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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Exactly this. Chronicles of Narnia being a great example. Not fantasy, but the Sharpe books are nuts when it comes to this. The fifth in production order is the 14th in chronological order. First book is eight in chronological order, noice.
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Aug 26, 2020 18:06
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Sniped like 95th snipes a random Spanish collaborator in the eye
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Aug 26, 2020 18:07
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Like if you've already read something and you want to read it chronologically as a gimmick that's fine, but otherwise you should stick to gods own order: by publication.
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Aug 26, 2020 18:54
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if we're broadening the purview of this thread to include good fantasy books, i'd like to call back toDear Watson posted:Lloyd Alexander the chronicles of prydain were more influenced by welsh mythology than by tolkein, and that made them stand out from the books full of rehashed d&d tropes that filled the bookstores back in the day. also, like ursula leguin, he was actually a good writer so he didn't have to resort to pooping dragons and sexy ogres to sell books.
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Aug 26, 2020 18:56
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Prydain was a great early read even if they did gently caress up the ending really bad
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Aug 26, 2020 18:58
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GBS threads like this are usually more chill in nature and freeform when it comes to content of discussion so I don't see any problem talking about books you love. Sub-forum threads are either too specific/heavily enforced in terms of what can be talked and/or usually infested by crusty goons that might not be the most "chill". This is a thread about bonding over how dumb the name LAURANLANTASAHA is or how much we enjoyed SJW FEMINIST PROPAGANDA (  ) that is Earthsea, a book about a guy sitting in a cave through a whole book. tl;dr Posting in a high quality "trap sprung" thread when the world around us burns to the ground.
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Aug 26, 2020 19:24
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ChubbyChecker posted:yes, it was that series. grimoire, did it have the name thing or did i misremember? Just read your original post. Yeah, it did and was a plot point late in the first trilogy On the subject of brevity, it's one of the things I like about Cook's prose. The novels are written as a logbook for a merc company working for the bad guys - the terse tone matches this Grimoire fucked around with this message at 19:44 on Aug 26, 2020 |
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Aug 26, 2020 19:41
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The earlier knock about Dragonlance being a bad D&D campaign ignores that all the early settings for D&D came from local campaigns. Greyhawk came from Gygax's early campaign, Forgotten Realms came from Ed Greenwood's campaign (though he used it to write stories as a kid before D&D took over when he was a teen), and Mystara/"The Known World" came from Schick and Moldvay's campaign. Dragonlance is bad because it falls into the same problem people have adapting Tolkien's world into a roleplaying setting: The main story is already told. No one is going to eclipse the heroes that are already there. It is not basing it on someone's campaign that makes it bad. It was just a not very good campaign to base a world on.
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Aug 26, 2020 20:13
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that's why I like to run games where the PCs almost always end up obscure an unknown by the end despite whatever worldshaking thing they did
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Aug 26, 2020 20:16
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Prof. Crocodile posted:if we're broadening the purview of this thread to include good fantasy books, i'd like to call back to I read these books! Well the first one. It was fuckign awesome! e: I was so disappointed with the Disney movie Black Cauldron.
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Aug 26, 2020 20:21
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Xenocides posted:The earlier knock about Dragonlance being a bad D&D campaign ignores that all the early settings for D&D came from local campaigns. Greyhawk came from Gygax's early campaign, Forgotten Realms came from Ed Greenwood's campaign (though he used it to write stories as a kid before D&D took over when he was a teen), and Mystara/"The Known World" came from Schick and Moldvay's campaign. That is my problem with many bad (and good) books, the main story is usually so big that I can't immerse myself into the world as a whole. Dragonlance is the story of that group and there is not much besides props to their adventures. LoTR is kinda same as in the Fellowship experiences the best and biggest adventure out there (well, that is the point in this case. Tolkiens longing to an old and long gone ideal of the world). I love The Hobbit more because I can see myself being in there, you know. Forgotten Realms is big enough to not dominated by a single adventure. I think the Bhaalspawn Saga is not canon but even then it's a random rear end in a top hat punching dragons and demons which happens every Tuesday. It's a personal preference, of course, but what I liked about GURRM books were the collosal levels of nerd wank goes into detailing the houses, random rear end knight , some wildling etc. That's why I might give Wheel of Time another go after like 17 years. Btw, nerds getting mad about Brandon Sandersons sections in the last book and majority of those turning up to be written by Jordan will never not be 
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Aug 26, 2020 20:33
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hah, though shartes and the same guy's viking books are entertaining trash, they're even more formulaic than wheels of times or d&d paperbacks
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Aug 26, 2020 20:39
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Galewolf posted:Btw, nerds getting mad about Brandon Sandersons sections in the last book and majority of those turning up to be written by Jordan will never not be Speaking of Sanderson, his original works are nothing special on their own, but the cosmere as a whole is amazing in scope. Shame the dude's Unshakeable Mormon Hangups are really holding him back though.
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Aug 26, 2020 20:40
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Galewolf posted:This might be a "trap sprung!" post but I legit had tears when it happened in the books. I know I would groan like the jaded boomer I am today if I get to read them again but for 18 year old me, I was there bro. I remember thinking that if the knights let him keep wearing his good family armor instead of having to wear the leather armor (i am 90% sure that was a thing) he might have made it.
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Aug 26, 2020 21:06
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Galewolf posted:SJW FEMINIST PROPAGANDA ( Is this really a stance people take on Earthsea? I reread the series over the lockdown, just the final book to go, and I can't see the association for anything other than the fact the author is a woman. I mean, this series makes all female magic users sneaky ignorant witches or the occasional evil sorceresses. Magic school is a literal boys club. Pretty sure the second to last book makes it clear that magic requires you to be a male virgin no less .
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Aug 26, 2020 21:11
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Xenocides posted:The earlier knock about Dragonlance being a bad D&D campaign ignores that all the early settings for D&D came from local campaigns. Greyhawk came from Gygax's early campaign, Forgotten Realms came from Ed Greenwood's campaign (though he used it to write stories as a kid before D&D took over when he was a teen), and Mystara/"The Known World" came from Schick and Moldvay's campaign. I don't think that's exactly it. It's more about the worlds themselves. We only got glimpses of Greyhawk as it was played, but those short bits were baked into the rules. The 8 schools of magic, the names of certain spells (after Bigby, Mordenkainen) the names of artifact (the Eye and Hand of Vecna, which is an anagram for Vance, which I'll get back to). The TSR Greyhawk boxed set was (again) just this tepid, limp thing, but it was made after Gygax was forced out, so it doesn't really count. The Greyhawk and Blackmoor adventures had some interesting stuff, but we never got to see the whole world, really. It was easier to take those bits and run. The Forgotten Realms had more worldbuilding (just in a sandbox sense) than Middle Earth, even only considering what Greenwood had written prior to selling the setting to TSR, let alone the poo poo written afterwards. (Greenwood is also apparently a sex pest, to continue the theme.) I don't think it's that the main story is told; I think it's that there's no room left for any other stories (except the jillion that apparently were published). The major PCs become adventure NPCs, but they're fixed in time. There's nowhere else in the world. There is, but I can't call up any details about it. It's just faceless. It's a Tolkien redux, but JRR never intended to sell adventure modules.
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Aug 26, 2020 21:16
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CheeseThief posted:Is this really a stance people take on Earthsea? I reread the series over the lockdown, just the final book to go, and I can't see the association for anything other than the fact the author is a woman. the first 3 books were a very traditional male centric fantasy bildungsroman, where the protagonist grows to be a man and saves a hot broad, except that the good guys and bad guys skin colors were changed. iirc from tehanu onwards they turned into more feministic works
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Aug 26, 2020 21:17
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CheeseThief posted:Is this really a stance people take on Earthsea? I reread the series over the lockdown, just the final book to go, and I can't see the association for anything other than the fact the author is a woman. She went back to the first 3 books while writing Tehanu because she confessed that those were male centric books, with some "reaching womanhood" themes in Tombs of Atuan but that was my take from her interviews that Tehanu onwards recieved some grunting for being what it is. E;fb.
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Aug 26, 2020 21:24
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Just a random Earthsea bit: The Karg royal twins rescue him when he was stranded and giving him the first half of the Erreth-Akbes ring was one of the most melanchonic pieces of fiction I've read. Galewolf fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Aug 26, 2020 |
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Aug 26, 2020 21:29
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Has anyone read the Coldfire Trilogy? It wasn't amazing, but it did have some things I did like. The planet the series takes place* in has some quirk where a person's mental state/thoughts affect the outcome of things, so things like firearms are super risky to use because even thinking about the possibility of a misfire can make one happen. In one of the books, the main character comes across a group of people so indoctrinated by a church to believe that their god protects them, that they can fire guns because they have absolute faith that nothing wrong will happen.
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Aug 26, 2020 22:31
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Comstar posted:No one's mentioned The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant? You left out the part where his rape daughter falls in love with him and then goes crazy.
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Aug 27, 2020 00:24
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sweet geek swag posted:To explain, this series is about a man who lives in the modern day who has leprosy and is constantly tormented by people in his localcommunity. He wakes up one day in a fantasy realm where he is proclaimed to be the chosen one who will defeat Lord Foul, the bad guy from this fantasy realm. Dude decides that "This must be a dream," so he rapes the girl who found him as pretty much his first act. I'm like 99% sure I read this in early middle school from the school library where there was also a Gor-themed CYOA book for children's perusal. I still wonder from time to time if librarians knew about the content when they ordered the books.
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Aug 27, 2020 01:15
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CheeseThief posted:Is this really a stance people take on Earthsea? I reread the series over the lockdown, just the final book to go, and I can't see the association for anything other than the fact the author is a woman. Without spoiling too much, the later stories she wrote suggest that many of the rules of Earthsea are more human invention than natural law. She was much older when she wrote the later books (and the awesome short stories) and you can see her taking a more critical eye to the world she established early on.
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Aug 27, 2020 01:25
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Ceramic Shot posted:I'm like 99% sure I read this in early middle school from the school library where there was also a Gor-themed CYOA book for children's perusal. I still wonder from time to time if librarians knew about the content when they ordered the books. we had nothing that extreme, but we definitely had a pile of forgotten realms stuff in my catholic elementary school in the (late) 80s somehow. it sent me a lot of mixed messages
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Aug 27, 2020 01:41
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What is the consensus on Robert E Howard? I mean on the subject of publication order not matching chronological order. (Dude was possibly more racist than Lovecraft, but it came through differently in his writing.) Also, i remember liking Robert Asprin as a kid, but it has been a loooong time. Maybe I should reread and see if it holds up. They're short.
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Aug 27, 2020 01:43
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I couldn't stand Dragonlance, but I read a little Forgotten Realms. The Harpers series, particularly. Each was a self-contained reskin of The Hobbit.
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Aug 27, 2020 01:45
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Grimoire posted:Speaking of Sanderson, his original works are nothing special on their own, but the cosmere as a whole is amazing in scope. Shame the dude's Unshakeable Mormon Hangups are really holding him back though. Sanderson is alright, but I'm getting really confused by people acting like he's The Most Important Fantasy Author Of The Modern Era, on account of his revolutionary, trailblazing idea of Hard Fantasy. It's good to have consistent rules to your magic, but a lot of his action scenes are just incredibly dull. It turns into a series of supertechnical Uses Of Power about as exciting as reading a combat log in a videogame. He did this, but the other character did this, and so he responded with a [Power] used on the wall behind him and this happened, and so... He also breaks his own Rules, for all that people make a big deal of them. Sooner or later, super-gods who don't follow the established rules show up, and the heroes will discover a new powers, and things get solved by a brand new solution that conveniently appeared just in time to solve the big problem. His Hard Magic also tends to read like superhero superpowers more than anything else. That's not a coincidence, either. He did write a love-letter-to-superheroes type of YA series. The powers were handled the same exact way, and it felt way more natural in a world full of skintight spandex. Mind, you really have to respect just how incredibly prolific he is. He's just constantly writing new books, new stand-alones, and new settings.
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Aug 27, 2020 02:28
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VideoTapir posted:Also, i remember liking Robert Asprin as a kid, but it has been a loooong time. Maybe I should reread and see if it holds up. They're short. are your two favorite things in all the world "constant unending puns even a dad would think twice about" and "casual misogyny"? then go for it!!
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Aug 27, 2020 02:41
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VideoTapir posted:What is the consensus on Robert E Howard? I mean on the subject of publication order not matching chronological order. I've been reading A Means to Freedom, the two volumes of correspondence between Lovecraft and Howard, and personally I think Lovecraft barely edges out Howard on that front since the former's letters endorse the KKK a few times and advocate murderous vigilantism based on skin color a bit more often. It's fortunate that neither of them were in positions of power to materially aid that kind of stuff.
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Aug 27, 2020 03:29
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Comstar posted:No one's mentioned The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant? I used to work at a library so I read a lot of really nerdy poo poo inline with this. and I heard a lot of gushing about this series from similar idiots as myself. I was so grossed out by the first book that I just stopped, although I skimmed a couple from work out of conclusion curiosity. I feel worse for ever having read any of it, that's how bad and weird it is (I guess that's an endorsement of sorts.) but the whole thing has a tone of just abject dirtiness to it. not even in an abject way like the Gor (I guess, heard about it) or the Xanth books (which I read too many of.) The Breakfast Sampler fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Aug 27, 2020 |
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Aug 27, 2020 03:30
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baw posted:also how about bad covers of good books I know this post is from a couple days ago, but this is the edition of The Hobbit that my dad read to me when I was little, and he put masking tape over the illustration on the cover because he didn't want to taint my imagination. I peeled it off when we were done and man was he correct.
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Aug 27, 2020 03:41
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baw posted:also how about bad covers of good books i also know this post is from a couple of days ago but i would like to point out that this is clearly an illustration of the two guys who used to hang out with ernest p. worrell. 
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Aug 27, 2020 03:53
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Imagine fawning over late Le Guin's work when she's the epitome of a white lady really into the Mysterious Orient  I kid, I kid, she's awesome.
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Aug 27, 2020 05:46
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I wont abide by people dissing Le Guin
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Aug 27, 2020 07:11
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Bismuth posted:I wont abide by people dissing Le Guin Literally how this derail got started
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Aug 27, 2020 07:15
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Imagine a perfect shitposting forum where everyone is happy posting and reading bad takes all day long and there is no hardship or cringe drama of any kind, but this forum has one tiny thread where one poster has to put up with people making GBS threads on Ursula Le Guin.
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Aug 27, 2020 07:33
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VideoTapir posted:Imagine a perfect shitposting forum where everyone is happy posting and reading bad takes all day long and there is no hardship or cringe drama of any kind, but this forum has one tiny thread where one poster has to put up with people making GBS threads on Ursula Le Guin. That poster is the chosen one
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Aug 27, 2020 07:36
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Jokes on you because I never read any other book than Earthsea from her, check-mate atheists  I also only read Darktower from SK.
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Aug 27, 2020 08:12
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Its such a good thing none of these are popular enough to have as much fan art as modern stuff does. Can you imagine like, hazbin hotel level fanart but for Gor?
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Aug 27, 2020 08:35
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VideoTapir posted:This is getting a little SF (no actual magic apart from shot that would befiddly as all hell miraculously working on the first try), bit haveany of you read Leo Frankowski's Conrad Stargard novels, I noped out at the harem of virgin 13 year old girls waiting to be impregnated in addition to the main character's ridiculous harem. If you're looking for medieval uplift Tales of Anyar is far less cringy but has less of an engineering focus.
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