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Pool of Radiance (Forgotten Realms: Pools, #1)

James M. Ward,

Jane Cooper Hong

Start date: November 1, 2021

Finish date: November 24, 2021

Discussion: Forgotten Realms Reading

Discussion leader: Raechel

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What Members Thought

Dec 03, 2021 Raechel rated it liked it

Shelves: forgotten-realms, fiction, fantasy

Another day, another Forgotten Realms series.

This book is... not bad. It's very classic D&D in that we have a party of heroes and they get sent off on little adventures by a sort of patron (who has ulterior motives). We see a bit of backstory and individual motives for each hero, and they all get chances to shine throughout the story.

What I find weird is that there's a serious focus on... buff-ness. Like to the point that it kind of felt like a fetish. Shal the mage starts out not-buff, but we g Another day, another Forgotten Realms series.

This book is... not bad. It's very classic D&D in that we have a party of heroes and they get sent off on little adventures by a sort of patron (who has ulterior motives). We see a bit of backstory and individual motives for each hero, and they all get chances to shine throughout the story.

What I find weird is that there's a serious focus on... buff-ness. Like to the point that it kind of felt like a fetish. Shal the mage starts out not-buff, but we get a scene where she accidentally wishes herself buff and then a description about how her clothes can't contain her new curvaceous body and then she accidentally teleports herself in the middle of a busy town so now oh no! everyone can see her big buff body barely covered by her scraps of cloth.

Tarl the cleric is a buff dude who's totally ready to Master the Sword (which is not a euphemism at all you guys), and proves himself by standing in the middle of a circle of sweaty, shirtless, scarred buff dudes and wielding his sword against the buffest of them. Clerics of Tyr don't even use swords.

Finally, we get Ren, who is the buffest of the buff ranger-clerics (because he wanted to multiclass). He's haunted by the memories of his dead girlfriend and everyone else is haunted by how big and buff he is. When we meet him, he has some flirtatious banter with a table of buff swordwomen who are all dressed in (of course) body-hugging chainmail.

Anyway, these three bodybuilders meet up and have weird sexual tension that never blossoms into a thruple because this was written in the late 80s. Instead we get some little mini-adventures and some good interaction between the party members except when the author just gets really horny for buff people. Like, this book isn't smutty, but it is horny.

There's this entire subplot about Shal wearing a ring of three wishes and she wastes two of them literally the first day she gets the ring. And then she makes another wish that I thought was going to reveal that her master had been brought back from the dead.... but that never happens. The author just doesn't realize he had her make a third wish and instead she gets use of her third wish as a deus ex machina at the end of the novel.

The book could have been planned out better, there's a lot of side characters who are introduced very suddenly and then killed in the same chapter or are given no real explanation to the reader or the heroes until an info dump near the end.

Not a bad way to start a trilogy, as I've certainly read worse. But I do hope it improves. ...more

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Jul 25, 2021 Rob rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy, nostalgia, fantasy-forgotten-realms

This was a fun nostalgic read. I picked this up at a used bookstore and managed to read it all over a weekend. It is a novelization of the first “gold box” computer game of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which was released in the late 80s. I spent hours as a kid playing that game but never read this book.

It is a straight forward adventure that doesn’t have too many twists. But I was vested in the characters and the pace on storytelling make it a good page turner. The Pools Trilogy is not known as ...more

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