James Alan Gardner's Fire and Dust

[emsariel]

I've read this story three or four times in the decade-and-a-half since it came out. I may have read it once in each apartment that I've lived in since college. I just finished another reading, and I feel like posting about it.

The first way that I've described it to folks is "the best fanfiction novella about a D&D setting that I've ever read." Obviously, described that way, it's the only such that I've read, but that's the quickest way to understanding it ... and for my friends who are hypersensitive or averse to recommendations, a good quick way to let them flip the bozo bit for the remainder of the conversation.

• fanfiction: James Alan Gardner wrote the book for the love of the setting, TSR wouldn't buy it, so he posted it to the internet.
• best: the novella is incredibly well written for what it is trying to be - an adventure story written in the Planescape D&D setting.  The main characters are quite complex, the secondary characters have their own lives and with an exception or two don't exist just for the MCs' needs, and even the minor one-scene characters have a ton of personality.  There are rich personal story arcs, the characters are enjoyable to live with, and there are scenes that might make you think or reflect.
• about a D&D setting:  two things amaze me about the story with regard to its placement in a D&D setting.  First, it's a strange fanfiction, to me, when there's no narrative canon to draw on.  A D&D setting is meant to allow game groups to write their own stories.  Those stories are invariably boring to others because they're written/composed/performed by a group in real-time and don't care about the conventions that we enjoy in lengthy fiction.  Yet the characters in Fire and Dust act like an adventuring party, do things required by the setting (which was shaped for adventuring parties) and it's still great to read.  It's focused around a single main character, but never gave me the feeling that I usually get hearing someone talk about their D&D character - the awkward inability to get any of the references, or causes, or implications of the story.  Gardner introduces everyone well, but lets them be a part of the larger setting.
• Okay, I'll break that second point out.  The story is rich with game references, and the actions of the group are informed, but not restricted to, D&D rules.  This is remarkably hard to do.  Order of the Stick is another excellent example, 1/3 of the way along the spectrum from "D&D session transcript" to "story in a setting".  I'd put Fire and Dust at the 2/3 mark on that spectrum.  Few things in the story are impossible within a D&D adventure, and I can picture almost everything as it might have been rendered in a game session.  But there are fuzzy points, and the story never calls them out sharply, as OotS often does for humor.  Instead, the story is full of things that a knowledgeable player will nod or laugh at, but still reads for someone who's unfamiliar with the setting or even the game.

As a sidenote, the potential to foster stories like this is one of the things that I like about early Dungeons & Dragons and about which I have become increasingly skeptical of recent editions.  In the Gamist-Simulationist-Narrativist framework, I think 3rd Edition D&D made a big move toward gamism from simulationism.  It streamlined the game, but it also made the game more and more specific in the stories the mechanics enable.  I think that you could render Fire and Dust in 3rd Edition, but 3E holds your hand enough that you might not be able to step outside of it as easily to do that cool thing.  4th Edition is even more so - with the system of powers, skill trees, and consistently-balanced party skills with regard to combat, I think it functions very well as a game, but is not as friendly to a simulation mindset whether that simulation is of real-world physics and causality or personal/character integrity.  In 3rd and then 4th, you're increasingly playing a D&D game, telling a D&D story, rather than trying to use a system to render the story that you're telling.