"The mind flayer turns its alien visage toward the adventurers, and the air seems to ripple as a wave of psychic force cascades toward them. Mialee resists the attack, but her friends are stunned. She casts 'hold monster' on the thing, and it becomes rigid. Nevertheless, she feels the creature's mind enter her own as it tries to win her allegiance by psychic force."
Brilliant! Edge-of-your-seat writing that drags the reader into the world of the "Dungeon Master's Guide." Unfortunately, all is not perfect as the encyclopedic style of writing that follows pummels the previously riveted reader into wondering exactly what kind of novel it is that is being read.
When first released, the "Dungeon Master's Guide," strangely, met with rabid support from a subculture mostly dominated by computer aficionados and lovers of medieval literature. Perhaps Monte Cook, Jonathan Tweet and Skip Williams were consciously aiming for this crowd in writing this volume that is seemingly equally as obsessed with statistical data as with gripping fiction.
Armed with a seemingly endless supply of mathematically based tables, the "Dungeon Master's Guide" quickly becomes inaccessible to all but the most resilient of readers. The scraps of blatantly fantastic musings, and the mostly well-done artwork that accompanies them, makes this tactic all the more frustrating. It seems that Cook, Tweet and Williams are grasping for meaning that tends to not be found in the genre in which they are working and, as such, they have decided to push their chosen stylistic boundaries in an oddly intuitive manner.
The book broods continuously on the dual topic of life and death, and, in so doing, tries to force the reader into confronting issues that most works of the type brush off as being simply necessary for this mode of writing's operation. The "Dungeon Master's Guide," however, is not simply willing to ponder this all-important topic in the conventional mode of narrative in which it is traditionally dealt.
Enter the mathematics. In a coldly calculated move, Cook, Tweet and Williams reduce life, and therefore death, to an exhaustive series of probabilities. The "Dungeon Master's Guide" speaks of this mathematical basis of existence in terms of dice rolls--the authors are referring to the widely held notion of life as a crap shoot.
In this light, The "Dungeon Master's Guide" asserts that regardless of ability, death is nothing more than a statistical event--something that eventually claims everyone--that, as such, forces the individual to cherish every living moment.
The "Dungeon Master's Guide" is that rare book written in the fantasy genre that sets for itself an agenda of offering more than sheer entertainment. Although its means of accomplishing this goal are often extremely frustrating, they are ultimately effective in a manner approached seldomly in fiction. The time and energy necessary to digest the encyclopedic portions and copious amounts of tabled data becomes nearly invaluable as the more traditional moments of the text reveal the depth that they house.
The "Dungeon Master's Guide" is published by Wizards of the Coast.
--Brian Gettler