MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: A rogue-ish hero and his intelligent sword hire onto a quest. Their employers are looking for a lost relic, and our pair are looking for gold any way they can find it.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: A charming and convincing partnership based on mutual respect and a healthy dose of witty banter.
CONS: Nothing earth-shattering or overly ambitious here.
BOTTOM LINE: This is the sort of Fafhrd-and-Grey-Mouser-style sword and sorcery adventure that I love and would like to see more of in RPG novels.

The Pathfinder line of RPG novels is doing a lot of things right. They’ve been publishing intelligent adventure novels that showcase their gaming system and their campaign setting in lush detail. They’ve hired a variety of solid, professional authors, and they’ve spread their tales among a wide variety of heroes instead of following one party for multiple books. The one thing that they had been missing–until now–was the particular brand of charming that I have recently come to love in Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Grey Mouser series. Tim Pratt has done an excellent job of capturing that spirit in this Pathfinder outing.

Read the rest of this entry

Fantasy novels based on a roleplaying game? You betcha. There’s no shortage of book series that suck money from devoted fans tie in to popular gaming franchises, such as the novels that accompany World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Warhammer 40k, and, of course, Dungeons & Dragons. Paizo‘s Pathfinder Roleplaying Game introduces the world of Golarion which, as many fantasy worlds are, is full of monsters, magic, dungeons, piles of treasure, plenty of traps, and–most importantly–an endless stream of “adventurers” who got conned into believing that the best way to make a living is to throw themselves headlong into danger and pray they come out the other side with all their wiggly bits intact. With Pathfinder Tales, Paizo has unleashed a growing variety of authors on the reality they’ve created to see what stories they can conjure.

So how do game dynamics and rule books translate into novel-length plot and characters?

Pretty durn well, actually. So strap on those boots, grab your walking stick, and prepare to journey through three such literary concoctions from the Pathfinder Tales library. Oh, and you might want to make sure your first aid kit is freshly stocked with healing potions. Just in case.

Read the rest of this entry

James Lafond Sutter is the Fiction Editor for Paizo Publishing and a co-creator of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game campaign setting. He is the author of the novel Death’s Heretic, which Barnes & Noble ranked #3 on its list of Best Fantasy Releases of 2011. He’s also written numerous short stories for such publications as Escape Pod, PodCastle, Starship Sofa, Apex Magazine, Black Gate, and the #1 Amazon bestseller Machine of Death. His anthology Before They Were Giants pairs the first published short stories of science fiction and fantasy luminaries with new interviews and writing advice from the authors themselves. In addition, he’s published a wealth of gaming material for both Dungeons & Dragons and the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. When not writing or editing, James has performed extensively with various bands and other musical projects ranging from punk and progressive metalcore to folk and musical theater. James lives in Seattle with several roommates and a fully functional death ray. For more, check out www.jameslsutter.com or follow him on Twitter at @jameslsutter.

Charles Tan: First off, how did you first get acquainted with speculative fiction? With tabletop gaming?

James L. Sutter: I’ve loved speculative fiction for as long as I can remember. One of my earliest book-related memories is buying Richard A. Knaak’s The Crystal Dragon (because it had not just a dragon but a holographic dragon on the cover!), but I suspect I was reading it even before that. I know that by the time I was in third grade I’d read all of Michael Crichton’s science fiction. So it really has been a lifelong affair for me, and one which gets more robust every year.

Gaming and I have had a more tumultuous relationship. I first discovered roleplaying games in fifth grade, when my teacher Mr. Tivnan taught several of us how to play first edition D&D on our lunch breaks. After that campaign finished, none of us really had any idea how to acquire RPG books, so instead we began creating our own roleplaying games based on everything from the wild west to Brian Jacques’ Redwall novels. Eventually some of us got hold of the real deal–things like D&D and Battletech and Warhammer–and those games defined our summers up through the end of high school. After that, I lost touch with gaming for a few years as I focused on writing and playing in bands. It wasn’t until I started working at Paizo in late 2004/early 2005 that I really rediscovered my love of gaming again, and I’ve been playing regularly ever since.

Read the rest of this entry