Dungeons & Dragons: The Fallbacks: Bound for Ruin Review

teitan said:

Why does the Tiefling look like the guy that hosted VH1's The Pick Up Artist?

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Dragonhelm said:

How does this book compare with classic Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms novels?

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Dragonhelm said:

How does this book compare with classic Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms novels?

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Ibrandul said:

TLDR: I found it lacking, and I imagine anyone expecting the kind of adult-oriented storytelling of D&D novels of yore will, too. My twelve-year-old loved it.

Most of the classic FR novels were written for adults or older teens. (I don’t know Dragonlance well.) A lot of us read them at younger ages, but they weren’t written for younger readers. Those novels are not all great, though I’ll go to the mat for more than a few of them. But most of them, successful or not, were written with an adult readership in mind. (Salvatore is, arguably, an exception.)

I don’t mean grimdarkness quotient, though the old novels do have more of that. I just mean what level of vocabulary they use, how psychologically mature the characters are, how long the chapters are, how complex the plots are, etc.

And those novels, at least the good ones, are stories set in a D&D-compatible fantasy world, rather than stories about D&D.

The Fallbacks is not just about D&D, it’s about middle-school-age D&D players.

Not literally. But the novel is focused on tweenage themes and the experience of being a D&D player in a way that the old books almost never were.

It’s very gamey. Instead of feeling like a world that D&D players might want to explore in their game sessions, it feels like a world that is modeling the way D&D players (specifically, younger ones) play and talk about D&D.

For example, the theme of the novel is group cohesion. This is explored by having members of the group talk and think about the group as “the group” and even “the party.” Over and over they articulate explicitly to each other and to themselves how they feel about being in “the party.”

And the feelings—oh, the feelings! We spend many pages treading and retreading each character’s emotions, primarily self-doubt, in a very clunky way.

In the Honor among Thieves movie (and the Guardians of the Galaxy movies that both it and this novel are explicitly modeled after), characters think and talk through their feelings about being part of the group. But here, it’s out of proportion—they do this about as often as they do anything else.

All five protagonists are unsure of their skills and their personal worth, whether they valuably contribute to the “found family” of their party, etc. And the reader is told over and over that this is how the characters feel.

One character wonders what she has left to prove; we know this because we read the line, “What did she have left to prove?”

And: “I have to care for this group. I have to make sure that I’m the leader they deserve.”

A few pages later:
“She was going to do whatever it took to prove to the rest of the group that she could be the leader they deserved.”

This is classic “middle-grade” tell-don’t-show, then tell-and-tell-again storytelling. As a grownup, I found it tiresome.

The novel also leans heavily into storytelling cliches. I don’t mean plot, structure, character archetypes, etc.—those are also formulaic, but that’s not always a bad thing. I mean the book is filled with actual lines of prose like this one, the final line of the book (which I’m not going to put in spoiler tags because it spoils nothing): “And they were just getting started.”

That’s not a line for grownups, that’s a line for little kids.

The book is marketed as a novel for adults, but only a handful of curse words and a bit of drunkenness serve to differentiate it from a middle-grade novel—the category aimed at 10-to-13-year-olds, just below Young Adult, stories typically oriented around protagonists’ doubts about whether they fit in with their peer group. I suspect that this may have been written originally as a middle-grade or perhaps YA novel and then bumped up to the “general readership”/adult category, perhaps for no other reason than to justify a higher price tag (in the US, YA hardcovers are typically priced at ten dollars less than adult hardcovers).

Johnson’s movie prequel The Road to Neverwinter tread a lot of the same ground in a more skillful way. She has written good books in the past, but I found this to be by far the weakest of her seven Forgotten Realms novels. The two big, extended action sequences at the beginning and end of The Fallbacks are great. The middle 50% of the book, not so much.

To be honest, I suspect heavy editorial meddling from WotC and not enough time for rewrites. We know from the Weis & Hickman lawsuit that present-day WotC is more than willing to demand extensive rewrites of completed novel drafts; and we know from Descent into Avernus that WotC decision-makers like to order late-stage revisions in order to shoehorn in whatever IP element the management has decided needs to be spotlighted for reasons of product synergy. Certain structural flaws in this book reek of “studio-mandated reshoots.” (I’d be surprised, for instance, if Valindra Shadowmantle made any appearance at all in the first draft.)

(Edited to soften my take a bit. I didn't hate this. I was just very disappointed in the drop in quality compared with Johnson's previous work, and I feel this is mismarketed as a novel for adults.)

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