much invented the Regency romance genre back in the 1930s*.
So, just as a crowd of schoolkids comes by to stare in the lab window at me, the narrator reaches the sentence "Unh!" he ejaculated, as he threw himself back into the chair," and gives just the right inflection to "Unh!" and I just about lose it. I did my best to contain myself, because none of the onlookers would have known why I was cracking up. :)
* They're more ... well, I don't want to use the word "literary", but modern Regencies' prose feels thin and weak compared to hers.
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He gets into some good Drizzt bashing after a bit. Particularly here (http://www.goblinscomic.com/d/20050710.html), and the next.
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Are you going to read the origin trilogy, too? I'd love to see snark on the Evil Spider Matriarchy.
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Ha. I totally named characters in a fantasy thing I was writing when I was twelve that way.
What makes mine even better is that the fantasy world was in some sort of parallel universe so all of the characters had perfectly normal names before the keyboard banging. So they had names like "Samohasgsogeh" and "Jenniferaityogenkla". The copy-paste function on the computer was my friend when I was (thankfully just the first chapter) writing it -- god knows I'd never would have been able to spell their names consistently without it. It was for a school assignment and we had our classmates read and give feedback ...everyone loved it. Clearly books that have characters involving keyboard banging are just marketable to seventh graders.