Community

Well the Cradle certainly is a rough place to make a living!  The risk/reward ratio also seems to be stacked against you.  Risk your life and probably die in exchange for permission to sleep  on the floor and eat old bread for a couple days J  I suppose one only makes a deal like that if desperation has set in.  Jaleigh does a nice job describing the battles in the tournament.  Her pacing is very good and descriptions are easy to follow.  I would think writing fight scenes would be difficult.  It’s so easy to lose your reader in the details of all the action.  I felt like a had a good understanding of all the grittiness of the battle.

I like how we’re learning more about Ruen in this selection.  He sure has become a lot more caring and selfless since Icelin first met him.  Makes me wonder if his initial greed when dealing with Icelin was just an act or if he had a change or heart?

I’ve been thinking more about character classes the past couple chapters.  Dado hit on this a little bit too.  My guess is Ruen is a multiclass rogue/monk.  What do you guys think?  I’m a little unsure on Icelin’s class.  In a way she’s like a wizard in that she initially learned her spells from a spellbook.  But now it seems that she is able to cast spells simply by focusing her energy, which makes her seem a little more like a sorcerer.  Albeit a sorcerer with control issues.

In other news, Seattle finally has a summer for the first time in like 2 years.  It actually hit mid-80s this past weekend.  I took the opportunity to jump in the lake and go swimming. 

"We're at the nether end of Waterdeep, yet they still get around to namin' everythin' here.  Unsettlin', that's what it is.  Unnatural."

Sull's comment here brings focus to a highlight of this book, all of the interesting settings, which are making my imagination as both a reader and a D&D player go bonkers.  I love the names too; I recently put together a whole city for a D&D campaign, and the naming of everything was equal parts joy and torment.  Joy when you get it right, or when a name inspires an awesome feature, and torment when you have a great feature, and you can't come up with an equally great name!

And we now have the story of Sull, which definitely was connected to his role in the community.  It adds a very believable motivation as to why our favorite neighborhood butcher would risk everything for Icelin.

Ruen continues to get more and more interesting.  As for class, I think if I were to build him now, I'd make him a monk, using a rogue-like theme and background for extra skills and such.  Icelin is described as memorizing spells, so I'd say she's a wizard, though the spellscar is obviously causing all these wild magic effects.  It's almost like a Dark Sun-style defiling, only in miniature and concentrated on herself.

Actually, thinking about this leads me to a few questions for Jaleigh.  These books were published before the rules of 4E were completely clarified and definitely before PH3 finally gave us the monk, but now we have the sequel coming up, which features Icelin at least.  First, did you do any modifications to elements in the story that are parallel to game mechanics in the sequel?  And second, if you hadn't written Mistshore until right now, do you think you the characters might've ended up differently?

Aug 7, 2012 -- 7:47PM, Gemini_Maxwell wrote:

"We're at the nether end of Waterdeep, yet they still get around to namin' everythin' here.  Unsettlin', that's what it is.  Unnatural."

Sull's comment here brings focus to a highlight of this book, all of the interesting settings, which are making my imagination as both a reader and a D&D player go bonkers.  I love the names too; I recently put together a whole city for a D&D campaign, and the naming of everything was equal parts joy and torment.  Joy when you get it right, or when a name inspires an awesome feature, and torment when you have a great feature, and you can't come up with an equally great name!

I'm with you.  Naming things in novels is often times the bane of my existence, Gemini.  It's as you say, when you come up with a great name, it can really help to define the setting or character and crystallize his or her identity in my mind.  But when you consider the sheer number of things you have to name, whether you're writing a novel or designing a campaign, inevitably there are going to be some names that you're never satisfied with.  For example, I loved the Dusk and Dawn inn as soon as I thought of it, but it took me a long time to come up with names for Icelin and Ruen.  I'm glad the settings are sparking your imagination!  

Aug 7, 2012 -- 7:47PM, Gemini_Maxwell wrote:

Actually, thinking about this leads me to a few questions for Jaleigh.  These books were published before the rules of 4E were completely clarified and definitely before PH3 finally gave us the monk, but now we have the sequel coming up, which features Icelin at least.  First, did you do any modifications to elements in the story that are parallel to game mechanics in the sequel?  And second, if you hadn't written Mistshore until right now, do you think you the characters might've ended up differently?

First, let me warn people up front that in addressing questions about the sequel, there will obviously be spoilers for which characters appear, and thus which characters survive this book.  I'm not too worried about this, as the description for Spider and Stone on Amazon goes ahead and spoils which characters are in the novel *sigh*, but if you don't want to know any tidbits about the sequel, don't read on in this section of my post.  








Now that that's out of the way, on to your questions.  As you said, I had access to the monk class for the sequel, which was handy.    Ruen definitely draws on those aspects of his background more in Spider and Stone, but there's a story purpose to it too, things he's forced to confront as part of his character growth.  In Mistshore, he's more of a rogue/lapsed monk.  He's in hiding in more ways than one.  If I was writing Mistshore today, hmmm...it's hard to speculate too much, but I don't think I would have done anything drastically different, I just would have been able to define the character classes a bit better.  If I remember right, I had to fudge a few things because of not knowing exactly how magic was going to work, things like that.  But Icelin is also unique among magic users in that she not only has the spellscar messing with her abilities, but also the perfect memory.  It made her a pain in the butt to write at times, but I did bring that on myself.  

Aug 10, 2012 -- 1:19PM, dadocollin wrote:

On another note, look for some major announcements about the Realms at GenCon next week.  Brian Cortijo has people watering at the mouth after a post he made on the Realms forums hinting at the changes... 

I'm very curious myself about what's going to be announced.  I plan on attending the D&D keynote and the Candlekeep seminar that follows.  As Brian hints, it seems like there are good things in store for the Realms in the new edition.