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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 7934152" data-attributes="member: 8461">Insofar as I'm aware, there aren't any further novels set in Chult. But then again, I haven't read all of the available Forgotten Realms novels, so take that for what it's worth.This one was a decent enough book, and I think that James Lowder is a very talented writer (I love love love Knight of the Black Rose), but this story never quite hit on all cylinders for me. And in all honesty, that's less the story's fault than how it never quite seemed to fit with literally everything else across the spectrum of D&D that tried to connect with it:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The people of Chult are a human ethnicity called tabaxi? Huh, I thought that was the name of jaguar people from the Monstrous Manual (Lowder would try to reconcile the distinction in FRM1 The Jungles of Chult, but it didn't really work).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The idea of a back-and-forth between gods over getting to decide your afterlife is funny, but the wider implications are problematic. Nothing else suggests that where you die has any bearing on what gods get to decide what happens to your soul, save for one minor point that I recall being in the Player's Guide to Faerun (I think it was that book) in D&D 3.5, where it was casually dropped that there were four different cosmologies - for Faerun, Kara-Tur, Zakhara, and Maztica - and which ones you could access with planar magic depended on where you were when you used your spell/magic item.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">So Artus had a major artifact, one which gave him ridiculously-potent powers over cold, immortality, and boosted all of his magic items...and then he disappears from the world. Seriously, after this novel, we don't see him again (insofar as I know) until Tomb of Annihilation, over a century later.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Maybe it's because I didn't read FRM1 The Jungles of Chult closely enough, but the focus on the Batiri goblins in this novel (and that one necromantic Bara) never stuck with me nearly as much as the entry for Ubtao's evil alter-ego deity Eshowdow and the eshowe people from Powers & Pantheons. But I don't recall those being in the novel at all.</li> </ul>A few other thoughts: Skuld, for some reason, always made me think of an evil, humorless version of the genie from Disney's Aladdin. I can practically hear him giving a song and dance about how "you ain't never had a slave like me." The wombats, likewise, were so low-impact that I can't actually remember them at all, though I suppose that's partially because I don't know what a wombat actually looks like. Also, I think Cyric is a really cool deity, so having his presence be limited to Kaverin's backstory struck me as kind of disappointing.Overall, I think of this one as maybe a 6 out of 10, but it's not one that I've felt any need to go back and flip through over the years.</blockquote>

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