showard@udenva.UUCP (Mr. Blore) (01/26/86)
In article <178@oberon.UUCP> tanael@oberon.UUCP (Ronalyn Tanael) writes: >Anyone out there in net land want to give a review of Weis's & Hickman's >Dragonlance series or Gygax's Adventures in Greyhawk? I am interested in >these books, but don't want to waste my time if they are just crude adapt- >ations of the D&D game. Well, I've read the three (actually I should say the first three [sigh]) Dragonlance novels and found them very enjoyable. They rely much more on the characters than one would expect, with relatively little hack'n'slash gruesome combat scenes. Unfortunately, this is a TSR product, which through some twisted logic means it must be AD&D compatible (it's also a series of modules, 12 at last count and no end in sight [heavy sigh]), so the magic is fairly mundane, and the map (why does there always have to be a map?) was obviously drawn on hex paper. I absolutely detest Gygax's writing style, so I have avoided the Adventures in Greyhawk book(s?). There was a short story in the Dragon, featuring the characters from the Greyhawk Adventures, and it was pretty lame. The two main characters seem to be pale imitations of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser (EGG himself admits this, though denies it was intentional) without much in the way of characterization. The stilted "Gentle Reader, Kindly Editor" style is only slightly subdued, and Gygax persists in using long words that don't really mean what he thinks they do. The story itself involved a ridiculous three-level chess game with pieces that are all named after AD&D monsters. To further this offense (Gygax must have read "Chessmen of Mars" shortly before writing this) the wonderful TSR people then wasted even more magazine space by printing the ludicrously complex rules to "Dragonchess".(Why do I still subscribe to that magazine? [heavy heavy sigh]) "Look over there, a dry ice factory. Good place to get some thinking done" -- Mr. Blore, the DJ who would not die {hplabs, seismo}!hao!udenva!showard or {boulder, cires, ucbvax!nbires, cisden}!udenva!showard