![]() ![]() Artek and his new friends have to claw their way back to the surface within two days or else a magical curse will kill him.īut before we talk further about the plot, let’s talk about dungeon design for tabletop role-playing games. His patron is an evil double-crossing bastard, so of course everyone involved ends up stranded in the deepest levels of Faerûn’s most dangerous mega-dungeon. Artek the Knife, a famous burglar, is freed from prison on the condition that he does one last job: rescue a lost noble from the depths of Undermountain. Then we jump to the very straightforward main plot. It’s a good opening that shows the reader right away what a dangerous and unforgiving place it is. This book sets its stage with a cold open introduction, unrelated to the rest of the story, where a company of overconfident adventurers gets massacred on their way out of Undermountain. Beneath the metropolis of Waterdeep there lies a vast dungeon full of monsters, traps, treasures, and the bodies of countless fools who thought they’d explore its depths and return rich. Undermountain! Next to Myth Drannor, it’s the most famous destination for adventurers in the Forgotten Realms. Who knows? Let’s crack it open and find out. Still, perhaps the pitch for this one - a motley group of misfits goes dungeon-delving far beneath the streets of Waterdeep - will force him away from his usual action movie and epic fantasy tropes and into a more constrained, character-focused narrative. I especially don’t have high hopes for this particular book, considering that I found Mark Anthony’s previous novel to be a painful slog. As such, I don’t have high hopes for any of these books… but if we’re lucky, we might unearth a hidden gem or two amidst all the dross. Just remember one important detail: for all of the novels we’re going to examine from now on, the authors and editors will be underpaid, overworked, and dreadfully low on morale. The fall of TSR and the continued survival of Dungeons & Dragons is a fascinating story, but only tangentially related to exploring the novels, so I won’t dwell too long on the historical background. Hemorrhaging cash from many departments, they attempted to compensate by cranking out no fewer than fourteen Realms novels in a single year, several of them in hardcover editions which were ruinously expensive to produce. 1996! At long last, we’re into the final stretch of TSR’s existence. ![]()
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