Joshua Kronengold <mneme at io.com> writes: > Gaertk at aol.com writes: > >The Riftwar was pretty good, though I disliked the ending to > >_Magician_, and all the following books made that ending > >worse. > > Plus the paperback version of Magician had that -awful- cliff-hanger > between books, where it cut away from the title character and focused > on the boring characters for most of the first half, in a really ugly > way. > > The other unfortunate thing is that Riftwar is apparently based on > Feist's home campaign, which apparently had heavy EPT/Tekumel > inclusions, which Fiest refuses to acknowledge despite their > obviousness to anyone who has read the Barker books (which are, in any > case, far better than any of the Fiest books except -maybe- the > "Mistress of the Empire" (etc) trilogy). I think it's one step further away -- it wasn't Feist's *own* campaign, and when he was in it he didn't know that many elements derived from EPT. And having forced myself through one Barker book and one Feist book, I have to say that the Barker book was far inferior. But neither was much to my taste, either. I think Barker was working much harder on the world- and culture-building, but he was so *totally* hopeless on the characters.... A bunch of friends locally have been (maybe still are) involved in Barker's own Tekumel campaign. I hear that if the player characters weren't going to do what the gamesmaster expected, it could get...interesting. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net / New TMDA anti-spam in test John Dyer-Bennet 1915-2002 Memorial Site http://john.dyer-bennet.net Book log: http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/Ouroboros/booknotes/ New Dragaera mailing lists, see http://dragaera.info