D&D 5E Thoughts on Ed Greenwood's Spellstorm

[Queer Venger]

Rather a surprising lack of Realms-shaking events in Ed's latest Forgotten Realms novel - you can find my review here, but as I get older, I appreciate spending time with characters when they're not locked in mortal combat.

Elminster gets a wonderful line when he says "Most of the strife I foresee will be on the Sword Coast and its backlands"... which almost certainly has to be a reference to Wizards' current adventure/storyline publishing strategy.

The book updates a few things about the post-Sundering Realms, which is no mean trick because most of it takes place in a manor where the guests can't leave due to the eponymous spellstorm. Elminster also gets to "retire" and be a butler, or something like that. But we get a clue of what Mystra is up to, and there's a lot of time spent with old favourites of the Realms.

I didn't really realise back when I was first introduced to the Realms exactly how important some characters were to Ed (and in his home campaign). I've got a much better idea of that now, because Spellstorm revisits a number of characters that were prominently displayed in early Realms products (and I'm sure have been developed since then): Elminster, Myrmeen, Khelben, Alusair and Mirt in particular. Manshoon - of course - also gets a fair bit of attention.

I've got this odd perspective on the Realms, as I was one of its early fans (collecting everything I could, etc.), but drifting away in the 2E days. I occasionally picked up things here and there mainly due to Organised Play, but there's a lot of material I never really paid attention to. So, I come back to this book and say, "Hey! I know a lot of these characters!" And they feel developed, which is to say: they've had lives. They've had things happen to them. And, though they're the same characters at their core, they've been changed by the hundred-odd-years that have happened in the Realms since they were introduced to me.

And that is absolutely awesome.

So: I really enjoyed this book. I think it has a few structural flaws and probably doesn't spend enough time fleshing out the other guests, but I wasn't reading it for them. I was reading it for Alusair and Elminster. For that, it delivered.

Cheers!

I picked up Archmage, will definitely line this one up for a read. Thanks for the review.

 

[Mirtek]

For me it's the worst of the recent FR novels. A real chore to force myself to read it through. I am generally not a fan of Ed's novels. The early Elminster novels (basically pre 4e) were always my least favorite and Spellfire was the only FR novel I actually stopped reading and banned to the very bottom of my stack of unread FR novels. It was only years after my first failed attempt that I had to force myself through this trilogy after exhausting the supply of unread FR novels.

With the Knights of Myth Drannor series his writting grew less unbearable to me (I still shock my head often due to the silly content, but at least could bring myself to read through at a reasonable pace without the constant urge to throw them away) and this trend continued with the most recent three Elminster novels.

However Spellstorm really did it for me. Not since Spellfire have I been so listless in reading a FR novel.

Ed's novels (even Spellfire) are not even the worst FR novels ever. That dubious distinction definately belongs to the novelizations of Baldur's Gate. The first one is so terrible, it's no wonder that the second one gets a little better as there's just no way for it to actually be worse. The third one (of the BG2 adon) then gets worse again to the level of the first one. Yet even these I could read easier than most of Ed's novels