This represents my first venture into Eberron novels. I am not new to D&D licensed stuff, as I have read an Ed Greenwood novel and quite a few R.A. Salvatore novels. But Lady Ruin by Tim Waggoner is the first D&D Eberron novel I’ve read. Not that it is a huge distinction to make, as the novel didn’t turn out too different from other D&D related novels I have read, but I just want to qualify that this is slightly new territory to me. I picked this novel in particular because the book store had no other Eberron novels that were the first in the series. Three book twos and a book four, but this novel is supposed to stand alone, at least for the time being. I am a little hopeful that the book will get a sequel, as the story itself really didn’t reach a satisfying conclusion, but so it goes. It was easy enough to spot that it was a D&D related story, as the novel took the form of a rather good first campaign, though the party wasn’t all there. The titular character was the daughter of a Karnathi general and the niece of an artificer interested in Xoriat and symbionts in particular.
The story involves a secret part of the military to which these people are attached and their research and experiments into creating warriors that can use the symbionts to fight. The research inevitably goes wrong and after quite a few deaths the woman’s uncle is touched by a daelkyr lord and turned into a flesh-shaping, evil lunatic. If there was one thing about this novel that I would have to say kept me out of it the most it would be the lack of good villains. The villains here, in the shape of the uncle and other evil creatures tied to Xoriat, are just evil. They want to recreate the world in Xoriat’s image, mainly because they are insane and see order of any sort as limiting. Which is interesting for a couple of minutes and then just devolves into chaotic evil. It is sort of sad when you can read the alignments of the characters, because to me Eberron represents to me a setting that isn’t quite so bound to alignments. But each character is pretty easy to tell right away. There is the lawful neutral general and the lawful good cleric. There is the chaotic neutral (or maybe chaotic good, but I doubt it) shifter and the main character seems to change slightly from lawful good to neutral good. And that sort of gets me out of the story a bit, because it makes the characters so predictable and flat.
The main character, at least, does seem to change some, which is refreshing, and as she interacts with the symbiont the reader can see clearly the transformation taking place. This would be, if it weren’t written, good PCing, as the character is reacting to her surroundings and circumstances and is growing as a person. The author tries, perhaps, to have the shifter grow a bit, but that really isn’t accomplished very well, and seems rather obvious and forced and fast when it happens, which is much more like real D&D, where PCs care about each other without ever earning that. But this is a D&D novel, so I guess I can forgive it a little. It does live up to the D&D style fights, at least, which are well rendered here and against a variety of quite interesting foes. As this deals largely with Xoriat the novel makes good use of aberrations, and from twisted flesh creatures to more traditional beholders and mind flayers to the Eberron specific dolgrims and dolgaunts, the monsters are suitably weird and the battles rather intense. There are times when you can see the will saves being made or failed, or things like that, but again, this being a D&D novel, that almost helps at times.
Overall the novel succeeds in capturing a part of Eberron, from the politics of Karnath to the state of Xoriat and the soldier’s mindsets. By the end of the novel the party has formed, and the main evil has gotten away. Unfortunately, the ending basically takes away the one villain that seemed more complicated than insane and evil, but the ending left things open to happen later. Most of who I would have called PCs are left behind (the general, the cleric, and perhaps the warforged) while the main character and the shifter join up with one of the soldiers (who I felt was more of an NPC, but whatever). But I can hope that the story continues, if only to see where the characters will go from the end of the novel as characters. That, as always, intrigues me. But the novel is a good Eberron story, and gives a bit of insight into symbionts and the like, an area that is not gone over too much in the various Eberron supplements. And it was a good, trashy read for my vacation. So I give it a 7/10.
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