| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| KnightErrantJR |
Posted - 17 Sep 2005 : 01:31:49
My quest to read everything that I might have missed during my years away from the Realms continues as I just finished Cloak of Shadows, the second book of the Shadows of the Avatar series.
The Good Stuff
I have to say, while I have always liked Ed's books, they vary as to how easy they are to read when one is not in the right mindset. It takes some mental work to follow a lot of his books, since he doesn't always make it easy to pick out the main villain, the main hero, or even the main plot, since he likes to write as much about the Realms in general as about his heroes. This can cut both ways most of the time.
However, in this book, it was pretty clear the path we were on, the heroes, villains, plots and all flowed very nicely. I'm not saying that they were overly simple, just that you never got whiplash wondering where that plot thread that suddely became important came from.
I liked the characters from the last book, but it wasn't really until this one that Belkram and Itharr really started to seem like separate charactes instead of the same character bantering with itself. Sharantyr also got to relax a bit more, since she seemed a bit more high strung in the last book.
I had to go back and reread all the information I had on Maulagrym from my sourcebooks after this book, as I felt far more interested in trying to insert them into a campaign as a sub plot after getting a better feel for them as a group and individually.
And I wonder how man people in Faerun swear they met an Avatar when it was just El's problem solving going on?
The Not As Good Stuff
Some of the relaxed joking banter started to really go over the top in a few places. I even wanted to slap Belkram and Itharr from time to time. And the sheer number of tentacles got to be a bit overwhealming.
That's my two coppers. Where were my fellow scribes thoughts on the matter? |
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