Dragaera

Comfort and Guilt Books

Gaertk at aol.com Gaertk at aol.com
Sun Jul 21 18:36:20 PDT 2002

In a message dated Sun, 21 Jul 2002 8:10:02 PM Eastern 
Standard Time, Kat <tsarren at alyra.org> writes:

[Feist's Midkemia books]

> I read Feist's Riftwar Saga in my early teens, and have 
> yet to re-read it... was it really that bad? Also, the 
> Krondor books and the other two (Prince of the Blood and 
> The King's Buccaneer, I think) that come between Riftwar 
> and Serpentwar sagas range from being blase to downright 
> bad.

The Riftwar was pretty good, though I disliked the ending to
_Magician_, and all the following books made that ending
worse.  When _Rage of a Demon King_ was announced, my first
thought was "Pug finally realises that Macros is the 
archvillain and kills him."  Unfortunately, that didn't
happen.

On a positive note, the Empire trilogy he co-wrote with
Janny Wurts is pretty good; most people prefer it to 
anything either wrote solo.

> The PC game Betrayel at Krondor, otoh... wow, that 
> was a great RPG.

I'm a purist: I reserve "RPG" for games where you can truly
roleplay, and so far I haven't seen a single-person game 
that manages that (Star Control 2 and Ultima 5 come 
closest).

But BAK is definitely one of the all-time great fantasy
adventure games, and I really love how magic was handled
(spell effectiveness proportional to mana used).  Too bad
the spells implemented were horribly unbalanced.

--KG