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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 4613391" data-attributes="member: 8461">This is a fairly good excuse, but I don't think that gives her a free pass for how her books deviate from the canon.The actual Dark Sun materials were already on the market when she wrote her books. It's not like she really needed TSR's secret notes on the setting or anything...she could just have picked up the boxed set and read through it, maybe even a supplement or two.Authors do research on subjects that they write about all the time. It doesn't seem that unreasonable that Lynn could have looked at some of the Dark Sun products to understand the setting better. Communication with the "insiders" at TSR would have helped, but if the fans can have such a dedicated sense of the canon without ever seeing such material, so can the people who write the books.The books were pretty good in a general sense; I certainly didn't think that they were badly written. They were easily the best of the Dark Sun novels, IMHO. As I mentioned, I particularly liked how flawed the characters were; that seemed to be the best way of portraying what life on Athas was like - Sadira was willing to defile to cast spells when she really needed to, Astinus initially saw no problem with keeping slaves, etc.They stayed in canon fairly well, though there were a few snafus (though it never got as horrible as it did in other books). For example, in an early book a halfling uses arcane magic, something that's retconned in a later book. Likewise, defiling magic is presented as something that preservers can use if they want to cast spells more quickly/powerfully, which the rules didn't quite support at the time (though later revisions tried to make that more correct). Overall, however, the books kept quite close to the canon, and even set future canon for the setting. I really think they're the best Dark Sun novels to date.</blockquote>

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