I just came across this in the bookstore. Wizards of the Coast has repackaged Troy Denning’s novel The Verdant Passage in a really nice-looking trade paperback edition:
The book is set in the Dark Sun game world (which Denning co-developed). This is the campaign setting I was most into when I played Dungeons & Dragons back in middle school. It’s basically Lord of the Rings meets Mad Max (most vegetation has been wiped out by life-devouring magic, gladiatorial combat is big, and the hobbits are all feral cannibals). The world is absolutely brutal. All player characters were supposed to start out at level 3 just to give them a fighting chance, and even so you were supposed to roll up three or four characters per player because it was just assumed that the characters wouldn’t be lasting long.
This new edition of the novel uses the same cover art (by Brom, whose spectacular artwork was always key to defining the look of the world), but with the addition of that gigantic black number 1. I don’t know why, but I’ve always had this thing involving book series with numbers on them — those damned numbers practically compel me to collect the whole set, and that they put the number in gigantic typeface on the cover … I mean, that’s just not fair. It took an enormous act of will to return this book to the shelf.
It did remind me, though, of an incident I’d completely forgotten about. I read The Verdant Passage during a day that I stayed home sick from school. I spent the whole day reading, and as is wont to happen when you spend hour after hour reading a book, the book started to seem more and more real and reality receded further and further into the background. This effect was amplified by the fact that I was running a tremendous fever, and by mid-afternoon I had become positively delirious. In the story, the band of heroes — which includes a gladiator — discover that the vile sorcerer-king intends to sacrifice everyone in the arena as part of an evil magical ritual. I remember crawling out of bed toward the door, but being too weak to keep going, and I lay there on the floor with my forehead pressed into the carpet, with sweat just pouring off me, and I was somehow convinced that I was both myself and the gladiator character, and that if I didn’t manage to drag myself off the floor and out the door and go save the world, then everyone was going to die.
Eventually, of course, my fever came down, and I realized that I am not in fact a totally badass gladiator warrior. (Wait. Or am I? Actually, I guess I kind of am. But I digress…) It was actually a pretty cool experience, and sort of made me wish that I could read books while delirious more often.
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