D&D General No One Reads Conan Now -- So What Are They Reading?

[Bedrockgames]

Under Heaven is such an amazing book.

I was curious about that one

 

[Shardstone]

I was curious about that one

Strong recommend from me. Absolutely beautiful novel. Has a very haunting supernatural moment in it about halfway through. Other then that and the beginning, the book is more alt China then historical fantasy, but it bangs.

 

[Bohandas]

Necroscope is what I read as well... I'll have to look into Titus Crowe.

Khai of Khem is good too (depending on your opinion of the exploitation genre)

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Animanga has been this popular since the mid 2010s. I guess it's a cultural divide between Gen X and younger generations though, especially since Gen X directly inspired Millennial designers

Really? I watched Marine Boy in the 70s, Battle of the Planets in the 80s and played Final Fantasy in the 90s. I think Anime has been a growing influence for a lot more than 10 years!

 

[Enaknomolos]

It seems appropriate in this thread to point out that the current New Edge Sword & Sorcery Backerit Campaign only has a couple of days left.

In the words of Howard Andrew Jones it is one of the current crop of magazines that takes this as their starting point:

We can find inspiration from the old tales without pastiching them. Specifically, setting aside the sexism and racism and the suspect politics but embracing the virtues of great pulp story‐telling. The color. The pace. The headlong thrill and sense of wonder. The celebration not of the everyday and the petty but of those who dare to fight on when the odds are against them.

 

[Dioltach]

Blood Song by Anthony Ryan

I started it a few years ago and got halfway through it. I can't remember exactly what I disliked about it, but I really did. Either the prose was too much tell and not enough show, or else the main character felt like a Mary Sue.

 

[Queer Venger]

I've also enjoyed these stories... Elric especially! <3

awesome, Im actually re-reading the Elric saga; pure psychedelic sword & sorcery goodness

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Really? I watched Marine Boy in the 70s, Battle of the Planets in the 80s and played Final Fantasy in the 90s. I think Anime has been a growing influence for a lot more than 10 years!

Anyone else remember in the 90s when a VHS tape with 2-3 episodes of an anime show on it cost $20?

awesome, Im actually re-reading the Elric saga; pure psychedelic sword & sorcery goodness

So good. The psychedelia is something that went over my head as a kid, probably because it was too heavy and out there for me to encompass.

 

[innerdude]

I started it a few years ago and got halfway through it. I can't remember exactly what I disliked about it, but I really did. Either the prose was too much tell and not enough show, or else the main character felt like a Mary Sue.

Yeah, not all fiction will be to everyone's taste, but a quick perusal of the Amazon and Goodreads ratings gives me a pretty decent leg to stand on that most fantasy fans will find much to enjoy.

While from a certain point of view, I can maybe see the "Gary Stu" complaint, from another viewpoint it's hard to reconcile, since the hero gets the living (insert relevant naughty word) beat out of him pretty much the entire book.

The protagonist of Name of the Wind is 10x the Gary Stu that Blood Song's is, and no one seems to rail at NotW or its sequel.

The most common complaint you'll see on Goodreads is that because it was originally a self-published title (later picked up by a major publisher), there's still hints of a lack of editing present in the text. I've read this book six or seven times and maybe found a grand total of a half-dozen passages that evidenced its self-published origin, none of which were even remotely enough to dampen my enjoyment.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

no one seems to rail at NotW or its sequel.

Are you kidding? Is this a joke?

I mean, let's be clear, you are not wrong re: Kvothe being basically the hero of his own fanfiction, and it's kind of arguably true even in the story, because most of what we're reading is a story that Kvothe is telling about himself, in a tavern he allegedly owns, to some poor schmuck who turned up there (and who is also being menaced by Kvothe's bitchy BFF, Bast). And absolutely he is embodying much of the Gary Stu/Mary Su vibes in that story.

And people don't rail at NotW that much, that's true. People mostly accept that Kvothe may be exaggerating somewhat and making himself more heroic or tragic than he was, and nothing he claims in that back is truly ridiculous either. Further Kvothe appears to be an unreliable narrator.

But the sequel? Nobody rails at the sequel? Man, were you around when that came out? Have you ever looked at discussion of Wise Man's Fear (WMF) at all? Because absolutely, from the bloody moment it got published, people do very much rail at Kvothe's portrayal of himself in the sequel, as a literal Ninja Sex-god. I mean, the first book, he's penurious magic-student and decent musician. In the second book, he's trained in ninja sword-fighting and ninja skills by a cult of Hot Polyamorous Ninjas, then spends like 1/5th of the book learning sexniques with some sort of Elven Sex Goddess (literal), and then I don't even remember much of the rest except he murders a bunch of people, including ones who can't defend themselves and it seems pretty dodgy.

An awful lot of people who like NotW absolutely loathed WMF, because either Kvothe is being an annoying exaggerator, or the story has gone downhill quite a bit.

Blood Song, as I understand it, doesn't have the same metafictional conceit. This isn't a story we're being told one character to another. There's no unreliable narrator. There's just a really ridiculously overpowered guy, and no, I'm sorry, based on the synopsis, Vaelin Al Sorna is not "10x less of a Gary Stu", he's actually considerably more of one.