Interview R.A. Salvatore Hated the Names in KoA: Reckoning

[SCO]

Dear fellow book addict:

even good writers write average D&D books. This is because they are contractually constrained to never ever change the setting unless it's part of a "grand plan" for the next edition.

Such "grand plans" are, inevitably, mutations of a kitchensink setting into a even more kitchensink setting.

I won't get into how magic affects the setting (false equilibrium) or how the derpastic gods are affected by their worshippers or the embrace of archetypes (all fantasy is guilty here).

Basically, i can have the "relaxing crappy novel" without the particular derp of the D&D setting just by not reading the franchise and reading some other fantasy books that aren't tied to a game/larger franchise.

Star wars is the same - say no to franchises!

 

[made]

Great boys literature.

Gret way to introduce kids to BDSM, too.

 

[IDtenT]

I liked KoA lore. By no means is original like, let's say, Elder Scrolls or Thief, but it's pretty solid with a nice twist here and there.

Too bad The Elder Scrolls lore is more or less ignored for a hiking sim.

 

[Azrael the cat]

I think they might be good books for children.

Isn't that true of all fantasy by definition? Oh of course there's Martin with his raping and oral sex for the more mature clientele...

pretty bad when compared to real writers.

What's a 'real' writer?

You wouldn't understand. But you don't mind that, do you.

Don't worry I understand: it is either a) A writer that YOU like or, b) A writer that academia has deemed 'real' and so you have to fit in by considering him/her 'real' as well like er, um, Joyce*?



* Do not pretend to include Joyce as a writer you like despite name dropping Finnegan's Wake. No-one actually likes or reads Joyce....

Given that there have been 'real' fantasy writers, I'd similarly dismiss most of Salvatore for the same reason that I dismiss Gaider's attempt and the same reason that I dismiss the various Mills and Boon authors. They are being hired to write for a pre-made setting and product, almost always to tight pre-set specifications for a series that works on churning out a certain number of titles per year. I'm not knocking it as a job, but you can't say that there isn't a difference in both work-style and product to authors who work on their own creative projects and their own terms.

It's the difference between someone saying: 'We need 2 books per year, with x, y, and z plot points occurring in book 1, and you can't use these words, the grammar has to be set at this reading age, etc' and just setting down to write the book you want to write. The latter style is certainly no guarantee of a good book - pulp publishing sets its infamously extensive criteria BECAUSE the publishing houses have found that most mid-to-low talent professional writers cannot write even a mediocre book if left to their own devices. Yes, that's right - Mills and Boon has its formula because they know that if they let the writers of their ultra-tight leash the product would be even worse.

Given that only a tiny proportion of writers - even out of professional writers who do it for a living - can actually write a genuine freeform novel to even a mediocre standard, I'd say that they deserve the recognition of not having their work conflated with the masses of contract-writers who are paid to write scripts, characters, individual jokes to be inserted into several different tv shows, advertising copy, computer game dialogue and so on.

There's plenty of writers I detest, but I'd still give them their due for writing freeform novels - you know, the stuff that the other 99.9% of their creative writing classmates wanted to write, but couldn't manage to even a moderately shitty level, resulting in their going off to write pulp, advertising copy and so on.

 

[Erebus]

inb4 lesifoere

Sadly, she seems to be gone. But I'll give the ol' Lesi-Signal a shot anyway :

I LIKE RICHARD MORGAN. I THINK HE WRITES MATURE, INTERESTING AND ORIGINAL SCIENCE-FICTION.

There. If she's still around, that should work.

Remember when Salvatore pissed all his fans off and went and wrote The Cleric Quintet? Those were great books. All about a guy who wasn't suited for combat and his friends just kept dying around him. Those books were cool.

Yeah, Cadderly was cool. He fought with a yo-yo and he could cast 7th-level spells even though the rules of the 2nd Edition stated that Deneir was too puny a deity to grant them to his priests.

Also, I remember nothing at all about the plot of those books, except that there's a vampire and a girlfriend who's an 18th-level monk and that Cadderly sacrifices himself because fuck living. In fact, I have clearer memories of the awful Icewind Dale trilogy : they're the books in which Salvatore pretends to kill each of his heroes at least once (spoiler alert : none of them die, though their companions start mourning the second they disappear).

 

[Deleted member 7219]

inb4 lesifoere

Sadly, she seems to be gone. But I'll give the ol' Lesi-Signal a shot anyway :

I LIKE RICHARD MORGAN. I THINK HE WRITES MATURE, INTERESTING AND ORIGINAL SCIENCE-FICTION.

There. If she's still around, that should work.

Remember when Salvatore pissed all his fans off and went and wrote The Cleric Quintet? Those were great books. All about a guy who wasn't suited for combat and his friends just kept dying around him. Those books were cool.

Yeah, Cadderly was cool. He fought with a yo-yo and he could cast 7th-level spells even though the rules of the 2nd Edition stated that Deneir was too puny a deity to grant them to his priests.

Also, I remember nothing at all about the plot of those books, except that there's a vampire and a girlfriend who's an 18th-level monk and that Cadderly sacrifices himself because fuck living. In fact, I have clearer memories of the awful Icewind Dale trilogy : they're the books in which Salvatore pretends to kill each of his heroes at least once (spoiler alert : none of them die, though their companions start mourning the second they disappear).

Dude, who cares what spells they cast? At the end of the day TCQ had a character who was completely against the norm, an anti-Mary Sue. If Drizzt is anything, he's overpowered and almost invincible. His past is the best thing about him and we know all about that. Drizzt is boring.

If your post wasn't intended to be sarcastic then disregard the previous paragraph.

 

[Erebus]

If your post wasn't intended to be sarcastic then disregard the previous paragraph.

It was sarcastic. Cadderly may have started out as a semi-loser, but he later became just as annoyingly overpowered as Drizzt. I can't say for sure that he was boring, because I remember nothing about his personality.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

It is the nature of D&D to get amazingly powerful as you explore and do quests and such. It shouldn't matter because it took Cadderly ages to get to that point. He spends most of the books weak and avoiding combat as much as possible. I can't remember what happens in the later books though, like yourself it has been ages since I read them.

 

[Excidium]

I hate elves.

 

[Atomic]

I liked KoA lore. By no means is original like, let's say, Elder Scrolls

 

[Sul]

I liked KoA lore. By no means is original like, let's say, Elder Scrolls

That's one of the things I like most about The Elder Scrolls, the lore is only as deep and complicated as the player wants it to be. For people that simply play the game it's nothing more than your average Tolkien rip-off, but for those who want to go deeper, especially in games like Morrowind and Skyrim (yes, Skyrim, dumbed down gameplay apart it's on par with Redguard and Morrowind lore-wise) they will find stuff like the Hoon-Ding, CHIM, concepts and ideas gaing sentience, beautiful use of metaphors, a whole race (dwemer) pulling out the plug from a "reality" of everlasting imperfection but leaving the lights on (and a trap by the exit door just for trolling), infinite cycles of dreams (or "kapas" as Paarthunex in Skyrim calls it) and people "waking up" from those dreams (or being zero-sum if their will and sense of self is weak). Even Alduin, the big bad dragon in Skyrim has meaning besides "being bad" (yes, he has come to end the current dream/kapa and pave the way for the next one).

Anyway...

 

[Metro]

I find it pretty hilarious they brought in Salvatore as Amalur has some of the shittiest/most generic/inane lore I've seen in a game in the last decade or so. Not a surprise, though, as most of these fantasy writers are terrible. They basically put out McDonald's/fast food quality literature. The same ones are hired over and over because they work for relatively cheap, can put out passable content in short time spans, and the legions of fans have grown accustom to lapping it up.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

That's one of the things I hate most about The Elder Scrolls, the lore is only as deep and complicated as the player wants it to be

fixed for me bro

why don't they ever weave that awesome weirdness and originality into the main narrative and gameplay itself, it's such a fucking waste to play tolkien six flags lethal tour edition when it could be an original experience better than forgotten realms games with none of development time wasted on bsb content

yet you get herp derp summon daedra god at statue get quest for shiny thing via sentences sixth grader can understand

the obvious message here is that since the writing can be tucked away where it won't hurt their audience's brians, it doesn't get vetted out and so you get awesome in the books that has nothing to do with the game at all

let me put it to you

Can you imagine reading something at the level of the gameplay writing blandness that suffuses the playing experience in post-morrowind bethesda games, so you're reading this horribly sterile crap right and then you look at the bottom of the pages and they have little footnotes with references to awesome lore and an index at the back of the book with even more awesome lore

what the shit is this fuck, the discerning reader would likely exclaim in due course

just having awesome and interesting footnotes does not make your book a good one.

 

[Sceptic]

why don't they ever weave that awesome weirdness and originality into the main narrative

They already did in Daggerfall, Morrowind, Battlespire and even in Redguard.

Can't argue for or against Sul's post since all his examples are from Skyrim, and I haven't played it.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

They already did in Daggerfall, Morrowind, Battlespire and even in Redguard.

post-morrowind bethesda games

ahead of you there bro

mind you, IIRC weren't daggerfall's quests just very interestingly lore'd up 'kill/fetch this' quests with huge vast expanses of dungeon inbetween