Brimstone Angels
In high school, I tended to spend allowance money on novels and comic books. A lot of the former were published TSR D&D books, particularly of the Forgotten Realms. The avatar trilogy, Azure Bonds - things like that. T'was imagination fuel for an ongoing RPG campaign too. Since then, I really haven't picked up many such licensed books, but based on an online review I decided to pick one up.
Brimstone Angels takes me back. It also shows me how much things have changed in the setting over the years. And boy, Neverwinter is a mess in 4E Forgotten Realms.
First off, the technical editing, while not atrocious, is some of the worst I've seen in the last few years. There are little things like misplaced quotation marks or missing spaces between sentences. It's a little mind-boggling to me really, as most of these are things that automated systems should probably pick up. I also find the layout/cut of the pages to be distracting, with the text running too close to the bound middle given how much space there is on the outside.
But I did enjoy the story of tiefling twins (one becoming a warlock) adopted by a clanless dragonborn crossing paths with devils and priests. There's actually a lot of time spent on the machinations of the devils involved, which I found interesting, though they were just a touch too "human" in nature compared to what I imagine and the exactly why a half-devil would care about the "status" of having a set of warlocks is never made clear. The overall plot is more a result of what happens when several different groups and goals are thrown together, but it plays out well to me because of the characters. And the characters are done pretty well in general. The focus is on Farideh, but the others are depicted pretty well through the book.
And wow. I don't know the timeline of Neverwinter, but that city is a mess in this book. Rebuilding from devastation. Occupied by a bizarre number of tieflings openly and at least two major devil cults secretly (somehow secretly, given the number of murders that start taking place). The big slug aboleths are now a major player of sorts, with the Abolethic Sovereignty representing some sort of "Old Ones" like intelligence alien to even devils. I remember reading a little about the spellplague at one point, and it's definitely present here, though I may have to study a little more as it seemed less than explained in the book. Azuth was killed (divine turnout in the Realms is pretty brutal) and his power taken by lord of the devils, ending the Blood War. And now you can have adventurers fighting devils in the street without anyone apparently taking notice. That's pretty bad. ;)
It sort of makes me want to play D&D again...
Brimstone Angels takes me back. It also shows me how much things have changed in the setting over the years. And boy, Neverwinter is a mess in 4E Forgotten Realms.
First off, the technical editing, while not atrocious, is some of the worst I've seen in the last few years. There are little things like misplaced quotation marks or missing spaces between sentences. It's a little mind-boggling to me really, as most of these are things that automated systems should probably pick up. I also find the layout/cut of the pages to be distracting, with the text running too close to the bound middle given how much space there is on the outside.
But I did enjoy the story of tiefling twins (one becoming a warlock) adopted by a clanless dragonborn crossing paths with devils and priests. There's actually a lot of time spent on the machinations of the devils involved, which I found interesting, though they were just a touch too "human" in nature compared to what I imagine and the exactly why a half-devil would care about the "status" of having a set of warlocks is never made clear. The overall plot is more a result of what happens when several different groups and goals are thrown together, but it plays out well to me because of the characters. And the characters are done pretty well in general. The focus is on Farideh, but the others are depicted pretty well through the book.
And wow. I don't know the timeline of Neverwinter, but that city is a mess in this book. Rebuilding from devastation. Occupied by a bizarre number of tieflings openly and at least two major devil cults secretly (somehow secretly, given the number of murders that start taking place). The big slug aboleths are now a major player of sorts, with the Abolethic Sovereignty representing some sort of "Old Ones" like intelligence alien to even devils. I remember reading a little about the spellplague at one point, and it's definitely present here, though I may have to study a little more as it seemed less than explained in the book. Azuth was killed (divine turnout in the Realms is pretty brutal) and his power taken by lord of the devils, ending the Blood War. And now you can have adventurers fighting devils in the street without anyone apparently taking notice. That's pretty bad. ;)
It sort of makes me want to play D&D again...
Your stats are 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 10 Arrange as you like Select class and race Game begins tonight.
ReplyDeleteArgh! What edition? ;) Y'know, I can't help but think of the devil-warlock relationship as depicted in the book as sort like trainer-pokemon. Especially with the unnamed "benefit" of having a full set. Heh.
ReplyDelete