DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 33D: The Hell Hound at the Door

At the far end of the room there was a small wooden bookshelf containing a dozen assorted volumes. These, of course, caught the particular attention Ranthir, who was also delighted to discover that one of them was a thick tome of spells.

Ranthir was not able to study the spellbook completely, but the illustrations of eyes being burnt away with acid were enough to leave him concerned.

NPC spellbooks are a huge pain in the ass to prep.

I’ve previously shared a tip for improvising NPC spell lists, but when it comes to their spellbooks, there is no shuffling: You mostly just need to commit yourself to the rote task of writing down lists of spells for each level.

I guess there is one potential cheat: Just replicate the caster’s prepared spell list and call it “good enough” for the spellbook, but I generally try to include at least two or three “extra” spells per level. (Partly for the sake of verisimilitude. Partly because it gives me some stuff to play with if the spellcaster should become a recurring characters. See, also, The Principles of RPG Villainy.)

I heartily recommend prepping these spellbooks as handouts. You don’t have to get fancy or anything: But a prepared piece of paper with all the spells listed on it that you can hand to the player at the table is just a great way of making the spellbook a concrete and persistent resource.

Way back in Session 3, we actually saw Ranthir loot Collus’ spellbook:

COLLUS’ SPELLBOOK

0 – acid splash, arcane mark, dancing lights, daze, detect magic, detect poison, disrupt undead, flare, ghost sound, light, mage hand, mending, message, open/close, prestidigitation, ray of frost, read magic, resistance, touch of fatigue

1^st – animate rope, burning hands, comprehend languages, detect undead, feather fall, floating disk, shield

For a low-level wizard, this was a treasure trove of new spells. Deciphering and copying this spellbook became a significant, long-term project for Ranthir. In every spare moment he could afford— and Ptolus certainly makes it difficult to find a spare moment! — Ranthir bunkered down and studied. You can find references to this in Session 7 of the campaign journal, but it was actually happening quite regularly:

Dominic expended himself in channeling the holy energy of Athor to heal as many of their wounds as he could. Elestra’s battered body was restored entirely and Ranthir was left with only a weariness from the blood he had lost. But the painful wounds to either side of Agnarr’s neck refused to close and, after inspecting them, Dominic concluded that Agnarr would need a full day of rest under his ministrations.

So Dominic settled into Agnarr’s room, praying occasionally and generally tending to his wounds. Ranthir retired to his own bed and set to work copying an additional spell from Collus’ spellbook into his own that would allow him to detect the presence of the undead – he wasn’t sure why, but he had a sneaking suspicion it might come in handy.

Magic being as powerful and versatile as it is, of course, the power unlocked by virtue of an NPC’s spellbook can often be the greatest and most valuable of treasures. In Session 12, for example, there was a direct pay-off for all of Ranthir’s hard work:

Tee led them to the river’s edge and then glowered down at it. Seeing the noxious water again – the edges of the cavern floor corroded and blackened where it met the river – did nothing to distill her fears. She had no interest in trying to wade these waters, no matter how calm the current might be.

Ranthir, however, was able to tentatively offer a possible solution. He had never stopped using the few spare moments in his day to study the spellbook they had wrested from the body of Collus (Toridan Cran’s arcanist), and one of the spells he had deciphered from its contents would allow him to conjure forth a floating disc of pure energy. It was a small disc and would only carry one of them at a time – but it should be a relatively trivial matter for him to ferry them across the river and, when the time came, to ferry them back again.

With the spellbook as a tangible prop (tucked away with the PC’s character sheet) and its study as a project, an NPC’s spellbook becomes a lovely and persistent reminder of everything that the PCs have accomplished — their history made manifest in the present.

I also love to use NPC spellbooks as a delivery mechanism for non-core spells. This might be a spell of my own creation, but more often than not I’m just culling awesome stuff from a variety of supplements. Perusing Vocaetun’s spellbook, for example, gave Ranthir access to a couple new spells:

VOCAETUN’S SPELLBOOK

0—acid splash, arcane mark, assess creature, dancing lights, daze, detect magic, detect poison, disrupt undead, flare, ghost sound, light, mage hand, mending, message, open/close, ray of frost, read magic, resistance, touch of fatigue

1st—acidic curse, color spray, comprehend languages, endure elements, protection from chaos, protection from law, ray of enfeeblement, reduce person, shield, silent image

2nd—invisibility, minor image, mirror image, obscure object

3rd—displacement, fly.

Assess Creature
Divination
Level: Brd 1, Clr 0, Drd 0, Rng 1, Pal 1, Sor/Wiz 0
Components: S
Casting Time: One standard action
Range: Close (25 feet + 5 feet/two levels)
Target: One creature
Duration: Instantaneous
Saving Throw: Will negates
Spell Resistance: Yes

With a wave of your hand, you determine the Hit Dice of one creature. This spell is foiled by any type of magical disguise, polymorph or shapechange.

Acidic Curse
Evocation [Acid]
Level: Sor/Wiz1
Components: V, S, M
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Range: Close (25 feet + 5 feet/two levels)
Target: One creature with eyes
Duration: Instantaneous
Saving Throw: Fortitude negates
Spell Resistance: Yes

You cause a victim’s eyes to fill with acid, inflicting 1d6 points of acid damage and blinding the target for 1d4 rounds. Creatures who suffer no damage from the acid (due to a successful saving throw, an immunity, or a spell granting resistance) are not blind.

Material Component: A bit of ragweed.

Open Game License

Using loot as a vector for delivering original spell content was once quite common in the earliest days of the game, when the core rulebooks featured only a paucity of spells that were “commonly” known. Then, as now, when your players learn the benefits of getting their claws on a spellbook, an encounter with an NPC throwing around strange eldritch arts becomes not only terrifying, but also exciting — redolent with the promise that they’ll soon have the opportunity to loot and learn those arts for themselves.

Campaign Journal: Session 33E – Running the Campaign: Battles at the Door
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 33D: THE HELL HOUND AT THE DOOR

December 28th, 2008
The 18th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

They headed out the opposite door and found themselves in another hall with doors to both their left and right. Arbitrarily choosing the door to the left, Tee picked the lock. Agnarr kicked it open.

The room beyond was extremely untidy, with a fetid smell that seemed to peremeate everything. The simple furnishings were crude and ill-kept. A weasel-faced man lying on the far bed jerked awake as the door crashed open.

Agnarr hesitated for a moment, uncertain whether the man might be a prisoner or not (the door, after all, had been locked and the room stank). But then he noticed that there was a sword laying on the bed and the man had a dragon pistol strapped to his side.

Agnarr charged with Tee on his heels. They hoped to silence the man before he could say anything, but he dove adroitly off the bed and rolled to his feet, firing his dragon pistol. He started shouting for help.

Tor and Dominic, still in the hall, turned and headed for the door at the far end of the hall, throwing their weight against it.

Tee, meanwhile, circled to the side of the weasel-faced man. Her blade darted here and there, keeping the man’s blade completely engaged while Agnarr came up from the other side and delivered the killing blow.

Someone threw themselves against the door Dominic and Tor were propping themselves against. It barely budged. They glanced at each and made a quick, unspoken decision. Dominic stepped away and Tor, timing things perfectly, yanked the door open at precisely the right moment.

A young elf woman – ebon-skinned like Shilukar – came stumbling through, thrown off-balance by the sudden disappearance of the door she had been planning to throw herself against.

Dominic and Tor were quick to take advantage – the former’s mace crushing her upper arm and Tor’s sword cutting deep into her thigh. She stumbled further down the hall, shouting over her shoulder. “Theral! There are six of them! Grealdan’s dead!”

Dominic looked through the open door and spotted Theral – the Brother of Venom that Tee had seen discovering Reggaloch’s body – beginning to cast a spell. He promptly slammed the door shut.

Almost simultaneously, with a powerful sweep of his sword, Tor caught the dark elf woman in the side of the face – his sword cut through one cheek, passed through her mouth, and out the other side. Her severed jaw fell to the floor and her body followed after it.

They took a moment to collect themselves and then threw open the door again.

HELL HOUND AT THE DOOR

A hell hound was at the door!

Like the ones that had attacked them at Pythoness House, the hound’s skin was cooled lava and its gaping mouth was a lake of fire that gouted a cone of flame down the length of the hall.

Beyond the hound was a massive chamber, its walls painted in horrific combinations of kaleidoscopic color. On the far side of the hall they could see a set of wide stairs leading down. To one side of the room stood Theral. At first there appeared to be six others on the other side of the room, but then they realized that there was only one man there – Vocaetun, the cultist with an ebon hand tattooed on the front of his neck – his form blurred and duplicated a half dozen times.

Tor and Agnarr squared off against the hell hound, rapidly reducing it to a pile of slag-like magma.

Theral, seeing the body of the dark elf woman and watching the fighters demolishing his hound, cursed and then shouted to Vocaetun. “Hold them here while I fetch the damn rats!”

Theral ran off down a side corridor. Vocaetun glared at his retreating back.

As the hell hound finally collapsed, Vocaetun waved a wand in Tor’s direction and then disappeared. Tor felt his eyes burning as they filled with acid.

Elestra leaped over the magma pile and headed towards the hall that Theral had dashed down. Rounding the corner she skidded to a stop.

“There’s a wall!”

“Don’t believe it!” Tee shouted, remembering the illusionary wall that Uranik had spoken of.

But Elestra hesitated. She didn’t want to throw herself into the unknown without the others to back her up.

Then Tee screamed.

Vocaetun had reappeared and hit her with an acidic curse that turned her own tears to caustic acid, having somehow circled around in the meditative chamber behind them. But none of them could see that – not even Tee, who was now clawing at her burning eyes.

Ranthir, seeing Tee’s reaction, knew that it must have come from behind them. “Over here! Tee’s being attacked!”

The others closed in on Vocaetun, but between the mirrored images dancing around his figure, the blurring displacement that seemed to cheat their vision, the blinding attacks from his wand, and the tight quarters, things quickly got confused and cramped.

Vocaetun mounted a fighting retreat back across the meditative chambers into the hall on the far side and then through a secret door into the kaleidoscopic hall. He had been hurt and was clearly beginning to panic. Once he was through the secret door, he broke into a pell-mell run across the hall – heading towards the stairs on the far side.

Running the Campaign: NPC Spellbooks – Campaign Journal: Session 33E
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Go to Part 1

TO WAR!

Shadow of the Dragon Queen takes place during the Siege of Kalaman.

No, not the Siege of Kalaman in 352 AC where Laurana is the general and the Dragon Armies deployed their flying citadels for the first time. This is an earlier Siege of Kalaman that takes place in 3-mumble-mumble AC, when a completely different flying citadel showed up for the first time, shredding absolutely everything we know about this continuity.

Ironically, I think Kalaman was chosen for this campaign because so little was established in the Dragonlance Saga about what happened there during the War of the Lance. Across all fourteen of the original modules, there’s only like a dozen paragraphs you would have to keep track of to keep things consistent, so it’s almost impressive in a way that they nevertheless managed to screw it up.

(I’ll stop calling out rotten continuity at this point, for that way lies madness.)

The other reason to set a campaign here is that Kalaman is basically the point closest to the Dragon Armies at the beginning of the War of the Lance which is NOT conquered by them. Go any closer to the draconian homelands and the PCs can’t save the day. Go any farther away and you can’t get away with telling a story of the early days of the war where people are still coming to grips with the true nature of the Dragon Queen’s threat.

The point is that Shadow of the Dragon Queen is set in the heart of a war, and the PCs will be no strangers to the battlefield. Over the course of the campaign, there will be twelve major battles that the PCs will be part of, and you’ll have two options for handling them.

First, as I mentioned, there’s the Warriors of Krynn boardgame, which contains each of those battles as individual scenarios. I’m likely going to do a separate review of the board game and will take a closer look at how it integrates with Shadow of the Dragon Queen there.

But you don’t need to buy Warriors of Krynn to run Shadow of the Dragon Queen. The book includes a system of battlefield encounters which can be run as standard D&D combats. These consist of four parts:

The battlemap. These are gorgeously rendered and are roughly the dimensions you’d expect in any other D&D battlemap.

Notably, however, the battlemaps have a 15-foot rim on all sides referred to as the fray. This is the first way in which these battlefield encounters represent the chaotic melee swirling around the PCs: Each fray has unique properties, generally being difficult terrain and requiring a saving throw to avoid damage if a character enters the area.

There are also the battlefield events, which occur randomly whenever a character enters the fray or at initiative count 0 on each round. These include things like:

• A volley of arrows falls on a random character’s position.
• Low-flying dragonnels flee across the battlefield.
• A draconian dragon rider falls from their mount, plummeting out of the sky and landing on the battlefield.
• An injured member of the PCs’ army crawls onto the battlefield, begging for aid.

Finally, of course, there’s the encounter itself. Sometimes this is a single group of bad guys; in other cases there’ll be a scripted sequence with additional bad guys showing up over time. Either way, when the bad guys are all defeated, the encounter (and the wider battle) come to an end.

This seems like a really simple structure, but conceptually it packs a big punch. There’s a lot you can do with just these few simple tools to bring radically different battlefields to vivid life in your campaign.

The one thing I would like to be able to say is that the outcome of these battlefield encounters have an effect on the outcome of the wider battle. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Which is perhaps unsurprising, because…

ALL ABOARD, FOLKS!

… the campaign is horrendously railroaded.

By which I mean both that the railroading is relentless and all-encompassing, but also that the methods they use to force the railroad down your throat are just hopelessly awful.

Phrases such as “encourage the characters to” and “it’s up to the characters to…” and the like seem to be the book’s favorite ways to signal the DM that the time has come to take the character sheets away from the irresponsible players.

Different people will have different reactions to this kind of stuff, but for me the absolute worst type of railroading is when the DM takes control (directly or indirectly) of what your character says. (Because, honestly, what’s left at that point? We’re literally just sitting at the table watching someone awkwardly talk to themselves.) And Shadow of the Dragon Queen absolutely loves this.

For example, the PCs have been railroaded into a debate with NPC military commanders about what the next logical course of action should be. The NPCs make their arguments, and then the DM is instructed to:

…encourage the characters to make the case that Lord Soth is a threat and the Dragon Army’s plans to the north shouldn’t be taken lightly.

But then the writers think to themselves, “Maybe the players won’t take the hint from the clue-by-four we’ve smashed into their faces. Or maybe the Dungeon Master won’t have the guts to put the gun to their heads and keep them in line.”

The answer, of course, is to cue up a GMPC. So, for example, even after you’ve “encouraged” the players to say their scripted lines, it’s an NPC who swoops in and gets to be the hero of the scene:

Darrett then asks Vendri to let him take the characters and a contingent of troops into the Northern Wastes to investigate whatever the Dragon Army wants there. [Vendri] asks the PCs to leave while she and Darrett discuss details…

I cannot emphasize enough that this is not one or two isolated incidents: It is the entire campaign. Just an endless, mind-numbing litany of blow-by-blow descriptions of how the authors anticipate/demand each scene be played out.

“The NPCs will say. Then the PCs will say. Then the NPC will say. Then the PCs will say.”

This is interspersed liberally with “the PCs can roleplay or they can make a Persuasion/Intimidation/whatever check,” which (a) is just bad praxis (rolls and roleplaying work together; it’s not either-or) and (b) is completely pointless anyway, because the check result never seems to vary how the conversation plays out!

And I just want to take a moment to say something truly from the bottom of my heart:

Fuck Darrett.

This prick gets attached to the PCs like a cancerous mole early in the campaign. He tags along as a sidekick squire, but then, suddenly, he’s the main character: It’s him, not the PCs, who gets promoted based on their adventures together. It’s him, not the PCs, who’s scripted to save Lord Bakaris’ life. Before you know it, he’s the PCs’ boss, ordering them around, making all the important decisions, and continuing to scoop up all the accolades.

So, again: Fuck Darrett.

And there’s basically an endless parade of these jackasses through the entire campaign.

About midway through the book, for example, Darrett says, “See that huge hexmap over there? I’m going to stay here on the boat. Y’all go and explore for a while!” For one glorious moment, the players will rejoice! The fetters have come off! Not only do the PCs finally get to ditch Darrett, they’ll be in control of their own destiny! They’ll get to make their own choices!

Except no. Because the authors are so terrified of the players having the slightest bit of agency that literally eight paragraphs later a brand new GMPC pops up with detailed instructions on EXACTLY THE ORDER IN WHICH YOU WILL CONDUCT YOUR “EXPLORATION!”

There’s even a little scene so that, if the PCs are confused about who their new master is, Darrett will helpfully explain it to them.

The whole thing is so grotesquely pointless that it almost feels as if the authors are being deliberately petty. As if they have some personal grudge against the players.

THE BORING BITS

As I look over my notes for Shadow of the Dragon Queen and flip through the book to refresh my memory, I can see that it’s studded with big, impressive set pieces:

• huge battles,
• dragonriding duels,
• flying cities,
• gnomish siege weapons,
• ruined cities,

and more!

Just looking through this list, it seems as if this campaign should be a thrill-fest from one end to the other.

So why did I find the book so utterly stultifying to read?

Largely because the medium is the message. When I read an adventure book like this, what I’m thinking about is the experience of running it at the table. And the picture Shadow of the Dragon Queen paints of the actual play experience isn’t a pretty one.

Yeah, the set pieces are shiny and cool in an abstract sense. But when I’m reduced to a mute audience either watching somebody else do all the cool stuff or stuck as a helpless puppet unable to have any effect on what’s happening, they lose their luster.

For example, consider the big finale of the campaign:

First, the PCs fight and fight and fight and fight to prevent the bad guys from taking control of the flying citadel!

And it doesn’t matter, because an unskippable cutscene is triggered and they’re forced to just watch while the bad guy activates the flying citadel helm.

But that doesn’t matter, either, because it doesn’t work and the citadel is falling apart all around them!

But that ALSO doesn’t matter, because after the PCs escape from the collapsing citadel, they turn around and see a different bad guy flying off in a completely different citadel!

Whoopsie-doopsie!

You can almost be impressed by the skill it takes to build up so many levels of irrelevancy. (Almost.) But they aren’t even done!

See, the PCs might think to themselves, “We’ve gotta stop the other citadel!” and rush to do that. That’s not the plot, though, so the DM is instructed to use endlessly respawning death dragons “that attack until the characters retreat.” The defenses are too strong! All you can do is watch helplessly while dragonnels ferry troops from the ground into the citadel!

Three pages later, though, after the entire dragon army has transferred itself into the flying citadel and its defenses are even more impregnable? Now it’s time to attack, and so a gaggle of GMPCs show up and give the PCs their marching orders.

Sure, after all that, the dragon-riding duel with Dragon Highmaster Kansaldi Fire-Eyes (complete with pre-scripted conclusion) has a cool illustration, but I honestly find it impossible to get legitimately enthused about it.

When the book goes to such elaborate lengths to scream, “THIS IS ALL POINTLESS AND NOTHING YOU DO MATTERS!” eventually you believe it, no matter how pretty the two-dimensional set painting is.

Grade: D-

Project Lead: F. Wesley Schneider
Writers: Justice Arman, Brian Cortijo, Kelly Digges, Dan Dillon, Ari Levitch, Renee Knipe, Ben Petrisor, Mario Ortegon, Erin Roberts, James L. Sutter

Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $49.95
Page Count: 224

A guide to grades here at the Alexandrian.

Meh.

When Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen was announced, I was really excited about it. So excited, in fact, that I ended up spending most of the summer and beyond doing a deep dive into the Dragonlance Saga. I was excited about the campaign returning to the War of the Lance, the time period of the original Saga (and accompanying Chronicles trilogy). I was excited about Stephen Baker (designer of great mainstream wargames) and Rob Daviau (father of the legacy board game genre) joining forces to design Warriors of Krynn, a companion wargame that was designed to be played in conjunction with the campaign.

What an amazing opportunity to reinvent the bond between wargaming and roleplaying that has been part of D&D’s legacy from the very beginning! And, more than that, an opportunity to triumphantly realize the unfulfilled promises of the original Saga!

Plus it was coming out within mere days of my birthday! What a fun little birthday treat! I didn’t hesitate at all in preordering the Deluxe Edition that bundled the D&D campaign and board game together into one package.

So when the book showed up at the beginning of December I didn’t hesitate for a moment in ripping open the box— (Literally. The Deluxe Edition box is incredibly fragile and basically impossible to open without destroying it. Bizarrely, it’s apparently deliberately designed to be disposable.) —and flipping open the book.

Of course, I was still excited! Just completely engaged with the book. There’s some nifty little player handouts in the first chapter that are designed as missives from various NPCs to the PCs as an introduction to the setting, and I recorded some dramatic readings of those, thinking they’d be cool to send to my players as little teasers.

But then I found myself reading the book less and less. At first I thought it was just the holidays keeping me distracted, but by the end of the month it was clear that Shadow of the Dragon Queen had become a slog for me. It was frustrating and, even worse, it was boring.

And then the OGL crisis hit, with Wizards of the Coast flipping off the entire hobby and promising to detonate a devastating nuclear bomb in the middle of the industry. As I dealt with the professional and personal fallout from that, I wasn’t really in the mood to read any D&D books (and it wouldn’t really have been fair to the book), so I laid it aside. Fortunately, the OGL crisis eventually resolved itself in perhaps the best way anyone could have reasonable hoped for, and so, in February, I eventually picked up Shadow of the Dragon Queen again.

… and it was a still a miserable slog.

To a large extent, the simple fact that I have only just now, at the end of April, managed to drag my carcass to the final page of the book, is a pretty accurate summary of my entire review.

IS THIS BOOK FOR YOU?

The original Dragonlance adventures, published in the 1980’s, sought to bring the power of a true fantasy epic to Dungeons & Dragons. It plunged the players into the world-spanning epic of the War of the Lance, in which the evil draconians of Takhisis, the Dragon Queen, formed the Dragon Armies and invaded the realms of Ansalon, positioning the PCs to change the course of history.

Shadow of the Dragon Queen is set during the earliest days of the war, ostensibly serving as a prequel or sidequel of sorts to the Dragonlance Saga. Part of the appeal of a ‘quel narrative like this, of course, is seeing how the continuity meshes with the existing work. When done well, as in the early issues of Kurt Busiek’s Untold Tales of Spider-Man or Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, you get an exciting bit of frisson whenever you see a character walk off stage left, knowing that they are simultaneously walking on stage right in a different story. Like a great heist movie, there is a kind of puzzle-solving delight in seeing the pieces come together, plus a real opportunity for depth and meaning that resonates beyond the immediate boundaries of what you’re creating.

The problem, though, is that Shadow of the Dragon Queen cares so little for the established continuity of Dragonlance or the War of the Lance that it’s a complete turn-off for any Dragonlance fans who would be interested in that sort of thing.

For example, the fact that several hundred years ago the True Gods abandoned the world of Ansalon during the Cataclysm and have not been heard from since is a really big deal. It’s a central tenet of the Dragonlance setting, a crucial element of the War of the Lance, and something which, in my opinion, is part of what makes the original Dragonlance Saga something special and unique in the annals of D&D. The quest to find the True Gods and restore the divine magic of clerics is, in fact, a really big part of the Saga.

So when it became clear to me that Shadow of the Dragon Queen was set in a time period before the True Gods returned to Ansalon, I was really curious: How were the designers going to deal with the fact that clerics canonically (pun intended) don’t have their spells?

And the designers’ provided a truly epic answer:

“Eh… fuck it.”

The book provides a short dream sequence. If a player creates a cleric, the DM basically says, “A god appears to you in your sleep! So I guess all that stuff that happens over in the Saga was completely pointless! Woo-hoo!”

The fact that the designers really couldn’t give a fig about this is really underlined by the fact that the FIRST TRUE CLERIC TO BE SEEN IN CENTURIES is just… kind of irrelevant? There’s one oblique reference to an NPC being impressed if the PCs have healing magic and that’s it.

Okay, so existing Dragonlance fans aren’t the target audience here. None of that continuity crap matters because this campaign is being written for new fans! Shadow of the Dragon Queen is their introduction to the wonderful world of Dragonlance, and it’s fine if stuff doesn’t match up perfectly up with the old stuff.

… except Shadow of the Dragon Queen kinda sucks as an introduction to Dragonlance.

The setting “gazetteer” (if you’re willing to call it that) is just fifteen pages long, and six of those are dedicated to short descriptions of every god. There’s an absolutely stunning poster map of Ansalon by Francesca Baerald, but most of the locations listed on it are not given even the briefest of descriptions.

From a player’s perspective it’s probably a slightly better experience, but I honestly don’t know how any DM would be expected to run the setting with confidence based on the information (or, more accurately, the lack of information) given here.

So if the book shows a careless disregard for the old fans and is completely inadequate for the new fans… who is it for, exactly?

Go to Part 2: All Aboard