The Legacy (1992)

Dark elves, goblins, ettins, and more! Get ready to cast Magic Missile against the darkness, it's time for some Dungeons & Dragons themed fiction with your second or maybe third-favorite white haired dual wielding warrior: Drizzt.

Ready to be chronologically confused? The Legacy is technically the seventh novel by R.A. Salvatore featuring the exploits of the dark elf Drizzt Do'Urden, although it is the beginning of a new series of four novels known as the Legacy of the Drow. This series follows after the events of the Icewind Dale Trilogy chronologically. However, Salvatore wrote three novels known as the Dark Elf Trilogy after the Icewind Dale Trilogy was published that serve as a prequel series. Are you keeping up with this? I know I'm not. Can these fantasy authors just keep their shit together for a change? Regardless, seeing as how this is the start of a new series featuring the same cast of characters, one could probably start with The Legacy if they really wanted to, because the events of previous novels are routinely recapped by the author when necessary.

The drow elf edgelord Drizzt is on his way to Mithral Hall for a reunion with the dwarven king Bruenor Battlehammer and to attend the wedding of two former companions - the barbarian Wulfgar and plucky archer lady Catti-brie. Dubiously tagging along is the halfling thief Regis, meaning the whole gang from the previous adventures are back together again. But this reunion may be short-lived, for Drizzt's deranged sister Vierna is hellbent on capturing her wayward brother and sacrificing him to the spider goddess Lolth. Forming an alliance with the mercenary leader Jarlaxle and the assassin Artemis Entreri, Vierna leads her dark band through the subterranean tunnels underneath Mithral Hall. A clash between Clan Battlehammer and the drow elves marching upon dwarven lands now seems inevitable. Perhaps the wedding won't be happening after all...

I'd tried a Drizzt novel many years ago in my adolescent years and bounced off it extremely early on because it never seemed to grab me, but I still wanted to know what all the fuss was about with this character all these years later, especially since I've read and enjoyed a number of other books set within the Forgotten Realms series. Happenstance brought me to The Legacy, but to be honest I found it to be a bit of a chore to get through. I'd always heard that one of R.A. Salvatore's fortes was writing action scenes, but I found the non-stop minutiae of every battle to be absolute torture to sift through. The paperback edition I was reading was roughly 330 pages and I can almost guarantee if one were to strip this book of all of the myriad swordfights and army clashes you'd only be left with about a hundred pages of text. There's not a whole lot of meat to the plot here other than 'evil sister leads a dark band through some tunnels to get at her wayward brother'.

That's not to say The Legacy is a total waste, because it does have its moments. The character of Drizzt himself wasn't nearly as insufferable as I was led to believe he was (although you can clearly see the character has more than a little Elric influence about him). For me, the novel was carried by Drizzt's clashes with the assassin Entreri, who is utterly obsessed with besting Drizzt. The interplay between the band of villains was fun too. It's all too obvious the main players can't stand working with one another in their bid to capture Drizzt and it seems only a matter of time before one of them tries to defect and turn on the others.

What I didn't care for outside of the endless battle scenes were most of Drizzt's companions, in particular the girlboss Cattie-brie. She's written to be smarter and wiser than all of the males around her who have far more experience in war and she's apparently always right. So basically she's Rey in Disney Star Wars before that was even a thing. It's clear that the author has a thing for this character and, perhaps accidentally writing himself into a corner in previous outings by pairing her with the barbarian Wulfgar, wanted nothing more than to get the muscleheaded lunk out of the way so he could push Cattie and her annoying Irish accent towards becoming Drizzt's new waifu. Thus, poor Wulfgar literally gets a tunnel dropped on him without much fanfare in order to set the stage for a new romance.

As an aside, I think Salvatore also has a thing for killing off the brute characters by crushing them to death. I recall reading the first novel in the New Jedi Order series and facepalming as Chewbacca was killed off by having a freaking moon dropped on him. What's up with this recurring theme, Bob?

Anyway, I'm not sure if I'm going to delve into the next book in this series any time soon. Drizzt himself and his extraplanar panther friend are cool, but everything else around them in this novel was like a wight in D&D catching me with their energy drain. Not recommended.

Greyhawk Adventures: Saga of Old City (1985)

The rapscallion known as Gord levels up his abilities as a thief during a series of quite random adventures across the lands of Oerth. Treasure. Betrayal. Mystery. Dexterity checks. Grab a can of Dr. Thunder and your dice bag, it's time to nerd out with another D&D novel, baby!

Despite being a massive geek for Dungeons & Dragons since around the age of seven and reading and then re-reading the original Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master Guide innumerable times, I'd never actually read a novel penned by Gary Gygax himself. I sought to rectify that by reaching for Saga of Old City, the first in a series of books featuring Gygax's own creation... Gord. Yes, Gord. Doesn't exactly have the same ring as a 'Conan' or 'Gray Mouser', but Gord is clearly Gygax's own attempt at creating an enduring fantasy pulp protagonist. Unfortunately, I don't think the esteemed godfather of D&D is able to stick the landing - at least not in this first offering.

The problems are evident right from the outset. The novel doesn't exactly open with anything grandiose or epic to get readers in the mood for dashing adventures. Instead, we're treated to our 'hero' being bullied and literally pissing himself in front of the other juveniles picking on him. Of course, Gord escapes and lives to fight another day, but doesn't exactly grow to be that much bigger in the intervening years that quickly pass by. I do find it slightly hilarious that instead of a muscle-bound hunk or a Merlin-esque wizard, Gygax went with a rascally manlet as his creation that would somehow make a stamp on the sword and sorcery genre.

Gord is framed as an underdog character we're meant to root for, but he's not exactly a Robin Hood type thief with a just cause that readers could easily rally behind, nor does he possess the unlimited vaults of charisma necessary to be a heel you can cheer for. Instead, Gord is a selfish jerk with a prevailing sense of avarice who participates in murders at various points in this novel and acts like a complete clown around women. Such was my disdain for Gord, I found myself actively rooting for his adversaries to kick his ass all over the pages of this book.

The other serious problem Saga of Old City suffers from is its structure. There is essentially no standard plot to this story other than 'Gord goes on a series of adventures'. This is written as a novel with standard chapter breaks, but it's really a collection of short stories cobbled together under the guise of a full-length novel. I don't have a problem with short stories, but the way Gygax has handled this is almost like a D&D campaign. You can clearly see where one adventure ends and another one abruptly begins, whisking Gord off in a completely different direction and ignoring any character development that may have occurred beforehand. A reader already attuned to tabletop role-playing games can also spot where Gord appears to 'level up', as his abilities and talents become more pronounced.

What does work here is Gygax's love for language and the flourishes of purple prose he employs from time to time, which fits in rather nicely for a pulp tale. Any author who can plausibly work the word 'lugubrious' into a sentence and still have it flow is a-okay in my book.

Still, I found Saga of Old City an absolute chore to finish, and I'm not exactly eager to take another trip with Gord on his adventures any time soon...

Dragons of Autumn Twilight (1984)

The Companions - who are in no way to be confused with the Fellowship - embark upon an epic quest to retrieve magical holy MacGuffins in order to set about restoring the True Gods to the world of Krynn. They then embark on an even more epic quest to Pax Tharkas, a fortress that should be the name of a power metal band. At Pax Tharkas, the Companions will engage in a deadly face-off with one of the architects of Krynn's darkest days, the bad hombre Dragon Highlord known as Verminaard. Roll for initiative!

So it's been quite a few years since I've read the first Dragonlance tome, Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. Truth be told, I don't recall being too high on this book. When it comes to all of the various Dungeons & Dragons settings (from the classic era when the game was still good, mind you), I don't think I ever quite 'got' the Dragonlance setting. I was definitely more drawn to the gothic horror of Ravenloft, the weirdness of Planescape, the post-apocalyptic stylings of Dark Sun, or even the regal pedigree of Greyhawk. What exactly defined Dragonlance? What was its gimmick besides magic lances that kill evil dragons and the vague Mormon overtones? These were the kind of things my younger self wrestled with and what presumably helped keep me away from the series.

I recently had a hankering to give the book another try though and, while I still don't think Autumn Twilight is anything remarkable in the fantasy genre, I at least enjoyed it slightly more than my initial reading all those years ago. I'm told the series does develop into something more interesting and better written as it goes on, but I believe this initial foray into the Dragonlance setting has its share of teething problems, although there is a certain charm to the proceedings too.

It's no secret this novel was based upon real-life D&D sessions ran by Weiss and Hickman and there are plenty of times during Autumn Twilight where, if you have a decent amount of role-playing game experience, you can tell it's a D&D session being transcribed to the page. Sometimes a character you think you have a handle on will make a boneheaded decision or experience some exceedingly bad luck during an intense battle, which screams 'the player of this character fucked up and rolled poorly'. As silly and annoying as this can be at times, it also contains some of that charm I alluded to, because what D&D nerd hasn't been there to either cause or witness a truly epic botched roll of the dice?

Where the book really shined for me this time around was in the character of Tanis. Sure, most fans of this series love emo-boy magician Raistlin, but Tanis is the Captain Kirk of the bunch, and maybe it was something I couldn't appreciate as much when I was younger, but now I can empathize with Tanis on just how much babysitting and putting up with bullshit he has to go through as the de-facto leader of the Companions and the constant peacemaker between the petty squabbles that seem to constantly flare up. He also has a little Chuck Norris style beard action going on, has a human babe and an elf side chick, and later on in the novel gets a cool magic sword. If you're a man of taste like me then Tanis has to be your guy.

What hurts Dragons of Autumn Twilight is both its sometimes flat prose and how beholden it appears to be to Lord of the Rings. It's not a note-for-note rip-off, but there are enough similarities - from the party composition to the general plot overview of 'take mythical magic item into dark land to do X' - that it makes everything a little stale and pedestrian. You might be wowed if this is one of your first fantasy novels, but if you've been around the block with the genre, nothing here is going to floor you.

I can't in good conscience give this a high rating, but it's 'kinda recommended' by me, particularly if you want to get into Dragonlance and see where everything began.