Project Zebra: Hold a chicken in the air, stick a deckchair up your nose ►

◄ Living with the Office 2016 interface

Interestingly this was supposedly submitted when the Harpers series was still being published.

http://fiction.charlesmoffat.com/Rise-of-the-Blade.html

Polite as ever, in http://forum.candlekeep.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=16831&whichpage=1 Elaine doesn't go into the reasons it would never have been published but I read it and it's the usual sort of reservations publishers would have;

- Mary sues (telepathy and precognition, best-there-is fighters and mages, human fighter winning the respect of and leading elves, good drow)
- Setting mainstay characters love the mary sue(s) and compare them to others
- Setting mainstay characters aren't in-character
- Unusual levels of violence, references to drunkenness
- Overpowered magical items, godhood
- Bizarre lapses of judgment in contingencies and traps
- Intended to be a trilogy
- Narrative asides
- Some real-world speech patterns written without adjustment for prose
- Direct references to game mechanics such as multi-classing, and rules-lawyering magical items

Despite or perhaps partly because, I did quite enjoy the author's audacity. It's grounded in FR without not being its own thing and everything I've just listed crops up in official novels to some extent. Plus the guy's two years older than me and it was written in 1998 (presumably sketched out even before that) so as a bit of teenage escapism it can be appreciated for what it is, and perhaps scratch the itch of Hasbro / Wizards of the Coast having all but cut D&D novels out of their product ranges.

Although this is apparently fiction happening in September if you're a fan of R.A. Salvatore:

http://comicbook.com/gaming/2018/02/12/dungeons-and-dragons-drizzt-novels-new/

I've read one or two of the Drizzt novels over the years, and it sounds standalone enough, so I might partake and it's got a guaranteed audience.

Skimming https://www.fanfiction.net/book/Forgotten-Realms/ I also found https://www.fanfiction.net/s/2683533/1/Adventures-of-the-Blade-and-the-Ballad which reads very authentically.

And then there's this https://nerdist.com/dugeons-and-dragons-band-gygax-lascivious-underdark/ and https://nerdist.com/dungeons-and-dragons-gentleman-class-old-spice/

💬 Comments are off, but you can use the mail form to contact or see the about page for social media links.

BLOG  MORE  ABOUT  MAIL