A D&D Book I Love
I just read The Seal of Karga Kul by Alex Irvine. I've enjoyed other D&D novels, but there hasn't been another D&D novel that I immediately bought as a gift for a friend to explain what D&D is all about. What has it got? A sense of adventure, a sense of humor, and a sense of wonder.
The book's fast-moving combat scenes are full of fantastic elements and exploits while remaining coherent. Vague descriptions or unlikely outcomes forced by plot demands are the two main problems for this type of action writing. Irvine avoids both problems.
The dialogue is crisp. Sarcastic banter within Irvine's party of adventurers makes sense in the multicultural world of D&D and simultaneously captures the barbed-but-fond banter I've experienced at most game tables. The group dynamic of the book's adventuring party never feels forced.
The 4e world is a world of scattered points of light spread across a world scarred by the wars of ancient empires. The scars created by the legendary empires in Irvine's book are elements of fantastic geography that determine the adventurer's fates, creating scenes any DM or movie director would have been happy to have envisioned.
Maybe The Seal of Karga Kul will accomplish something similar to what Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn did for me and the world of Warhammer 40K. I didn't care about the 40K world, but Eisenhorn was such a good story that I started giving a damn. I can't be sure that Irvine's book has that type of introductory power, since my experience of the book obviously pivots on happy recognition of smoothly refined elements of the 4e background story. But I suspect the story will work for the D&D-interested soul I'm giving it to. And I'll bet the book will make a lot of other readers happy.
The book's fast-moving combat scenes are full of fantastic elements and exploits while remaining coherent. Vague descriptions or unlikely outcomes forced by plot demands are the two main problems for this type of action writing. Irvine avoids both problems.
The dialogue is crisp. Sarcastic banter within Irvine's party of adventurers makes sense in the multicultural world of D&D and simultaneously captures the barbed-but-fond banter I've experienced at most game tables. The group dynamic of the book's adventuring party never feels forced.
The 4e world is a world of scattered points of light spread across a world scarred by the wars of ancient empires. The scars created by the legendary empires in Irvine's book are elements of fantastic geography that determine the adventurer's fates, creating scenes any DM or movie director would have been happy to have envisioned.
Maybe The Seal of Karga Kul will accomplish something similar to what Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn did for me and the world of Warhammer 40K. I didn't care about the 40K world, but Eisenhorn was such a good story that I started giving a damn. I can't be sure that Irvine's book has that type of introductory power, since my experience of the book obviously pivots on happy recognition of smoothly refined elements of the 4e background story. But I suspect the story will work for the D&D-interested soul I'm giving it to. And I'll bet the book will make a lot of other readers happy.