Well, in a fit of nostalgia, since I'm having fun with the
Shandalar campaign occasionally (and
Magic Duels occasionally), I suddenly remembered that MtG used to have novels, so after a little research I've picked up the first 8 or 10 (I don't recall which), written back before Wizards of the Coast decided to go for epic long-running series. But I fully plan to get to those, too (at least as far as the end of the Phyrexian war, maybe also through the next large arc or a little farther, after which the quality largely tanked too much.)
Just finished
Arena, the very first
Magic: the Gathering novel, written by William R. Forstchen. I'm going into allllll of these with pretty low expectations, and this was a good start, if rather... hmm... not quite grimdark... but close. Grimgrime? The random repetitive cursing got distracting, and I'd bet a Coke that one in five pages either take place in a sewer or might as well. Of course it's a bad situation in a city (entirely set there, with a few scenes outside toward the end), so the super-grimy tone fit the setting enough. Harder core than the
Dragonlance novels the original readers (who would have been me if I had cared at the time) would have been coming to the series from.
Back when these novels were released, continuity wasn't a concern because the cards themselves carried no real continuity, or faint wisps at most; which is why I didn't care to ever buy them or even borrow them from friends. Heck, I didn't know it at the time, but the
Wheel of Time series was already running and I would have eaten that up like cake! (I got into it a few years later, just after college, when
Lord of Chaos, Book 6, came out.)
But I'm feeling old, I guess, and just want something imaginative to chew on in between more serious research reading.
The author did a fair job working out the plot, and I felt emotional (in a good way) about the situations a few times. He didn't always have a handle on juggling the various character-secrets around, though, and especially in the first half (but even occasionally in the second half) there were times when the characters would ignorantly forget what they had just heard or even said themselves a few pages or minutes ago --
of course so-and-so suspects "X", YOU JUST HEARD HIM SAY SO WHY ARE YOU CONNIVING AS THOUGH THAT MIGHT OR MIGHT
NOT BE A FACTOR!
Still, he takes a Yojimbo/Fistful of Dollars plot, with a Gladiator structure added in (a few years before the Ridley Scott film as I recall), and manages to improve the basic source material quite far -- and I regard that as no small achievement.
Also, it's fun as a player of the game (especially back with old cards like this) making guesses as to what spells are supposed to be (or seeing them called out straight up), even if the mechanics of the game itself don't translate well to something-like-a-real-life situation and so have to be changed for the scenes to work. I grinned every time someone threw a "fissure", which in the card game destroys a lot of things that a real fissure wouldn't. As in the card game at the time, they're popular among the fighting characters, too! -- and then the author comes up with ways to make a fissure kill a swarm of flying bats for instance.
And it was fun seeing a bunch of core concepts being introduced to readers who might never have played the game, even though I knew the concepts would be changing later as various writers (and the game designers) worked out the milieu better. Often I'd ponder 'when' this was supposed to be happening in relation to the first major plot arc (clearly not later than that): during its multi-thousand year run, or sometime before it (but not too long before)? Well, that's why these books are in a state of semi-canon.
Anyway, more fun to be had soon along this line. Overall glad to have read it, and while I'd give it a 5/10 I'm just doing that to set a relative bar for other MtG books (some of which I've heard are much better, others much worse, although lots of readers seem to rank
Arena up pretty high.)
Next up,
The Whispering Woods.
