Olive said:
Well, i know this maybe should go elsewhere, but its for influence in my DnD campaign...
I've been reading Sepulchrave's story hour, which is incredile, and in part of it, people start talking about how vancian his wizards are, and about how cool they make vancian magic seem... now i like the vancian magic system, and i'd like to read about its origins. so what should i read?!?!
thanks...
Not all Vance is good, but there's a lot of good stuff. He's been a prolific writer, too, and there's some much stuff it's hard to know where to start. Here's my take on it :
First of all, there's a lot of SciFi stuff that's only going to be mildly relevant to what you're looking for, even though some of it is excellent The Planet of Adventure series and the Demon Princes are more SF than Fantasy, the former more so than the latter.
I'd say the best starting point for Jack Vance is the Lyonesse series. In many ways, it's his most accessible work, it forms a cohesive whole, but most of the typicall Vancian elements are present : smug self-assured heroes, powerful mages restrained by a non-intervention pact, weird parallel planes, sandestines, wacky faeries? It's all in there, and it's an awesome read.
Then if you want to go back to the source, especially the whole fire-and-forget spell system, you got to look for Tales of the Dying Earth. These are short stories, all concerned with magicians or mysteries, and it's both easy reading and THE main D&D source of inspiration. Then you can delve further into the Dying Earth stuff with the two Cugel novels and the Rhialto novel.
Altogether, that's probably a few weeks of reading already ! Hope this helps !
