A lot of my contemporaries have fond memories of the boardgames Dungeon! and HeroQuest. I was never that enamored of them. I think this is largely because I came to the games via Dungeons & Dragons rather than vice versa — so it always seemed like the poor man’s version of a fuller and richer game. There are myriad limitations to the game, of course, but the largest lack I felt was that — although the contents of a room could change — the board was largely immutable. There was no true sense of exploration.

HeroQuest, in particular, was never a game I really warmed up to. The inclusion of a gamemaster allowed for dungeons with more flavor, but also emphasized the fact that — with the same play dynamic — I could be playing an actual RPG. (Perhaps Advanced HeroQuest or Warhammer Quest would have left a different impression on me, but I’ve never even seen a copy of those games.)

The completely randomized Dungeon!, on the other hand, at least served the niche of “I want to play D&D, but I don’t have a DM”. It just didn’t scratch it very well (at least for me).

Over the years I’ve occasionally dipped back into this particular sub-genre, usually to be met with disappointment. Most recently the Order of the Stick boardgame failed to be anything more than an unbalanced, colossal bore.

Which brings me to Munchkin Quest — which finally scratches the itch I first developed twenty years ago: DM-less dungeoncrawling. It has a variable board which you discover as you explore it,

Over the past few weeks, my little circle of friends have played Munchkin Quest almost a dozen times, more than any other game. That’s probably not a pattern of usage that will last forever, but it does speak to a dynamic and interesting game.

SLOW PACE

The only real complaint we had with the game was its slow pace. Allow me to explain…

Munchkin Quest is based on the popular Munchkin card game, which I played a lot 3-4 years ago before losing my regular playing group. In Munchkin, every turn stats by opening a Door — which generally means fighting a monster. And once that monster has been defeated, play proceeds to the next player.

In Munchkin Quest, in order to facilitate the exploration of the dungeon complex, players are instead given 3 movement points (which can be increased or decreased with various pieces of equipment or other abilities in the game). When players explore into a new room (generally by spending a single movement point), they encounter a monster and fight it.

Begin to see the problem?

In Munchkin a player’s turn usually consisted of a single combat. In Munchkin Quest, on the other hand, we were usually seeing 3 or 4 combats on every player’s turn.

The first time we played the game, it took 90 minutes before the fourth (and final) player finally got to take their first turn. Even with all the out-of-turn actions that can be taken in the game, this was still hugely problematic. The long breaks between turns not only tended to result in players disengaging from the game, it also had several knock-on effects that also degraded gameplay.

For example, because of the multiple combats per turn the players tend to level up faster in Munchkin Quest than they do in Munchkin (at least in terms of the number of turns — in actual playing time, Munchkin Quest is a little slower). In our experience, a game of Munchkin Quest was over in just 3-4 turns (which would take 3-5 hours). This had a direct impact on the flow of the game (unlike Munchkin it didn’t feel like you were in a race with other players — the pace was just too slow for that).

One of the more interesting elements of the game are the wandering monster mechanics — which allow undefeated monsters to move from one room to another. But the longer, slower turns significantly lessened this dynamic of the game. Monsters rarely moved and didn’t move very far.

The longer, slower turns also created poor gameplay in other ways. During our third game, for example, it took nearly two hours for the fourth player to get their first turn. At their beginning of that turn, the first three players were already levels 6th, 8th, and 7th. (The game is won at 10th level.) The fourth player was already 2nd level, but had ended up out of position as the others had all moved away from the entrance of the dungeon. She hadn’t been able to join in the combats or treasure hauls and was seriously disadvantaged.

HOUSE RULES

In order to fix this problem, we introduced a simple set of house rules:

(1) At the beginning of the game, all players roll a single d6. The player with the highest result becomes the Quest Master. (Re-roll ties.)

(2) At the beginning of a round of play, all players draw one (1) Deus ex Munchkin card.

(3) At the beginning of a round of play or at the end of any monster movement phase, the player with the most green feet (movement points) takes a turn. In the case of ties, start at the Quest Master and go clockwise.

(4) On their turn, in addition to all the other actions allow by the rules (playing cards, combat, etc.) a play can take any ONE action which requires the use of movement points.

(5) At the end of each player’s turn, there is a monster movement.

(6) If all of the movement points at the table have been spent at the end of a monster movement, then a new round begins. Flip all of the red feet back to green and continue play.

EFFECTS

These house rules have several effects:

(1) Play looks a little more like traditional Munchkin in that, on any given turn, a player will probably only fight a single combat (at most).

(2) Players don’t have such long lapses between their turns, which also means that there will be a more active churn of resources (which helps to keep the game fresh).

(3) Monsters become more active in their movement around the board, making the dungeon feel more dynamic.

(4) As far as we can tell, no meaningful strategies from the original game are eliminated. But we have discovered that all kinds of new strategies have been created. One major area of strategy became the manipulation of remaining movement tokens (allowing you to take more turns or affect the sequence of play). Another area of strategy rose up around how players traveled together. (In the original rules we all felt like we were basically soloing the game. But the house rules allowed people to either move off by themselves; move with small partnerships; or huddle up as one big group and stick together.)

Game balance appears to be completely unaffected by the modification.

I suspect that once we get the 6-player expansion for the game, the dynamics made possible with these house rules will become even more interesting. And, in my opinion, necessary: When it takes 45-75 minutes to get to the fourth player’s first turn in a four-player game, I can only imagine that it would take 90-120 minutes toget to the sixth player’s turn in a six-player game. And that would be outrageous.

Why didn’t anybody tell me about this?

Jhereg, the first in a series of books starring the character of Vlad Taltos, was originally published 25 years ago and I’m only finding out about it now?

Not fair.

Truth be told, though, I only have myself to blame. I’ve heard about the Dragaeran books a number of times over the last decade or so, mostly on the rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup, but also as far afield as Penny Arcade. I actually bought Jhereg about four years ago, started it, and bounced off the first chapter.

It should be noted that I didn’t bounce because it was bad. I just bounced because I wasn’t in the mood for that sort of book

Which is ironic, because the book is actually almost nothing like the first chapter.

The first chapter reads like the introduction to a grand saga of sorts — something along the lines of A Game of Thrones or the Malazan Empire books. The rest of the book reads pretty much nothing like that. In fact, if I was going to describe the rest of the book, it would be something like this:

A pulp detective novel by Raymond Chandler, except the main character is an assassin instead of a private detective and his seedy office is in a world of high fantasy instead of the 1940s.

And it really is as awesome as that sounds.

Actually, though, saying “high fantasy” is somewhat misleading because one of the things Steven Brust does very well is blending together high fantasy and low fantasy. Vlad Taltos runs a small-time criminal organization in a gritty fantasy city. But just a short teleport-hop away, Taltos will also find himself rubbing shoulders with powerful Dragonlords who have lived for thousands of years and wield powerful sorceries that can lay waste to mountains.

And it works.

As an example of making things work, Brust’s world is one of the rare instances in which I’ve seen anyone attempt to work with a society where easy, prolific, D&D-style revivification is possible. And he makes that world believable, largely by simply saying, “This is the way things works.” And then building the world logically around it. “Death” in the Dragaeran Empire doesn’t mean what “death” does in the real world, and everyone in the story just seamlessly accepts that reality.

What else can I say about Jhereg?

Perhaps the most notable thing about the book is Brust’s prose. It’s not the type of eloquent or beautiful language that lends itself to loving quotation, but it’s tight and it’s fun to read. It’s really easy to plow through a hundred pages and then find yourself wondering where the last hour disappeared to you. I literally lost myself in the story, which is a rare pleasure.

Long story short: If you haven’t already read it, I highly recommend Jhereg. You might be 25 years late to the party, but it’s a really great party and you won’t be the only one to have just arrived.

GRADE: B

Steven Brust
Published: 1983
Publisher: Ace
Cover Price: $7.99
ISBN: 0441006159
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THE RINGWORLD ENGINEERS

Louis Wu sleeps his way across the Ringworld… and then kills everybody he slept with.

THE RINGWORLD THRONE

Within the first few chapters of The Ringworld Throne, I was struck repeatedly by two thoughts:

1. “This is incredibly turgid.”

2. “Oh lord, here we go again.”

To explain the first, let me offer an example: Early in the novel there is a sequence in which the main characters are waiting to meet with another group of characters. They have to wait three nights.

First, it must be understood that there is no particular reason why they have to wait three nights. Niven simply made an arbitrary choice. Second, it must be understood that essentially nothing of interest happens in those three nights. There is exactly one significant conversation and nothing else of consequence.

Despite that, Niven spends over twenty-five pages describing the events of those three nights. The characters mill about pointlessly; they sleep; they eat; they have meaningless sex. And it’s all described in mind-numbing detail. The one significant conversation meanders along through three different sequences stretched across half a day and six pages and is three times too long at that.

It’s boring. Achingly, painfully boring.

To explain the second, let me simply say this: It takes Niven less than a dozen pages before he has retconned the entire plot of the second novel and rendered it into a math error.

Since the entire second novel was, in itself, a massive retcon of the first novel, one begins to wonder if there was ever any actual substance here or if it’s just retcons all the way down.

I also think that there’s a fairly good chance that the original title of this book was Ringworld: Home of the Pointless Orgy until Niven’s editors made him change it. I have never read about so much sex while simultaneously being bored out of my mind. Niven never lets a dozen pages pass without having somebody humping somebody else, nor does he ever let an opportunity pass to make sex sound as boring as he possibly can.

Also, let’s take a moment and talk about Protectors: I know it’s always been kind of tough to take them seriously if you’re a hard science fiction buff. But when the entire conclusion of the novel consists of Protectors running around willy-nilly and a plot lifted from a Benny Hill sketch with the words “sexy nurse” scratched out and replaced with the word “Protector”… well, it’s kinda hard to take them seriously at all.

GRADES:

RINGWORLD ENGINEERS: B-
RINGWORLD THRONE: F

Larry Niven
Published: 1980/1996
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Cover Price: $7.99
ISBN: 0345334302 / 0345412966
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I recently posted reactions to several of R.A. Salvatore’s Drizzt novels. The resulting discussion touched on the familiar disparagment of tie-in fiction and I wanted to take a moment to discuss that: What’s the appeal of tie-in fiction? Why is it so popular despite the perception of poor quality?

The better D&D tie-in novels deliver on three levels:

(1) They deliver fast-paced plots with easy prose and cool characters.

(2) They take place in a familiar, highly-detailed setting.

(3) In fact, it’s a setting that your characters might be playing in next Saturday! Heck, you might even run into the characters from the novel that you’re reading right now! (That sense of a personal connection really can’t be undervalued.)

The poorer D&D tie-in novels only deliver on levels 2 and 3.

You can contrast D&D tie-in novels with the tie-in novels written for Star Trek or Star Wars, which deliver on three similar levels:

(1) They deliver fast-paced plots with easy prose and cool characters.

(2) They take place in a familiar universe and expand your knowledge of an entertaining milieu.

(3) They feature familiar characters that you’ve grown to love through TV or film.

In other words, if you’re looking for short, undemanding reading material, then tie-in fiction can provide it. Tie-in novels are basically filling the same role for people that the pulps did in the ’30s and ’40s.

That at least partially answers the question of popularity. So let’s talk about the image problem that tie-in fiction has: Why is tie-in fiction almost universally considered mediocre at best?

I think there are a couple of reasons. First, tie-in fiction inevitably concentrates your attention on the 90% crap ratio. (Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap.) If I pick up 10 unrelated books and 9 of them suck, I’ll just forget about them and focus on the one which was good, trying to find other works like it. If I pick up 10 D&D books and 9 of them suck, I’ll reach the conclusion that D&D books suck and look for non-D&D books in the future.

Second, the process for creating tie-in fiction doesn’t lend itself to works of greatness. Basically, the vast majority of tie-in authors are established but not top-of-the-line authors. If you’re Iain Banks or Vernor Vinge or J.K. Rowling you don’t need or want tie-in novels, and the “undiscovered greats” are generally prohibited from even submitting. (There are, of course, exceptions to this: Pocket Books remained open to slush pile Star Trek submissions for years and Isaac Asimov wrote a tie-in novel.)

On top of all that, a tie-in author is robbed of the one thing which tends to define the immensely popular works of speculative fiction: The ability to create and introduce a world which captures the imagination. Dune, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and many other classics have uniquely captivating worlds contributing greatly, in my opinion, to their success. But a tie-in author is, by definition, playing in someone else’s playground.

Many of them are also robbed of the ability to create new and memorable characters, but here the D&D tie-in novels prove to be a potential exception. Salvatore’s Drizzt novels are an obvious example of that: The key distinction of those immensely popular works was Salvatore’s ability to create a memorable protagonist. His ability to do so suggests that a Conan, Elric, or Gray Mouser could emerge in the realm of tie-in fiction (although, in my opinion, Drizzt doesn’t reach that level of greatness).

THE LEGACY

The problem with The Legacy is that Salvatore allows one of his strengths (his ability to vividly describe fight scenes) to bloat horribly out of control. The plot, with minimal spoilage, can basically be summarized as such: There is about twenty pages of meaningful character interaction. Then there’s a big battle between dwarves and goblins. This battle is extensively described in both tactics and detail, but is ultimately meaningless: It has no effect whatsoever on the rest of the book. Then there’s another twenty pages or so of meaningful character interaction. And then there’s another huge, rambling fight sequence that lasts for two hundred pages.

The End.

In fairness to the novel, while the battle between the goblins and the dwarves is utterly pointless, the big fight sequence which makes up the bulk of the book is laden with plot. But it’s still just a big fight scene: It’s page after endless page of detailed thrusts, parries, dives, cuts, blood, noble charges, and hard struggle.

Die Hard literally has a narrative with more breathing room.

More damning, however, is that the plot is poorly formed.

(There are some meaningful SPOILERS from this point forward.)

In my reaction to the Icewind Dale Trilogy, I mentioned my belief that perhaps the biggest reason Drizzt Do’Urden caught the imagination of so many readers was Salvatore’s decision to give him a rival of equally deadly skill in the formidable assassin Artemis Entreri.

I don’t waver in that conviction, but in reading the handling of the Drizzt-Entreri rivalry in The Legacy, I kept expecting one or the other to don a leather jacket, hop on a motorcycle, and jump over a shark.

Let me see if I can sum this up: Mixed into the larger fight sequence, Drizzt and Entreri fight. Their fight gets interrupted. They futz around for a bit, and then they fight again… but this fight gets interrupted. So they futz around for a bit, and then they fight again… and this fight gets interrupted, too. So they futz around for a bit, and then they fight again… and this time Drizzt wins by knocking Entreri off a cliff. Entreri falls to his doom.

Except Entreri isn’t dead. He’s got a magical cloak that lets him fly. So he flies back up and they fight again. Drizzt wins again, and this time he knocks Entreri unconscious, causing Entreri to fly into a cliff at literally breakneck speed. Entreri falls to his doom.

Except Entreri still isn’t dead. His now-broken magical cloak has caught on a rocky spur and he’s dangling from a cliff. So a completely different character climbs up to Entreri, cuts the cloak off him entirely, and then watches him fall to his doom.

For real this time.

(Just kidding. In the next book, it’s revealed that Entreri was miraculously saved from his fall by people who had no reason or opportunity to do so.)

There are just so many problems with this…

By the time Salvatore is done, the Drizzt-Entreri rivalry has been robbed of its meaning and significance: While there was definitely room left open for a rematch after the end of The Halfling’s Gem, the numerous fights between the two in The Legacy eventually just become so much noise on the page.

Salvatore, to his credit, manages to recover from his mistakes by providing a really powerful conclusion to the fight… the first time Entreri falls from the cliff. By the third time that Entreri has supposedly fallen to his doom, even that has been turned into a hollow mockery.

More importantly, there are only about fifteen pages of actual plot to be found here, yet Salvatore has stretched that material to cover more than fifty pages through sheer, dull-minded repetition. This is infinitely worse than the wasted space in Exile: There you had random encounters which served no greater purpose in the plot, but at least they were interesting and original in their own right. In The Legacy, you simply have bloat.

And this is just one plot thread. The bloat within the other plot threads is not nearly as egregious, but all of them suffer from it.

Here’s what it really boils down to: The Salvatore who wrote The Crystal Shard would have boiled The Legacy down into about 50 pages of taut, action-packed storytelling. Unfortunately, the Salvatore who actually wrote The Legacy gave us a 300 page mess leading to…

STARLESS NIGHT

Basically, Starless Night suffers from the same problem The Legacy does, although to a slightly lesser degree: Instead of 50 pages of plot bloated into 300 pages of novel, it’s 100 pages of plot bloated into 300 pages of novel.

The actual, meaningful plot of Starless Night is fairly straightforward: Drizzt returns to his homeland and discovers that the dark elves are planning to conquer the kingdom of his dwarven friend.

That’s a solid plot. It not only moves along the arc of the greater story Salvatore is obviously trying to tell, it also offers up those essential crucibles which reveal and develop character: Drizzt, returning to the homeland he had forsaken, has a meaningful internal struggle. His friends’ reactions to his decision are meaningful turning points. And so forth.

But again, Salvatore can’t keep his eye on the ball: The plot wanders off in a thousand random and meaningless directions. Several pointless fights consume page after page of empty action. Narrative beats are repeated again and again and again… and again until you’re reduced to tears of boredom.

Characters also begin acting in a shallow and random fashion. Whether it’s a dark elf priestess monologuing with Machiavellian glee over the doom of our hero while the hero’s allies rally right behind her or a dark elf mercenary, immediately after capturing Drizzt, launching an elaborate and completely unmotivated plan to free him again, Salvatore’s characters simply lack any believability.

(To clarify: Motivation is given to Drizzt’s liberator. However, the motivation makes no sense. After being instructed by his employer to kill all the witnesses to Drizzt’s capture, the character concludes that his employer will make a public announcement that Drizzt has been captured and, thus, screw things up. The character, therefore, decides to free Drizzt and avoid the crisis.)

(Feel free to read through that again. But it won’t help.)

Salvatore doesn’t do himself any favors by introducing a plethora of new characters. Mostly villains, these new characters aren’t meaningfully vested with any identity or purpose: They’re given names, shoved briefly onstage, and then hacked down.  You have the vague feeling that perhaps you should be cheering Drizzt on with particular vigor when he confronts the drow priestess who’s been torturing him… but since that torture was scarcely even mentioned before the confrontation happens, you don’t really care.

And don’t even get me started with the half dozen people who all want to fight with Drizzt so that they can prove that they’re the Biggest Drow in Town. The final confrontation between Drizzt and one of these would-be challengers was cleverly handled (with Drizzt’s natural talents facing off against magically-enhanced skill), but since the challenger had absolutely no personality or existence beyond “I want to fight Drizzt!!!” the entire confrontation felt pointless. It was just a fight for the sake of a fight.

These books are deeply disappointing after the fun times of the Icewind Dale Trilogy and the Dark Elf Trilogy. I own several more books in the series (having bought them in bulk so that I could take them on a vacation to Mexico), but have never bothered to read them.

GRADES:

THE LEGACY: D+
STARLESS NIGHT: D+

R.A. Salvatore
Published: 1993 / 1994
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cover Price: $7.99
ISBNs: 0786948590 / 0786948612