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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Windjammer" data-source="post: 5399384" data-attributes="member: 60075">I find Homeland and The Crystal Shard head and shoulders above the rest of Salvatore's novels.Homeland put many a thing on the map of the Realms, and D&D, quite literally, that wasn't there before. It also holds in a kernel what is so appealing about the Realms as a campaign world. I absolutely believe Ed Greenwood when he says he re-reads that novel every year.And yet it's painstakingly obvious that the cast of characters in Homeland is a lot more varied, their interactions a lot less predictable, the psychology more subtle and mature, than most of what Salvatore produced afterwards. The Crystal Shard is to me the paradigmatic D&D novel. I give copies to new players at my table. It is that good. Small bits, like Bruenor's battle tricks, which help to bring scenes alive, but more importantly, the whole sequence with Icingdeath - that, to me, stands at the level of a true epos.And yet, again, it is painstakingly obvious that Salvatore excelled in that novel where his later ones fail. And they fail, for me, for the obvious reason that the amount of plot rolled into that novel is a hundred times over what Salvatore would deign to include in one of his later ones. Try to summarize the plot of a later novel - it'd have barely made a quick scene in the early work. For these reasons, I hold Salvatore in the highest regard as a writer who has enriched the world of D&D, but I also hold that regard with respect to rather few of his works.</blockquote>

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