Spellfire Foreword and Final Thoughts

[masterghandalf]

MG: Well, everyone, it’s taken several months but we’ve finally finished our journey through Ed Greenwood’s Spellfire! It was annoying, meandering, full of dead ends, overpowered and often unsympathetic “heroes,” supposedly terrifying villains who proved to be nothing of the sort, and very little resembling an actual meaningful plot. But before we put it to bed and move on to the next installment of Shandril’s Saga, Crown of Fire, there are a few more things left to cover. The first of these is Greenwood’s own foreword to the second edition, where he reflects a bit on the creation of the book and why he made the decisions he did, which gives a bit more insight into his thought process. Thankfully, it’s short, but it does have some doozies. So here we go! I’ll be quoting the whole thing, so my comments will be in bold.

Foreword by Ed Greenwood

When TSR, Inc., went looking for a new fantasy world setting for the Second Edition of the Dungeons and Dragons game, I’d piled up many articles in Dragon Magazine featuring the Forgotten Realms.

MG: Right off the bat we seem to have some timeline issues here, as Advanced D&D Second Edition premiered in 1989, while the Realms as a setting got its first official D&D modules in 1985, and the novel line, including Spellfire, began in 1987. Indeed, one of the main reasons the Time of Troubles event (which involved most of the gods being cast down to Toril in avatar form, some of them dying, new gods being raised, and the metaphysics of the setting being somewhat rearranged) happened relatively early in the setting’s published history was to provide a justification for some of the mechanical changes between 1e and 2e. Though Greenwood, obviously, knows more about the events behind is official sale of the Realms to TSR than I do, so maybe the setting was purchased with a specific eye on the upcoming new edition behind the scenes. Or maybe he just misspoke.

The Realms was born in 1967. When ongoing D&D play began in the Realms a decade later, I didn’t feel it was fair to clobber players with new spells, monsters or magic items until they’d been published, and so the Realms was introduced to a wider public.

When TSR launched the Realms as a game setting they asked me to “show us all the Realms” in a novel, and Spellfire was born.

MG: And here we have a legitimate issue. I’d mentioned previously that Greenwood wrote Spellfire as an introductory novel to the setting, and here we have it in his own words (yes, Douglas Niles’s Darkwalker on Moonshae and RA Salvatore’s The Crystal Shard had already seen print, but the Moonshae Islands and Icewind Dale are both rather off the beaten path compared to the rest of the setting and both books are pretty self-contained in themselves, though they’d eventually spawn sequels and, in Salvatore’s case, an extremely successful ongoing series). And to be blunt, it’s terrible as that. Faerun, as a setting, is huge, with dozens of major nations, regions, cultures and independent city-states and millennia of incredibly detailed history. Spellfire, the novel that’s supposed to introduce all that, takes place in… the Dales. And a couple of scenes in Zhentil Keep, and the occasional peak at Waterdeep (of which we see nothing but the inside of Amarune’s townhouse), but mostly the Dales. And the Dales, to be blunt, are boring. They’re a series of loosely aligned rural communities built around the fringes of an ancient forest, amidst the ruins of a fallen elven civilization but, well, they’re the sort of thing that can exist in pretty much any D&D setting, or most fantasy settings more generally. The setting isn’t even particularly well used – the most interesting thing in the Dales is the ruin of Myth Drannor, which shows up in one chapter early on and is mostly incidental to the plot. Otherwise, it’s mostly a lot of travel through various forests and farting around for far too long in Shadowdale. And compared to the Realms as a whole, the Dales are tiny, even if you include the Moonsea region and Zhentil Keep just to the north of them. Now, I understand not wanting to overlap too much with what Niles and Salvatore were doing, but that still leaves a lot of setting. What about the Sword Coast and its major port city-states, including Waterdeep, Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter, Luskan, etc.? If you want to see “all the Realms,” trade hubs like those seem like a good place to start? If you want to stay in the heartlands, then the Dales are literally just north of Cormyr and Sembia, two of Faerun’s most prosperous and iconic human nations, with various smaller nations all around. Go a bit further east, and you get to Thay and its neighbors like Aglarond and Rashemen; Greenwood’s already brought in the Simbul, so maybe we could’ve seen her at home and the war she’s dedicated her life to fighting, instead of just having her as Elminster’s love interest? Or to go further afield, you can get to the Shining South – I’ve always had a soft spot for Halruaa! The point being, Faerun is full of interesting places, but Spellfire resolutely refuses to leave one of the least interesting of them.

Greenwood seems to like the Dales, though. A lot of his books at least partially take place there, and a lot of his favorite characters – Elminster himself, of course, but also Storm and the Knights – live there. And, in a lot of ways, that seems to be the only way in which this book “shows us all the Realms” – it doesn’t show us a lot of the actual setting, but it sure does have a lot of Greenwood’s signature characters, including his self-insert, various supporting characters he’s fond of, and some of his favorite villains, dropping by in a continuous parade. Still, it can’t help but feel like if LotR had taken place entirely in the Shire and its environs, with an extended stopover in Bree, plus occasional cuts to Isengard for some mostly irrelevant intrigue, and still been sold on the strength of Middle-earth as a well-developed world.

The plan was for me to pen a novel every year.

MG: Well, that certainly didn’t work out. Greenwood is the Realms’ second-most prolific novelist (the first is Salvatore, no contest, whose output I think is more than the next two runners-up combined) and he’s written approximately twenty-two novels in the setting on his own, plus a few he’s co-written with other writers, but he’s never managed a novel a year. Indeed, his next Realms novel would be Crown of Fire, the immediate sequel to Spellfire, which came out in 1994, seven years later.

I wanted the first one to show a lot of spectacular scenery, introduce every interesting character I could find an excuse for including, and demonstrate the depth of detail the Realms offered.

MG: Aside from introducing lots of characters, if that was the goal, it didn’t come off. See previous comments.

Humor and Three Musketeers-style swashbuckling, not just fate-of-the-world-hanging-on-the-heroes high fantasy quests. Gold rushes and city intrigues and crooked merchants as well as dragons and roaring monsters and endless dungeons.

MG: I must have missed the part in Three Musketeers when D’Artagnan got superpowers, killed off Milady and Rochefort and humiliated Cardinal Richelieu and effortlessly sent him fleeing for his life before the book was a third of the way done. And, okay, Spellfire doesn’t have huge armies clashing or the world literally at stake, but Shandril still attracts the attention of a lot of powerful people, defeats one of the setting’s big bads (Manshoon) and kills off another potential big bad (Shargrailar) before the book is done, so I can’t really call it a small-scale adventure either. Though I did recently read a forum post making the observation that unlike Dragonlance, which is heavily focused on the fate-of-the-world metaplot and tends to stumble when it moves too far away from it, the Realms historically has tended to focus more on the deeds of individual heroes and regional conflicts at most, with big world-shaking events like the Time of Troubles, Spellplague and Sundering being comparatively rare (Eberron offers a third perspective, resolutely refusing to have any official metaplot at all).

Just for fun, I also wanted to blow holes in fantasy cliches. Let’s see a heroine save the hero.

MG: …that must have been a lot more subversive in the eighties. And it’s also a bit rich considering that, even though Shandril is objectively orders of magnitude more powerful than Narm, people repeatedly act throughout the book like he has to be her protector instead of the other way around.

Show a swaggering band of heroes do something recklessly stupid and (for once) get killed off.

MG: Killing off a bunch of redshirts to raise the stakes for the actual important characters is, like, the exact opposite of subversive, Greenwood. And the Company of the Bright Spear, who are killed off literally in chapter three, are far too underdeveloped to be anything else. Which reminds me of an interesting post I read a while back about why George RR Martin’s killing of Ned Stark was so effective. It argued that Martin’s real genius wasn’t killing Ned, who is, objectively, the sort of character you’d expect to die in an epic fantasy. Instead, it’s the bit of literary slight-of-hand Martin pulled to make Ned look like a different kind of character than he was before pulling the rug from under readers’ feet. Contrast with Duke Leto Atreides from Dune, who is pretty similar to Ned in personality and virtually identical in terms of his role in the story but is heavily foreshadowed as a dead man walking practically from his introduction. Just an interesting comparison in how to handle this sort of thing that occurred to me.

Ever notice villains getting attacked while in their sleep or in their homes – but not heroes? Well, I wanted to fix that.

MG: Not really, no. Is that a common trope? Just thinking of LotR and The Hobbit, to use classic fantasy predating the Realms, I can think of the heroes getting taken unawares several times, while the villains almost never are (maybe Smaug, arguably, but Bilbo doesn’t really attack him in his home, he just robs him and chats with him).

Ever notice how heroes stride or gallop across a continent on scant sleep, never having to relieve themselves? I wrote scenes of blundering exhaustion and embarrassed searches for concealing bushes. I also included wizards hurling grand spells and missing their targets, and grand charges that ended in spectacular pratfalls.

MG: While the comment on easy travel logistics in epic fantasy is actually an apt one, I think we mostly generally assume that characters are taking care of bodily functions off-page and we just don’t read about it? I don’t particularly want to read about it, anyway. It happens to everyone, but it’s not usually plot relevant.

I made my heroes weep, gasp, curse, slip and cut themselves. Often. Every time an evil guard fell dying, I let the reader know about his fading dreams and his family back home. I tried to show “good sides” of every bad guy, and vice versa. I shoehorned in scores of monsters and characters I wanted other authors to use later… and ended up with a novel that was, ahem, more than a third longer than what was now wanted with scant time to fix things.

MG: Frankly, it sounds like Greenwood tried to write the Faerunian version of War and Peace – a massive narrative encompassing every aspect of the setting - and faceplanted when his ambitious exceeded his skill. And, okay, I absolutely get the temptation to write the Big Epic of your dreams, especially in a setting you’ve worked on for years (I’ve got a few of mine knocking around in the back of my head, to be sure). But, well, no novel can be all things for all people or tell the story from every possible perspective at once; you’ll probably just end up with an unfocused mess if you try (which is, admittedly, a perennial problem with Greenwood’s writing, at least in the books of his I’ve read). As for moral greyness, if that was Greenwood’s goal, he failed miserably. His villains – and there are far too many of them – are pretty much all one-note evil. There was certainly no effort made to humanize Naergoth or Fzoul, and definitely not Korvan or even Shargrailar! We’re supposed to feel sorry for the Shadowsil for going from innocent girl to evil cultist, but we’re given no indication of how it happened, so it fell flat. And Manshoon loved the Shadowsil, but that relationship exists solely to get him involved in the plot and then vanishes into the aether afterwards. And none of this stops Shandril from mowing down Cultists in droves as soon as she gets her powers, with exactly zero regrets. As for his “heroes,” while they certainly do their share of disreputable and unpleasant things, and are occasionally called out on it, those accusations (especially against Elminster) then tend to get dropped without resolution, serious interrogation, or any change in anyone’s behavior. Which leaves me thinking Greenwood doesn’t actually think of them as real problems, whether it’s Torm’s lecherousness and bloodthirstiness or Elminster’s high-handed meddling in everyone’s lives (and also dirty-old-man-ness, both literally and figuratively).

Out came editorial axes, some hasty stitching covered the worst remaining holes, and Spellfire was hurled forth. Many, many readers loved it, but I winced at the published version because many surviving characters now “looked and sounded wrong” and because the Malaugrym had disappeared completely from the novel, making it seem as if Elminster and the Knights heartlessly abandoned Shandril and Narm to certain death, rather than fighting covertly to protect them.

MG: And here’s where things completely fall apart. Here we have Greenwood’s explanation for why the Malaugrym were important, and why it was important for the second edition to restore them. But it has nothing to do with what we see in the text. If Greenwood is referring to where Elminster and the Knights were in the last couple of chapters… well, Elminster was off threatening Amarune, but that took all of five minutes and doesn’t seem to have interfered with any of his other activities (which seem to have mostly consisted of screwing the Simbul). The Knights never encountered the Malaugrym at all; Torm and Rathan left Shandril and Narm to go give a kid a kitten, and the rest of them were still back in Shadowdale doing nothing much noteworthy. If he’s referring to why Elminster decided to throw Shandril out of Shadowdale… that still had nothing to do with the Malaugrym! If they’re there to draw Elminster and the Knights away from protecting Shandril, then the Malaugrym literally do not perform the function they are in the story to do! Look, Greenwood, I know you like the Malaugrym (and there’s an “Elminster versus the Malaugrym” subplot that runs through the background of, at the very least, Shandril’s Saga and the Elminster: The Making of a Mage prequel before coming to a head in the Shadow of the Avatar trilogy) but I honestly have to say, your original editor was right to demand they go. They add literally nothing to this story.

Now the chance has come to not to restore the full original novel (that would take the by now standard fantasy trilogy!)

MG: I think fantasy trilogies were already fairly standard by the mid-to-late eighties (Tolkien – technically LotR is one long novel, but generally sold and marketed as a trilogy - Brooks, Donaldson, Weis and Hickman, Lackey and Feist all say hi), and maybe that’s nitpicking, but I don’t feel like cutting Greenwood much slack.

But to bind up some wounds and sharpen some points and clean up Spellfire. I hope you’ll all still love it as I do.

MG: Well, I think this sporking has made my opinion on the matter pretty clear. I do think Spellfire has some interesting ideas buried in it, but it’s in desperate need of a better plot and structure, to say nothing of making better use of its characters and setting (and less of Elminster, and to a lesser extent other characters, being a creep), as I’ll discuss in my final thoughts shortly.

Hearken, then, to a romp that tries to be more than its surface blast and bluster.

Thanks for reading.

MG: I mean, it may try, but that’s not the same thing as succeeding. And that rather anticlimactic note brings Greenwood’s foreword to an end! Mostly, it makes me think Greenwood has more ambition as a novelist than skill, and utterly failed at conveying some of the things he was trying to (which is unfortunate, as some of those things were kind of important). And now that he's had his say, it’s time for me to have mine. On to the final thoughts!




Final Thoughts

And now, for the very last stage – my own reflections on Spellfire as a whole. This won’t be as long as some of my previous final thoughts for past sporkings, if you’re familiar, but I still have a fair bit of ground I want to cover, broken down into specific sections.

Characters

Shandril Shessair: First up is our heroine. And, okay, I’ll admit it – I don’t hate her. Compared to some of the other protagonists I’ve sporked in the past, she’s practically a breath of fresh air; she may be unrealistically sheltered and sometimes makes rather boneheaded decisions, but she’s not really a bad person. I’d hesitate to even call her a sue, despite how OP Greenwood made her (which I’ll actually discuss in more depth when we get to the Afterword for Crown of Fire, where he talks about why he gave her spellfire in the first place) because she doesn’t give off the vibe of being a self-insert or authorial fantasy (admittedly, because she’s surrounded by other people *coughcoughElminster* who fill that role) and I think this will become even more obvious as the trilogy goes on. The problem with Shandril is that, well, she has very little personality at all beyond “generic fantasy protagonist.” Seriously, stop me if you’ve heard this one before – an orphan runs away from home looking for adventure, discovers they have great magical power, learns that adventure isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and confronts the forces of evil. That’s Shandril, and it’s also a bunch of other people I can think of, and probably even more I’ve not heard of. And she doesn’t have a lot else going on to customize the model; Greenwood makes a few nods towards exploring what suddenly acquiring that much power would do to a person, but never really brings anything meaningful to the conversation. In general, if I had to compare Shandril to another fantasy protagonist, the first one who comes to mind is actually Bilbo Baggins, who doesn’t fit the stereotypical backstory but is also a “normal” person who gets caught up in adventure, acquires magic to help them along the way, and becomes our window into a fantastical world. Alas, Bilbo is much more charming and has a much more defined arc than Shandril does. On that point, looking over both this book (and forward to the trilogy as a whole) is the fact that Shandril doesn’t really want anything. Okay, she wants to stay alive (which is about as basic a motivation as they come) and she wants to be a Harper (but not for any particular reason, just because Storm talked her into it) but for the most part she’s got no goal, nothing she’s trying to accomplish beyond wandering through the wilderness in the vague direction of Silverymoon. That does not an engaging protagonist make. Tellingly, even though Shandril was the main character of the first book by the setting’s creator, it’s almost impossible to find either fanart or official art of her anywhere on the internet, which says something about how little lasting impression she made on the fandom (in contrast, other major Realms protagonists like Drizzt, Arilyn Moonblade, Farideh, and of course Elminster are much easier to find art of). And that’s not even getting into the fundamental problem that when you start your adventuring career by exploding dracoliches (including the greatest of all dracoliches) pretty much everything else is going to look anticlimactic after that, and Shandril’s spellfire as depicted is so OP it feels more like she’s running through the story with cheat codes activated than anything, which does not make for compelling drama.

Narm Tamaraith: Narm is Shandril’s love interest, the secondary protagonist of the novel, ostensibly someone we ought to know pretty well by the time it’s done… and yet I really find myself struggling to find anything to say about him. He and Shandril fall into what the narrative insists is true love after knowing each other for all of five minutes or so, but I really couldn’t tell you what they find attractive in each other. He’s training to be a wizard, but he’s overshadowed by all the other wizards in this book so much that it tends to get lost in the shuffle. He’s a bit more worldly than Shandril, I guess, but it doesn’t amount to much; people keep insisting he needs to be Shandril’s protector, but she needs to save him far more often than the reverse. We get some hints about his backstory and reasons for studying magic and potential conflicts there, but it all comes to nothing of significance in the end. Even the PTSD he seems to have early on from watching Marimmar get torn apart by devils gets quietly dropped and never amounts to much. In short, Narm exists, and he’s mostly inoffensive. And that’s about all I have to say on him.

Elminster (and the Chosen of Mystra in general): Ooh, boy. Here, on the other hand, is the doozy. Elminster’s not quite as obnoxious here as he’ll become later, mostly because in Shandril’s Saga he’s a supporting character, unlike in most of Greenwood’s later books that become the Elminster Show, but he’s still pretty bad. To start with, he’s just not a very pleasant person. He’s lecherous (yes, he comes by it honestly; the classic wizard archetype he represents mostly derives from the mythological figures of Odin, Merlin and Vainamoinen, who all had their moments, but it's still obnoxious, especially when we’re supposed to think he’s totally awesome and morally upstanding anyway) manipulative, ill-tempered, and, as Errezha would like me to remind you all, has terrible personal hygiene. None of that makes for an endearing character, but then you get to his power level. Elminster’s not literally the most powerful person in the setting (but the fact that he’s a 29th level wizard with lots of extra bells and whistles on top and still isn’t the most powerful tells you a lot about how high Faerun’s overall power level skews) but he is easily the most powerful person in the story (with the possible exception of the Simbul, who we’ll get to shortly). And to be blunt, his presence therefore ends up basically deforming the story around him, as we have to twist and twist to come up with justifications for why he can’t just solve everything. Most jarringly, this shows up when he has to boot Shandril and Narm out of Shadowdale and back on the road for nebulous reasons so they can face actual conflict without him hanging over their shoulder all the time. And, ultimately, it makes Elminster look worse, because he’s totally powerful enough to protect Shandril from most of her enemies and/or send her on to Silverymoon with minimal effort, and that he doesn’t do that can’t help but look like gross negligence at best and active maliciousness at worse. Ultimately, he comes off as a self-righteous, high-handed meddler who pushes other people onto the scripts he’s written for them but avoids facing any real consequences himself.

I’ll note that Elminster is worse about this than most “wise old wizard” types (who often are accused of being high-handed meddlers both by other characters and, in some cases, the audience) because of how powerful he is compared to the rest of the setting. Most characters of that archetype (including but not limited to Gandalf, Dallben, Allanon, Dumbledore, Yoda, Moiraine and, yes, much as I loathe him, Wigg) in other works are powerful, yes, but typically have enemies who are their equal or superior or are in some way restricted in when and how they use their magic and therefore can’t just solve everyone’s problems by going in guns blazing. Elminster’s main opposition, at least in this book, is Manshoon… and, well, Elminster can wipe the floor with Manshoon any time he wants (the next book makes this very clear) and as for restrictions, he’s got freaking Mystra, who’s probably one of the top five most powerful deities in the whole setting, in his corner. I can really only think of two other wizards who are at that much of an advantage over the rest of their setting – David Eddings’ Belgarath (who shares a lot of Elminster’s unsavory aspects as both a person and a literary character, tbh, including massively out-powering his evil counterparts, but at least has the excuse of the literal destiny of the universe railroading him to keep him from throwing his weight around too much) and Wencit from David Weber’s War God novels (who may be even more powerful than Elminster, if anything, but is less annoying because compared to Eddings and Greenwood, Weber’s easily the best writer of the three). As a counterexample, I’d also like to raise Steven Erikson’s Malazan series, which often reads like a darker-and-edgier version of the Realms (and, iirc, got its start as Erikson’s home D&D setting) and has a similarly high power-level, but the character who holds the “canonical epic magical badass” hat most often, Anomander Rake, is deliberately used very sparingly, partially to preserve his mystique when he does show up, instead of being shilled all over the place (Malazan also has a famously – or perhaps infamously – large scope with lots of moving parts, which prevents any one character from overshadowing the story in the same way, no matter how powerful they are).

As for the rest of the Chosen, they all somewhat share the same author favoritism Elminster gets, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent, but this book only deals with two of them in a significant way – Storm and the Simbul. Storm, alas, is mostly reduced to Elminster’s sidekick and doesn’t get much focus outside of convincing Shandril to join the Harpers. With the Simbul, we get some drama about what she’s up to and if she’s Shandril’s friend or foe, but that ultimately gets swept under the rug as she becomes Elminster’s love interest in the last few chapters, which role she’d hold (and sadly, often be reduced to) for much of the setting’s remaining history.

The Knights of Myth Drannor: Okay, I know the Knights were based on the PCs from Greenwood’s home gaming group, and maybe they were fresher in the eighties, but for the most part they’re about as generic an adventuring party as they come. Most of them are defined solely by their role in the party, though not necessarily their class- Florin is The Leader, Merith is The Elf, Lanseril is The Druid, Illistyl is The Apprentice, Sharantyr is The Ranger, and so on. The remaining three get more personality, but it’s not good. Jhessail feels like she’s supposed to be the Team Mom, but in practice she comes across as pretty bad at it, being rather full of herself, losing her temper, driving Narm to hysterics when trying to teach him, and the like. Rathan generally comes across as the jovial, good-natured type you’d expect of a priest of Tymora, but he occasionally gets these random moments of bloodlust that are totally at odds with that, and the narrative never calls him out on it or seems to realize it’s a problem. And Torm… Torm is awful, a loveable rogue minus the loveable. He’s greedy, selfish, insensitive, lecherous, and an all-around nuisance, and like Rathan can be surprisingly bloodthirsty, but Greenwood seems to expect we’ll like him anyway. Sigh. It’s all a pity, because I can see potentially interesting characters in the Knights, but they really need a better book to bring it out (preferably written by someone other than Greenwood; I tried to read the first book in his trilogy about the Knights’ origins many years ago, and it was so tedious it ended up in my DNF pile, which is very rare for me).

Gorstag: He’s a fairly minor character, all told, but enough of a problem that I felt he needed his own section. Gorstag’s a mess. I think Greenwood tried to take two archetypes for adoptive or foster fathers of fantasy heroes and smushed them together, and the result doesn’t work. On the one hand, we seem to be supposed to see him as the cool retired adventurer who loves and protects his adopted daughter; on the other hand, he works her like a servant (albeit while making clear the intention he expects her to take over the inn in her own right one day) never lets her leave the inn, and keeps someone as foul as Korvan around in a position where he can harass her. And none of his fears about the Cult coming after Shandril because of her parents seem based in reality at all. Basically, he’s LotR-era Bilbo and Vernon Dursley awkwardly smushed into one person, and as a result, depending on how charitable one is being, he’s either a paranoid incompetent at best or a selfish hypocrite at worst, and either way absolutely sucks at the whole “adoptive father” business.

The Villains: I’m putting them together, because we have a whole lot of them and most of them get very little page time. And, frankly, none of them are threatening, even the dracoliches. Most of them die a chapter or two after being introduced, whether by spellfire, Elminster, or their own stupidity, and even those who stick around rarely do anything that impressive before being handily defeated (looking at you, Malark, the supposed archmage who never uses any particularly noteworthy magic). Indeed, they all sort of blend together – did we really need three completely separate dracloliches in this book (thereby cheapening dracoliches in particular, and dragons in general, as antagonists)? Did Malark, Naergoth and Thiszult really need to be separate characters instead of just having one major representative of the Cult? Before I did my pre-sporking reread, the only villain I really remembered much of aside from the dracoliches was the Shadowsil, who is a pretty generic evil sorceress and dies a third of the way through the book, so it’s telling she was still the only one of the bad guys to actually stick in my memory.

Manshoon deserves a bit of space on his own, because as I’ve mentioned previously, he’s a pretty big deal in the setting overall – as the leader of the Zhentarim, he’s one of Faerun’s big bads, has persisted across the entire history of the setting into the current 5th edition, and is at least on the short list for Elminster’s evil counterpart and nemesis. And this book was his first appearance in the fiction. It introduces him… by having him be utterly defeated and humiliated in his first fight scene and barely escaping with his life, and it will set something of a trend of Manshoon as a character and the Zhents as a faction developing reputations for being full of fail. He will continue as the trilogy’s overall big bad (or the closest thing it has to one, anyway) so we’ll have more to say on him later, but I just wanted to reiterate that Spellfire was the introduction of one of the setting’s major baddies, and it set the tone for him in a really bad way. On a related note, I’ve noticed that some authors have a real knack for imbuing their wizards and magic-using characters in general with a real sense of power, even when they’re not directly using magic – and with evil wizards in particular, with a sense of wrongness that leaves no doubt that you don’t want to know the things they know or be able to do the things they can do, because it’s not worth the price. Glen Cook is a master at this; Tolkien is also good at it, and I can think of several other examples. Greenwood isn’t, but considering how often he likes to write really powerful wizards, both good (or at least “good”) and evil, he probably would’ve been much better off if he had, and Manshoon especially would’ve benefitted.

Setting

Now, I know, I’ve slagged on Greenwood as an author in this sporking (though I don’t think it’s undeserved) but he does have a genuine reputation for being good at one thing in particular, and that’s worldbuilding. It’s hard to argue with the results – the Realms are easily the largest and most detailed of the various official D&D settings, and possibly one of the most detailed fictional settings, period. They offer a huge variety of nations, organizations, and cultures, backed up with an extremely detailed history. And Greenwood himself is well known for being able to give essay-length responses on virtually any Realmslore-related question fans ask him. So, it’s really remarkable how little of that worldbuilding makes it into this book that’s supposed to be an intro to this setting. I mentioned the problem with the book’s scale and focus earlier, but the issues go deeper than that. All that history I mentioned? None of it’s relevant outside of some discussion of Myth Drannor, and even that’s mostly incidental to the plot. All those nations? We get some names thrown at us – Cormyr, Sembia, Waterdeep, Aglarond, Thay – but almost no explanation of where those places are, what they’re like, or why they’re important. The gods get handled similarly. Factions are handled weirdly; we get decent overviews of the Cult of the Dragon and the Harpers, but the Zhents and the Malaugrym are dropped into the novel as if Greenwood expects us to already know who they are and what their deal is, despite having no reason to at this stage in the setting’s published history. Basically, it feels like Greenwood is actively not using the one skill he’s famous for, and it’s both baffling and frustrating; Spellfire makes Faerun feel like a much smaller, cramped and boring setting than it actually is, and surely that can’t have been the intention. And some of the details, which I’ve pointed out in the sporking itself, don’t line up with the setting as usually presented, though I’m inclined to put a lot of that down to early-installment weirdness between Greenwood’s original vision for Faerun and how later writers would develop it.

Now, for comparison, there is a certain skill that I’ve noticed some authors possess that really would have come in handy here – that is the ability to quickly sketch the feeling of depth and history with just a few carefully chosen references. It’s more an art than a science, and something I can’t really describe the specifics of beyond “I know it when I see it” but I can think of several authors I can use as examples – Tolkien of course, Tad Williams, R. Scott Bakker (I have lots of problems with Bakker, though a research paper would probably be a better forum than a sporking to air them, but he absolutely has the ability to convey the mythic feel underlying his worldbuilding) all do it very well; George RR Martin, Robert Jordan, and Brandon Sanderson (in the Stormlight Archive, not really his other works) are okay at it. Greenwood, sadly, doesn’t seem to have that skill, which is too bad; if he did, it would let his ability as a worldbuilder shine through much more obviously instead of it being lost in the shuffle.

Plot

So, with all that out of the way, what’s this book about? Well, it’s about a girl named Shandril who runs away from home, joins a band of adventurers, gets spellfire, and then... well, after that is where we lose focus. Partially, this ties back into Shandril’s own lack of direction – she has no real personal goals or larger missions she’s dedicated to, so she just feels kind of aimless and since she’s the main character, the book does too. Now, up to Rauglothgor’s lair, things do move along at a pretty decent clip, but once Shandril gets spellfire, the story starts to get wobbly. The deaths of the Shadowsil, Rauglothgor, Aghaszhtamn, Orlgaun and the defeat of Manshoon, all in the space of three chapters, clear out pretty much all the antagonists we’ve been building up; and then we reach Shadowdale and the plot hits a brick wall and stops dead for a measurable chunk of the story’s remaining length, before finally getting Shandril on the road again for poorly explained reasons. And both during and after Shadowdale, most of the story devolves into a series of escalating fights with random baddies, with some character scenes – Shandril and Narm studying, the wedding, learning her origins from Gorstag – sprinkled through, but never really cohering into an overarching narrative. Finally, the “escalating bad guys” gauntlet culminates by spitting out Shargrailar, and after he’s defeated the story just sort of stops. It’s not a resolution – Shargraillar’s not a running enemy, defeating him didn’t solve any of Shandril’s problems – but apparently Greenwood thought that the aftermath of destroying the most powerful dracolich in the world made for a good breather.

And then there are the side plots. Greenwood has a tendency to meander, and while the Shandril plotline is fairly focused on her and her activities, we have several others that… aren’t. The Malaugrym could be excised from the story entirely without seriously changing things, and I remain convinced that Greenwood’s editor was right to want to axe them. The High Imperceptor pops up as a potential big bad partway through the book… and then wanders out again just as abruptly after a few chapters, his only remaining action a token attack on Fzoul’s temple (which we barely care about anyway, because we just met Fzoul). We waste several chapters on Zhentarim intrigue, but it’s completely circular – we start with the status quo of Manshoon being in charge of both Zhentil Keep and the Zhentarim, with Fzoul and Sememmon as his deputies and the beholders as uneasy allies, and that’s exactly where we end up after it all shakes out. And it only vaguely has anything to do with Shandril. And don’t even get me started on Delg turning up alive and coming out of freaking nowhere in the very last chapter. Basically, taking the subplots into consideration, the book ends up being a complete structural mess.

How Would I Fix It?

Well, I mentioned before we started, but Ed Greenwood has many faults, but he is a good idea guy. The basic premise of a young girl who finds herself in possession of a rare magical ability, on the run through Faerun with an evil cult and a sinister syndicate in pursuit and a team of experienced adventurers as allies could easily be a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the execution is where we stumble. I thought up a lot of ways to fix individual plot points and characters as we went through the book, but ultimately, I think what I’d end up doing is rip almost all the concepts out and put them back together in a very different way. Here’s my basic pitch:

Shandril is the daughter of Gorstag and Lureene, innkeepers from Highmoon. Because the inn is a popular stopping point for travelers and adventurers, Shandril is something of an adventurer fangirl; she eats up all their stories regularly, knows all the major adventuring companies in the region and their exploits by heart, and desperately wants to be an adventurer herself, even though Gorstag wants her to take over the inn someday. When the famous Knights of Myth Drannor stop by one night, Shandril sees her chance and runs off to join them after they leave (I’d put Narm and his master as traveling with the Knights – maybe Marimmar hired them for this expedition? – for simplicity’s sake). The Knights, understandably, want to send Shandril back home, but can’t for some reason (maybe they’re on a time crunch?) and she ends up tagging along. At some point, the Knights are attacked by the Cult of the Dragon and Shandril is kidnapped by the Shadowsil a Cult archmage. The Shadowsil has been experimenting with spellfire (maybe she’s trying to figure out how to imbue a dracolich with that power?) but all her test subjects have died, and she needs more, hence Shandril. By luck or fate, Shandril survives the experiment and gains spellfire, and manages to escape whether by her new powers, rescue by the Knights, or both. The Knights decide to take her to Elminster (who in this version is rather less powerful and insufferable) to figure out what to do, while the Shadowsil and Rauglothgor (Aghaszhtamn can be cut completely; he’s pointless) want their test subject back and at some point the Zhents (here represented by Sememmon, who’s the most competent and pragmatic of their upper echelon) also get involved, hearing about Shandril’s spellfire and deciding to try and recruit her instead of killing her. Ultimately, after quite a bit of traveling around and various adventures on the way, we end the book with a showdown where the Shadowsil and Rauglothgor are killed and Shandril is starting to learn to control her powers, but with some ominous foreshadowing for what the Cult wants with spellfire and what they may be planning to serve as a sequel hook; Shargrailar and Manshoon can be saved as Chekhov’s Guns to go off later in the trilogy. That’s a very rough outline, but I tried to give it more focus and more of an overarching narrative with fewer antagonists and moving parts and make Shandril a bit more proactive and less impossibly naïve while still keeping the “girl in over her head” angle (and also smoothing over some of the weirder aspects of Gorstag and reducing Elminster to a bit part); her spellfire I’d nerf a bit so it’s still at “can absorb and redirect raw magical energy for various effects” level but not “instantly one-shots dracoliches” level. And Shandril and Narm’s romance can be left to develop organically, instead of deciding they’re in love after five minutes and deciding to get married after half a day.

Conclusion

Spellfire is… not a good book. I’ve certainly read worse (looking at you, Fifth Sorceress) but I’ve also read much, much, much better. And some of the problems can be put down to Greenwood having been a young writer at the time and this being his first novel, but, well, a lot of them persist across all his work. I’ve noticed a trend for Greenwood (or at least fans arguing on his behalf) to place the blame for a lot of his problems on TSR (or, later, Wizards, but mostly TSR) and their editors, but while I can kind of see where they’re coming from, it only goes so far. Manshoon is totally a terrifying Machiavellian mastermind in Greenwood’s head and TSR made him nerf him (along with other villains) out of fear that if the villains were too cool it would stir up more accusations of D&D being Satanic? Other writers have made similar comments, but weak villains are a consistent problem for Greenwood and other writers didn’t seem to have as much difficulty with them (during TSR era, RA Salvatore managed to create Drizzt’s arch-enemy Artemis Entreri, who’d go on to become nearly as popular as Drizzt himself; Elaine Cunningham – pushed as the third of the “big three” Realms authors during 2e and 3e – had her recurring baddie Kymil Nimesin, aka Wannabe Elf Hitler and one of the most loathed villains in the whole fandom in my experience; Greenwood had nothing like either of them). Greenwood always imagined the Realms as sex-positive and LGBTQ-friendly, and TSR stopped him from writing about it? I can see that, but it doesn’t explain the weird and random “Lhaeo pretends to be a gay stereotype” plot point from this book, or that when Greenwood depicts heterosexual sexuality, which was always allowed, it’s more titillating than anything meaningful (the same is also true of his depiction of LGBT sexuality, there’s just less of that altogether and other authors whose opinions I trust more have indicated that the editors not usually letting it through was, at least for a while, true). Greenwood really wanted to write about Mirt, but TSR made him write about Elminster instead? I mean, TSR and Wizards both have their hand in pushing Elminster as the setting mascot (and he certainly makes more sense in the role than Mirt) but I don’t think you can argue that Greenwood didn’t enthusiastically take to it. Besides, Mirt’s gross and I don’t want to read about him either. And, discussed in the Foreword to this book, Greenwood writes longer and more detailed novels and the editors take the axe to them? While I kind of sympathize with Greenwood here, I also can’t help but think he should have done a better job to try to stick to the expected word count and avoided this problem altogether. And in general, these are all problems that plague Spellfire but also continue to be perennial issues with Greenwood’s works in general, at least so far as I’ve read them.

But, in any case, we’re now done with Spellfire! Next time, we’ll continue our journey through Shandril’s Saga with Crown of Fire, which followed the first book seven years later, in 1994 (though it literally picks up immediately afterwards in-universe). It’s… probably the best installment of the trilogy, though that’s a low bar to clear, but it does at least have a much more focused plot and fewer extraneous villains. But it nonetheless has some real doozies, so we shall all see you then! For now, my thanks to everyone who has followed this sporking; I hope you’ve enjoyed it and, if so, that you’ll continue on! Until then, may Tymora smile on you!

Comments

Re: Ask and you shall receive!

[masterghandalf]

*applauds with vigor* Bravo!