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I remember quite liking the Twins trilogy (for what it was) back in my early 20s, with the time travel and the apocalypsing I probably wouldn't think the same if I re-read it would I 
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Jul 23, 2019 10:56
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I think the Corum books hold up better these days, but you could certainally enjoy Elric still. As said they are short enough you could blaze through them. Stick to the original 60's and 70's stories however. The stuff where he went back to the well from the 80's onward are not good.
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Jul 23, 2019 11:37
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Lemniscate Blue posted:This is also the origin of kender, and I believe gully dwarves as well. Kender, yes. Gully dwarves were the result of gnomes and dwarves interbreeding, which adds a whole new layer of unintentional  to the whole mess.
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Jul 23, 2019 12:27
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W.T. Fits posted:Kender, yes. Gully dwarves were the result of gnomes and dwarves interbreeding, which adds a whole new layer of unintentional Mormons are real fuckin' weird about "interbreeding".
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Jul 23, 2019 13:45
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No. 1 Apartheid Fan posted:Re: Moorcock, are the Elric books any good? Do they hold up at all? The original run of novellas - from the one where Elric helps a bunch of pirates sack his homeland to the four which form the novel Stormbringer - are the best, mostly because they're a young, hungry, angry Moorcock doing for pulp fantasy what punk would do for rock music years later. For my money, every subsequent attempt by Moorcock to tag on anothrr story or novel to the Elric series has just diluted that early edge further.
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Jul 23, 2019 15:21
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Omnicrom posted:So what are Gully Dwarves anyway? I've heard of them a couple of times, and the fact they're in the same breath as Kenders is a bad sign, but I've never got an example of what they really are. In one of the later books a chapter introduces Gully Dwarves by saying their traditional math system had two numbers, 1 and 2. Gully Dwarves revere the genius that invented their third number "a whole bunch".
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Jul 23, 2019 15:38
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Razorwired posted:In one of the later books a chapter introduces Gully Dwarves by saying their traditional math system had two numbers, 1 and 2. Gully Dwarves revere the genius that invented their third number "a whole bunch". I love this example so much because you can clearly see the inspiration (the partly-oversimplified reports of Australian aboriginal peoples with "1, 2, many" counting systems), and instead of going with "here's a culture in our fantasy world that also works like that and is no worse off for it," the end result was "look at these stupid fuckers! they're all too dumb to learn how to count!" sigh
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Jul 23, 2019 16:00
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Oh man I read so many of these drat books as a kid (after playing, but never beating, the SSI Krynn games). I reread them a decade back and they were, unsurprisingly, not good! Quite bad, tbh!
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Jul 23, 2019 17:32
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Mormons are real fuckin' weird about "interbreeding". I said "unintentional" because I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. I guess I should've known better. 
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Jul 23, 2019 18:42
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tzirean posted:I love this example so much because you can clearly see the inspiration (the partly-oversimplified reports of Australian aboriginal peoples with "1, 2, many" counting systems), and instead of going with "here's a culture in our fantasy world that also works like that and is no worse off for it," the end result was "look at these stupid fuckers! they're all too dumb to learn how to count!" This just reminds me of how Pratchett took that same apocryphal racism and upended it for his trolls by making "one, two, many, lots" into a base-4 counting system just as sophisticated as base-10. Back to Dragonlance: I guess I'll fess up to being The Biggest Goddamn Nerd of All Time and apparently the only person to read the post-Summer Flame novels, which I think were called the Fifth Age? Highlights I vaguely remember fifteen years later: • Evil dragon overlords replaced with bigger eviller dragon overlords… FROM SPAAAACE (literally; they were said to have come from other world through the void. They were still red, blue, white, black, and green, of course. Let's not get crazy or anything) • Good knight order (honorable and just) and evil knight order (honorable and malicious) joined by neutral knights (honorable and… boring?) because there's definitely not enough rule of threes already in the setting • Kender homeland gets demolished and now half of them have PTSD. Kender PTSD makes them act like normal people, who can feel fear and don't just grab things from other people without thinking about it. This is definitely a great idea that will age well.
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Jul 24, 2019 01:58
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Zeroisanumber posted:IIRC Tinker Gnomes were created by a magic chaos rock turning an entire dwarven city into a group of damaged fuckwads. Other way around, actually. A bunch of gnomes chased after the Greygem, and half wanted it because it was valuable and became dwarves, and the other half wanted it out of curiosity and became kender. Why do I know this instead of calculus? DrBouvenstein fucked around with this message at 11:54 on Jul 24, 2019 |
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Jul 24, 2019 03:45
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The setting is a D&D setting where the good god is named Paladin Why are you expecting any thought?
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Jul 24, 2019 03:54
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:The setting is a D&D setting where the good god is named Paladin no it's Paladine it's totally different and original and furthermore
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Jul 24, 2019 04:09
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Pieces of Peace posted:This just reminds me of how Pratchett took that same apocryphal racism and upended it for his trolls by making "one, two, many, lots" into a base-4 counting system just as sophisticated as base-10. I tried to read the first one when it came out and I think it was a bridge too weird for me. I just read the Wikipedia summary and I stand by my decision.
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Jul 24, 2019 04:19
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I don't care how any of you feel about Dragonlance otherwise, but acknowledge that Reorx is the greatest fictional deity ever created come at me
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Jul 24, 2019 05:50
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Silhouette posted:I don't care how any of you feel about Dragonlance otherwise, but acknowledge that Reorx is the greatest fictional deity ever created Lay his catechism upon me, oh priest of the one or whatever. (Never heard of him, why's he so great?)
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Jul 24, 2019 05:59
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He's a drunken dwarf with a gambling problem
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Jul 24, 2019 06:17
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Pieces of Peace posted:• Evil dragon overlords replaced with bigger eviller dragon overlords… FROM SPAAAACE (literally; they were said to have come from other world through the void. They were still red, blue, white, black, and green, of course. Let's not get crazy or anything) Also Mina was a thing and gently caress everything about her Mary Sue bullshit
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Jul 24, 2019 06:44
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The worst races in games are usually the ones that are supposed to be so rare as to be practically extinct, but players being players often end up two to a party. So here we have the Irda, beautiful and smart pre-curse ogres. Raistlin totally had sex with one, during one of the pre-novel adventures, but he then got amnesia and forgot the whole thing. I don't remember if Caramon was mind-wiped too.
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Jul 24, 2019 06:55
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U.T. Raptor posted:iirc, they're either said or impled to be some of the smaller and weaker members of their race, too. I don't mind the alien dragons so much because it, to me, had some cool aspects of Spelljammer. Like...in Spelljammer, all the different D&D settings (The Realms, Dragonlance, Greyhawk, etc...) are essentially planets in their own "crystal spheres" floating in the ether/phlogiston that powerful wizards or psychics can pilot spaceships to. So Takhisis just moved Krynn from it's native crystal sphere to another one just right over there where the dominant life form was huge, gently caress-off dragons. Essentially it was just a way for players and DMs to mix and match stuff from various settings, but with some really cool flavor behind it.
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Jul 24, 2019 14:30
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Thranguy posted:The worst races in games are usually the ones that are supposed to be so rare as to be practically extinct, but players being players often end up two to a party. So here we have the Irda, beautiful and smart pre-curse ogres. (Wild/Kagonesti elves were in this category too.)
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Jul 24, 2019 15:06
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DrBouvenstein posted:Why do I know this instead of calculus? Your math teacher didn't love you like D&D loved you.
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Jul 24, 2019 15:37
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so it's been four pages, are we gonna let's read this dragonlance or what? not to be rude, just it seems like the pace needs to pick up a little if we're gonna get through all 200+ books
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Jul 24, 2019 16:34
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Leperflesh posted:so it's been four pages, are we gonna let's read this dragonlance or what? not to be rude, just it seems like the pace needs to pick up a little if we're gonna get through all 200+ books I'll have more today. Work has been crummy.
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Jul 24, 2019 16:39
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I remember getting the 5th age book and it opened with two of Caramon's (that had been in the Tales and were likeable enough dudes) sons dead and I was just like "nope" and that's what turned me off Dragonlance forever. I was a hell of a loyal reader before then. I do remember I enjoyed that there was a Minotaur island empire that could have been a serious problem to the main continent but they were so busy killing each other in hierarchical tests of martial skill that they never turned their attention outward. I still think that's a pretty cool idea. I'm sure somebody's going to quote a story tho that ruins it.
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Jul 24, 2019 16:52
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:I remember getting the 5th age book and it opened with two of Caramon's (that had been in the Tales and were likeable enough dudes) sons dead and I was just like "nope" and that's what turned me off Dragonlance forever. I was a hell of a loyal reader before then. Yeah, that triggered a memory for me. I think I remember a short story where a knight is called up to a village because they've seen a minotaur. He finds the minotaur but he seems like a decent dude and they reach some kind of understanding until other minotaurs show up to kill minotaur #1in a lopsided fight that was demanded by honour or something. The knight doesn't intervene in the fight at minotaur #1's request and then questions stuff about his own code. Anybody remember the name or where that story was located? I think it was in "magic of krynn" but google is failing me.
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Jul 24, 2019 17:02
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Yeah that was the story that stuck with me. This big old minotaur sitting on the beach sharpening stakes and waiting for his final showdown. When the kill party shows up he picks the two best ones and proceeds to kill like 80% of his opponents, who are armed with real metal weapons. It was honestly a pretty Badass Moment as these things go. The knight finds out his "crime" was believing that the other races had value and that the minotaurs could learn something from them. Sedition. It's honestly a decent takedown of nationalism for a kid's fantasy story.
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Jul 24, 2019 17:08
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Yeah that was the story that stuck with me. This big old minotaur sitting on the beach sharpening stakes and waiting for his final showdown. When the kill party shows up he picks the two best ones and proceeds to kill like 80% of his opponents, who are armed with real metal weapons. It was honestly a pretty Badass Moment as these things go. Ah, thanks. Amazing the stuff that sticks with you. edit: found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kender,_Gully_Dwarves,_and_Gnomes "Definitions of Honor" by Richard A. Knaak. Seldom Posts fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Jul 24, 2019 |
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Jul 24, 2019 17:32
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If I remember right, that one was "Colors of Belief" by Richard A. Knaak, in the "Reign of Istar" volume of the Tales anthologies. Edit: Looks like I was wrong! 
W.T. Fits fucked around with this message at 17:50 on Jul 24, 2019 |
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Jul 24, 2019 17:42
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Knaak loved Minotaurs. He wrote the Kaz stuff right?
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Jul 24, 2019 18:16
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dismas posted:Knaak loved Minotaurs. He wrote the Kaz stuff right? He did. I think he came up with Kaz as a character too. He also wrote another story that popped into my head while I was trying to find the minotaur one. "Wayward Children" is about a bunch of draconian soldiers who garrison a village of elves. All kinds of mysterious stuff starts happening, and you sympathize with the bad guys a bit. It turns out that the elves are actually shapeshifted good dragons trying to see if there's anything left of their kids in the draconians. (Draconians are evil dragon-people made out of good dragon eggs). I seem to recall it had some body horror and was also pretty sad. That's 2 points for Richard A. Knaak with 12 year old me.
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Jul 24, 2019 18:56
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I THINK he also wrote this baller story where a knight deliberately gets himself captured by the enemy army and is straight up tortured for 3 days, but his faith keeps him strong and he literally goes into a trance where he sees all his dead knight companions calling him home. He comes out of the trance when they're about to slit his throat and personally challenges the Evil General to combat, fights him, and suddenly drops dead after giving it out as good as he gets. Turns out the knight had the plague. The enemy army left a plague victim in their camp for 3 days, LOL. They all get sick as hell and the army is beaten. Good poo poo, decent twist. edit: I believe it's "By the Measure" And yeah the "good Dragons are nice to the Draconians to see if there's anything redeeming about them" was good. The Tales are probably the best thing in Dragonlance, most of them are stupid or corny, but some are actually nice little genre pieces that are worth reading if you're a tween. edit: Looks like Richard Knaak might have put that poo poo on his shoulders and carried it away, because looking at Wikipedia I had forgotten almost all of them EXCEPT the ones he wrote, which stuck with me. Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Jul 24, 2019 |
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Jul 24, 2019 19:14
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:I THINK he also wrote this baller story where a knight deliberately gets himself captured by the enemy army and is straight up tortured for 3 days, but his faith keeps him strong and he literally goes into a trance where he sees all his dead knight companions calling him home. He comes out of the trance when they're about to slit his throat and personally challenges the Evil General to combat, fights him, and suddenly drops dead after giving it out as good as he gets. Yeah, that seems right to me--that plague story rings a bell as well, but none of the rest of them do.
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Jul 24, 2019 19:44
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I feel like there's a real competition between Dragonlance books and the Belgariad for "fantasy series I thought was awesome but now regret investing time in."
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Jul 24, 2019 21:00
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Madurai posted:I feel like there's a real competition between Dragonlance books and the Belgariad for "fantasy series I thought was awesome but now regret investing time in." Also Shannara
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Jul 24, 2019 21:46
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dwarf74 posted:Uhhh Xanth "That I thought was awesome" being the critical qualifier here.
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Jul 24, 2019 22:45
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dwarf74 posted:Uhhh Xanth Seconding Xanth. It’s not good and down right creepy. And I only read one or two books. As a loyal Dragon magazine reader during the launch for Fifth Age where for what felt like an entire year the fiction was all Fifth Age focused short stories, it never clicked with me. The Kender story is the only one that I even half remember and it was basically ten kender go out on an adventure, one wanders off and then there were nine. Slowly counting down until the one kender comes home this broken, miserable adult who has seen all their friends die / disappear on them. But maybe I’m not remembering right. The structure of the fiction sat with me more then content.
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Jul 24, 2019 22:46
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Madurai posted:"That I thought was awesome" being the critical qualifier here.
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Jul 24, 2019 23:06
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Nystral posted:Seconding Xanth. It’s not good and down right creepy. And I only read one or two books. Does that one kinda gloss over the bad stuff as it happens? Like the story's literally "he wandered off to do his own thing" and then at the end it drops "actually they died" on you?
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Jul 24, 2019 23:52
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Yeah , I was not a fan of the fifth age either. These were not great books in general, but I was young, and I really liked the characters, and if you are going to kill all the characters off and create a miserable status quo I was just not going to keep reading. It's the same reason I fell out of old Star Wars EU stuff around the New Jedi Order.
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Jul 24, 2019 23:56
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