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I always thought that Citzen Kane needed a few more jive-talking robots.the way he altered quite a bit of The Broken Sword for the 1988 reprint -- which is a pale shadow of the 1954 originalHang on, Salvatore edited an edition of THE BROKEN SWORD?
Isn't that a bit like getting Michael Bay to handle a new edit of CITIZEN KANE?
and EXPLOSIONS!!!! gotta have those or it's not a movie.
While I may not hate -him- per se, seeing his fandom welcome drow or even HALF-FIEND strangers with open arms in games while blurting enlightened humanist rhetoric about "judging by actions and not by appearance" make me scratch the walls.
While there's nothing wrong with enlightened humanism... try to give me that in a -medieval- setting and you'll see me -go medieval- on your character if only for demonstrative purposes.
"I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Cheliax the tieflings of former slaves and the sons of former diabolists will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood! I have a dream that one day even the state of Katapesh, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice! I have a dream that my four half-drow children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!"
While I may not hate -him- per se, seeing his fandom welcome drow or even HALF-FIEND strangers with open arms in games while blurting enlightened humanist rhetoric about "judging by actions and not by appearance" make me scratch the walls.
While there's nothing wrong with enlightened humanism... try to give me that in a -medieval- setting and you'll see me -go medieval- on your character if only for demonstrative purposes.
Yes, well, giving anachronistic attitudes to characters in a (supposedly) historical novel is all too commonly done. This is so modern readers can "sympathize" with them. Never mind that traits like honor, decency, bravery and integrity aren't limited to any one age or culture, and some of us like seeing just how much attitudes have changed over the decades/centuries/millennia.
Hang on, Salvatore edited an edition of THE BROKEN SWORD? Isn't that a bit like getting Michael Bay to handle a new edit of CITIZEN KANE?"He" meaning Poul Anderson... but then again, Anderson of 1988 < Anderson of 1954, so your analogy is pretty good.
Really? What did he do to it? Good think I've got my moldly old paperback...
I have to ask, what exactly is wrong with the name Pasha Pook. Pook is certainly a real world surname and there is nothing inherently silly about Pasha that I can see. The Combination is slightly forced, but by the standards of names which start with the same letters it practically rolls of the tongue.
Is it some obscure historicial joke that i am missing?
The title doesn't bother me. The combination is something I'd expect out of a marginally clever seven year old. Pook alone I would have avoided because even if it's a real world name, and I'd never heard that until now, it sounds like something a toddler did in the corner.
I'm not in love with using real-world surnames in fantasy products anyway, if it can be avoided. Jones the evil overlord is just not going to work.
Cultural ignorance is not a good starting point for making an argument, it might sound odd to your ears, but that doesn't mean that it is an innately bad name. The worst that can be said of it, in my oppinion is that it is a slightly clumsy combination.
On a matter of personal taste, i have to say 'fantasy names' annoy the snot out of me. While Jones the evil overlord doesn't really work, i think that has more to do with the evil overlord bit than the jones. Andrew Jones, grave robber and ghoulish cannible however, works very well indeed.
Plus, if you really hate Drizzt you can kill him in the face in BALDUR'S GATE (if you fiddle with one of the .ini files to switch off his invulnerabiliy) and loot his gear, which is sweet.
You don't even have to fiddle- take one companion (who you wont miss) and make that poor sod go down alone and insult Drizzt. let the decoy stand at the water's edge, south of the little lake. Drizzt will kill him and then just stay there, while your party kills him slowly with bows and crossbows. bring plenty of ammo- and drink a cup of tea while you wait. the loot is great an the xp is even better. not very sporting I know, but...
In the game, Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance, you can enter a code that allows you to play as either Drizzt or Artemis. One day, while playing the game with a friend(he was Drizzt and I was Artemis[because Artemis is cooloer]) and he was killed by the white-wolves near the beginning of the first level. So funny.
Here's a few snippets of my previous posts on this thread:
And then......I ate up the first six books...
...Then the next 2 1/2 books after that bored me...
...Was Salvatore running out of ideas?...
...I gave up halfway through "Siege..."
...In short, the Drizzt series isn't bad, just too stretched out. The same goes for the Dragonlance series. I think a good series needs an ending. (Obviously, a marketing department would scoff at the notion.)
I'm surprised that no-one's related the well-known story that RA Salvatore was going to kill off Drizzt in the drow attack on Mithril* Hall in SIEGE OF DARKNESS but TSR threw a major strop and told him that they'd take the character off him and give him to another writer if he did that. That's why there was a long (well, 2-3 years) pause between SIEGE OF DARKNESS and PASSAGE TO DAWN before Salvatore reluctantly came back to write more adventures of Drizzt.
It is clear that from the very lacklustre PASSAGE TO DAWN onwards his heart wasn't really in it and he was only interested in the money.
Amazing! Salvatore got bored of it too?!? So if he had control of his own work, he would have stopped at book 9? (Well, maybe the money would have pressured him to go on, but still...)
To me, it's the darnedest thing! Had Salvatore stopped after 9 books, I would have read to the end of book 9, so that I could claim to have read the whole series, and comment on it as a whole. Again, I say that a good series needs an ending.
(P.S. This is my 200th post on Paizo.com. What a pity I couldn't think of something more intelligent to say to mark the event.)
On a matter of personal taste, i have to say 'fantasy names' annoy the snot out of me. While Jones the evil overlord doesn't really work, i think that has more to do with the evil overlord bit than the jones. Andrew Jones, grave robber and ghoulish cannible however, works very well indeed.
Exactly, I mean how many evil overlords actually think of themselves as being evil? Nero, Caligula, and Josef Stalin are the best examples I can think of, and even they didn't look at waht they did or who they were as being evil. To them, what they did was nessecery to secure a future, either for their lone, for their legacy, or for their people. They may have looked at themselves as amoral, but clearly not evil.
Cultural ignorance is not a good starting point for making an argument, it might sound odd to your ears, but that doesn't mean that it is an innately bad name. The worst that can be said of it, in my oppinion is that it is a slightly clumsy combination.On a matter of personal taste, i have to say 'fantasy names' annoy the snot out of me. While Jones the evil overlord doesn't really work, i think that has more to do with the evil overlord bit than the jones. Andrew Jones, grave robber and ghoulish cannible however, works very well indeed.
I'm not making an argument. I'm expressing an aesthetic opinion. This is all personal taste to me. I find Pasha Pook a very grating, jokey sort of name. It's not the only grating, jokey think Salvatore has written into his books, by far, but it's the one that came to mind. Scottish dwarves are another.
I read the first two trilogies some time ago (decade plus, at least), and remember coming back to a bookstore a few years later to see entire shelves of Drizz't books. Kinda just gave up right then and there. I mean, how much crap can one dark elf get into without finally fixing the Silver Marches once and for all?
The books- and Drizz't- were entertaining enough at the time. Like others have said, they're not brilliant prose, nor are they meant to be. They're a bit more filling than an action movie, but nothing I'd take a hi-lighter to and write commentary on the margins over (you know; "Icingdeath = Redemption of Evil?" kinda crap). Salvatore keeps money flowing into the hobby, albiet indirectly, and I'm sure more than a few folk fell into the hobby due to wondering what these realms everyone had forgotten about were and if one could tool around in it with a few friends and some dice.
The Drizz't clones I'm familiar with as something that exists, but my gaming group was pretty insular, so of all the archetypal rip-offs out there, "dual-wielding drow ranger" never made it into the mix. However, I'm sure I'd roll my eyes if I ended up GMing for one.
Oh, and I'd recently heard Salvatore on the Open Design podcast. His "Wubba-Wubba" story was priceless. :D
I enjoyed the first three books as a teenager because it was great to see the game I loved portrayed in fiction. Even reading back, I find those, as well as the next three prequel books starting with Homeland stand up pretty well.
It seems after that that Salvatore seems to start to take himself too seriously. The emo bits get worse, and so do the names of the characters. I agree Pasha Pook is bad, but nothing compared to names like Thibbledorf Pwent or General Dagnabit. Plus for quite some time his characters (while being emo, because this is supposed to be serious literature) would have entire conversations where they referred to themselves in the third person. "But if Drizzt is to be accepted, what is Drizzt to do?" Drizzt said. (Not an exact quote, but there are books full of this stuff if you look.) Ugh.
I will say the last trilogy, as well as the one he is currently working on are getting better again.
