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Author's Note: This was originally posted on my old blog on November 13th, 2020.

24/07/2024

Reviewing The Icewind Dale Trilogy

Introduction

Earlier this year I decided I wanted to use Icewind Dale as a setting for a D&D game I wanted to write, but I knew almost nothing about the place. So I turned to R.A. Salvatore’s breakaway hit the Icewind Dale Trilogy to help familiarise myself with what makes the setting memorable. I found very little of use but I did find three books just begging for a write-up, so here it is.

Today I’ll be weighing up the best and worst parts of this trilogy of novels in an attempt to determine which one is the best, and if the series as a whole is worth pursuing.

The answer is no, don’t waste your time.

Book 1: The Crystal Shard

Published 1988, TSR Inc.

Plot Overview

Nobody likes Drizzt Do’Urden (because he’s a dark elf) and I can’t blame them (because he’s irritating). A bunch of nomadic tribespeople attempt to conquer some towns in a subarctic dale but fail. One of them grows up to join forces with the “heroes” that killed so many of his people. They fight to defeat the shitty wizard who has gained possession of an evil sentient rock of unimaginable power. There’s also a dragon at one point, presumably because this novel is based on Dungeons & Dragons and has fan expectations to meet.

Positives

• The evil artifact is solar powered, which is probably the most imaginative thing you’ll find in any of these books.
• The big bad of the book is the evil artifact itself, which has to contend with either a competent wielder capable of fighting its influence, or a weak willed moron that it can bend to whatever end it desires. An anxious dingus being puppeteered by a sentient magic rock is a pretty neat setup, even if it is very one ring.

Everyone wants the precious.

Negatives

• Drizzt Do’Urden is here and he can’t stop reminding you how angsty but also amazing he is.
• Wulfgar, the supposed protagonist, doesn’t even get a name until part 2. He also gets overall less screen time than Drizzt, who is supposedly a sidekick.
• This book is horrendously racist. From inherently evil races to savage and evil barbarian cultures, we’ve got all the most uncomfortable tropes. As an added treat we also have colonialist propaganda! The hero is a barbarian who learns to be civilised and thus saves his people from their savage ways (Check out The Colonial Message of The Crystal Shard for more details). This alone is enough for me to recommend not wasting your time on this book.
• The evil artifact warring with its wielder could have been a cool focus for a story but unfortunately not a whole lot is really done with it, the book being too preoccupied with the antics of Drizzt & co.
• Speaking of the villain, using his mind control powers to act out his snuff film fantasies really wasn’t necessary.
• All tension quickly drains away as you realise that no main character is ever in danger, every fight is just the heroes mowing down cannon fodder opponents with impunity.
• This book loves to ape Lord of the Rings, absolutely loves it. There’s the obvious parallels to the one ring of course, but it’s not the only thing. We’ve also got the way everyone talks, which sounds like a schoolkid attempting to recreate Shakespeare. Lots of surface level affectations but a clear lack of any underlying logic. The book is also inexplicably divided into three parts, despite being a mere 330 pages long. Presumably the motivation there was “I want to be like Tolkien but I don’t know how”.
• There’s one last flaw so bizarre I almost want to rate it as a positive just for how hard it made me laugh. You see, in addition to a prologue and being divided into three one-hundred page “Books”, this novel also has epilogues, plural. If this is a normal thing that happens please someone let me know, I have never in all my life encountered this before and I can’t find any writing guide that mentions doing this. The first epilogue is at the end of Book 1, which is odd enough to begin with considering it could have just been another chapter, there’s no timeskip or shift in perspective or any of the other things that might warrant a chapter being marked an epilogue. The second epilogue takes place in the middle of Book 3. Between chapters 20 and 21 is a two page epilogue that again gives no reason why it needs to be differentiated from any of the other chapters. And then there’s one last epilogue at the end of the book where you would expect one to be.

Book 2: Streams of Silver

Published 1989, TSR Inc.

Plot Overview

Nobody likes Drizzt Do’Urden (because he’s a dark elf) and I can’t blame them (because he’s irritating). Bruenor the dwarf insists on dragging all of his friends on a search for his ancestral home. A master assassin named Artemis (such a very subtle reference) is chasing Regis the halfling on behalf of the crime boss Regis stole his magic ruby from. Artemis joins forces with a wizard (Sydney), a golem (Bok), and some dude (Jierdan). The trio are attempting to get the evil magic rock from the last book and they think Drizzt has it. This villainous adventurer party threatens to kill each other constantly, and they also have Bruenor’s daughter Catti-Brie as a hostage. There’s another dragon.

Positives

• The villain party is far and away the best part of this book. A delicate web of alliances and conflicting selfish interests that threatens to explode into violence at any moment? Love it. This powder keg is the only time there’s ever been any legitimate tension in any of these books.
• Catti-Brie actually gets to display some of that wisdom we’re always told she possesses when she manipulates the powder keg that is the villain party into exploding when it most benefits her. It’s a reversal of the old trope of the captured villain playing mind games with the heroes and it’s great.
• Bok being an unstoppable engine of destruction with a head full of rocks is legitimately funny at times.
• While only an apprentice to a more powerful evil wizard Sydney is already a competent villain in her own right and I really like her. Despite being described as “not pretty” she has managed to assemble a network of boyfriends she uses to gather information for her. She is the best female character in any of these books, and in my opinion the best character full stop.
• Whisper is a stone cold bitch who has single handedly clawed her way to the top of the deadly business of information brokering. We’re not told endlessly how cool she is like Drizzt, we’re just shown, and it's great.
• Artemis and Drizzt have raging hate boners for each other from the moment they meet and it’s incredible.

Image Credit: Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant

Negatives

• Drizzt Do’Urden is still here and he still can’t stop reminding you how angsty but also amazing he is.
• Salvatore teases me by pretending to kill Drizzt at one point. I would be incredibly disappointed when he turns out to be alive, but I already know he has thirty more books to star in so the surprise is ruined.
• Look ma! No tension! Aside from the aforementioned powder keg of a villain party the rest of the action in the book remains dull as dishwater.
• These 300 odd pages books are still being unnecessarily divided into parts.
• Oh great there’s more barbarians, and they’re also stupidly evil for no reason. We also continue to have lots of inherently evil sentient humanoid races.
• In a turn of events that shocked no one but still manages to be disappointing, Artemis kills Whisper for no reason whatsoever. Thus we lose the second best character any of these books will ever have.
• Sydney dies as well, there are no longer any characters worth caring about.
• Salvatore makes it clear at this point that he struggles to value women for anything but their looks.
  Catti-Brie’s claim to fame isn’t being the adopted human daughter of a dwarven clan head, it’s being “Fairest in all the Dale, maybe in all the north.”
  Sydney’s introduction specifically notes that she was “not a pretty woman.”
  Whisper is “young and alluring.”
  These upfront judgements of attractiveness only happen for the women of course, men get normal descriptions.
• On the topic of Catti-brie, here’s what happens when she kills a single human, after having just felled a dozen or more duergar (gray dwarves):

Lines of tears wetted Catti-brie’s face. She had felled goblinoids and gray dwarves, once an ogre and a tundra yeti, but never before had she killed a human. Never before had she looked into eyes akin to her own and watched the light leave them. Never before had she understood the complexity of her victim, or even that the life she had taken existed outside the present field of battle.

...The dwarf had trained Catti-brie to fight and had reveled in her victories against orcs and the like, foul beasts that deserved death by all accounts. He had always hoped, though, that his beloved Catti-brie would be spared this experience.

This shit here is lazy writing born of the difficulties of giving RPG players opponents it is acceptable to murder with impunity. In a game it often ends up being unavoidable, that’s just what happens when you have a system that focuses so strongly on combat. Here in this novel though you can do whatever you want, and you chose to have Catti-brie kill a boatload of sentient humanoids, this scene is bullshit.

• Hold onto your butts now, here comes the grand finale of this shitshow. I don’t know how else to explain this except by quoting the relevant passages wholesale so here they are:

Regis recognised trouble in the form of a woman sauntering towards them. Not a young woman, and with the haggard appearance all too familiar on the dockside, but her gown, quite revealing in every place that a lady’s gown should not be, hid all her physical flaws behind a barrage of suggestions.

Regis hadn’t seen such boldness in a woman since his years in Calimport, and he felt that he should intervene. There was something wicked about such women, a perversion of pleasure that was too extraordinary. Forbidden fruit made easy. Regis suddenly found himself homesick for Calimport. Wulfgar would be no match for the wiles of this creature.

He pulled the ruby pendant out from under its coat and set it dangling at the end of its chain. The sparkles caught the woman’s greedy eye at once and the magical gemstone sucked her into its hypnotic entrancement. She sat down again, this time in the chair closest to Regis, her eyes never leaving the depths of the wondrous, spinning ruby.

Regis caught the barbarian’s look, but shrugged it away with his typical penchant for dismissing negative emotions, such as guilt. Let the morrow’s dawn expose his ploy for what it was; the conclusion did not diminish his ability to enjoy this night. “Luskan’s night bears a chill wind,” he said to the woman. She put a hand on his arm, “We’ll find you a warm bed, have no fear.” The halfling’s smile nearly took in his ears.

The intervention of a massive barfight is the only thing that prevents Regis from using his hypnotic ruby to date rape a woman. This is immediately after slut shaming her and making an enormous deal of how hideous she is. I don’t know what to say here, this is wrong in so many ways I don’t know where to start. I will remind you though that REGIS IS ONE OF THE HEROES! Everyone is about to drop everything to spend an entire book charging to his rescue! Even though he pulls fucked up shit like this! R.A. Salvatore can fuck right off, don’t bother reading any of this crap.

“Regis is my name, my ruby pendant’s what brought me fame.”

Book 3: The Halfling's Gem

Published 1990, TSR Inc.

Plot Overview

Nobody likes Drizzt Do’Urden (because he’s a dark elf) and I can’t blame them (because he’s irritating). Artemis has captured Regis and is taking him to face his doom, the rest of the party set off in pursuit. The setting moves to fantasy stereotype Arabia, a wretched hive of scum and villainy. I scream a lot while reading it. There’s no dragon somehow.

(Weird bit of trivia, Part 2 of this is called “Allies”, the same title as Part 2 of Streams of Silver.)

Positives

• Drizzt and Artemis’s homoerotic antagonism reaches fever pitch.

Just kiss already!

Negatives

• Drizzt Do’Urden is still here and he is somehow even more insufferable than before. He now has a magic mask that disguises him as a surface elf because Salvatore doesn’t want to deal with him being a drow when it isn’t benefiting him as the author.
• Drizzt and Artemis don’t kiss even though they should.
• Salvatore wusses out and reveals that Bruenor in fact survived plummeting to his death at the end of the last book, confirming yet again that no character is ever in danger. My concern for these characters' wellbeing drops through the floor.
• Our dear old friend the mid-book epilogue returns, inexplicably appearing at the end of part 1. The practice of dividing these books into parts also hasn’t been dropped yet.
• Now for the truly egregious problems, foremost among them being that the whole book is dedicated to the rescue of Regis. Regis proves himself time and again to be cowardly, selfish, greedy, gluttonous, and above all a creep. He is the horrible halfling rogue the rest of your party wants to shank and roll into a ditch so you can finally be free of his bullshit. So of course everyone drops what they’re doing to chase this scumbag to the ends of the earth because the consequences of his own actions finally caught up with him, and he doesn’t even learn his lesson. At the end of this trilogy Regis is still the exact same person he was at the beginning, and everyone continues to overlook the fact that he’s awful.
• Our destination is the city of Calimport, part of a larger desert area known as Calimshan, which we reach via another city named Memnon. As soon as Drizzt & pals step off the boat in Memnon we go full orientalism, which if you want more info on what that means the first ten minutes of this video sums it up quite succinctly. TL;DW though some 18th century fuckboys made up some baseless nonsense that we still haven’t managed to put to bed and it oozes out of the pages of this book like tar from a smoker’s lungs. This “Arabian” themed setting is made out to be a hellhole right from the word go. Here’s our introduction to the exotic world of Memnon:

Strange music, shrill and mournful—as often resembling wails of pain as harmony— surrounded them and carried them on.

A strange combination of odors wafted through Memnon’s hot air: that of a sewer that ran through a perfume market, mixed with the pungent sweat and malodorous breath of the ever-pressing crowd. Shacks were thrown up randomly, it seemed, giving Memnon no apparent design or structure. Streets were any way that was not blocked by homes, though the four friends had all come to the conclusion that the streets themselves served as homes for many people.

At the centre of all the bustle were the merchants. They lined every lane, selling weapons, foodstuffs, exotic pipe weeds—even slaves—shamelessly displaying their goods in whatever manner would attract a crowd. On one corner, potential buyers test-fired a large crossbow by shooting down a boxed-in range, complete with live slave targets. On another, a woman showing more skin than clothing—and that being no more than translucent veils—twisted and writhed in a synchronous dance with a gigantic snake, wrapping herself within the huge reptilian coils and then slipping teasingly back out again.

Here’s the introduction to Calimport:

The aura that distinguished Calimport as home to so very many Calishites came across as foul to the strangers from the North. Truly, Drizzt, Wulfgar, Bruenor, and Catti-brie were weary of the Calim Desert when their five-day trek came to an end, but looking down on the city of Calimport made them want to turn around and take to the sands once again. It was wretched Memnon on a grander scale, with the division of wealth so blatantly obvious that Calimport cried out as ultimately perverted to the four friends. Elaborate houses, monuments to excess and hinting at wealth beyond imagination, dotted the cityscape. Yet, right beside those palaces loomed lane after lane of decrepit shanties of crumbling clay or ragged skins.

Naked children, their bellies bloated from lack of food, scrambled out of the way or were simply trampled as gilded, slave-drawn carts rushed through the streets. Worse still were the sides of those avenues, ditches mostly, serving as open sewers in the city’s poorest sections. There were thrown the bodies of the impoverished, who had fallen to the roadside at the end of their miserable days.

Alright for one, Europeans have slums too, London had enough of them that they came up with the nickname “Rookeries”. If you want in-universe examples instead there’s Waterdeep’s Field Ward and Neverwinter’s Beggar's Nest, both cities considered among the most civilised and prosperous and just all round gosh darn wonderful in the Forgotten Realms. These haphazard constructions really aren’t anything special, I mean look at the state capital of Sydney; it’s a mess of unplanned streets and it was built by white people beginning in 1788.

Then of course there’s the slavery, which doesn’t exist outside of clearly defined “evil” areas in this setting, a claim that is absolutely ridiculous. Slavery in the real world is everywhere, though often hidden by alternative names, such as “indentured servant”. The people of the British Isles have been selling their own citizens overseas since antiquity, and when they later came up with transportation as a punishment, the resulting convicts became slaves on whose backs new colonies were built.

As for the poverty, these people come from an area that is an analog of middle ages feudal Europe, they haven’t got a leg to stand on. Not that Drizzt lets that stop him!

Check out the audacity of this bitch:

...He was busy making the inevitable comparison between Calimport and another city he had known, Menzoberranzan. Truly there were similarities, and death was no less common in Menzoberranzan, but Calimport somehow seemed fouler than the city of the drow. Even the weakest of the dark elves had the means to protect himself, with strong family ties and deadly innate abilities. The pitiful peasants of Calimport, though, and more so their children, seemed helpless and hopeless indeed.
In Menzoberranzan, those on the lowest rungs of the power ladder could fight their way to a better standing. For the majority of Calimport’s multitude, though, there would only be poverty, a day-to-day squalid existence until they landed on the piles of buzzard pecked bodies in the ditches.

Ah yes, the deadly abilities of outlining someone with a harmless glow, or creating a sphere of darkness in an already pitch black underworld where everyone has a supernatural ability to see in the dark. As earth shatteringly powerful as those are, don't you think that maybe everyone having the exact same powers kind of cancels out whatever advantage they would have granted?

So Drizzt says this place is worse than the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad city of the drow. This is after spending what feels like every other chapter lamenting how they cavort with demons, oppress men, and love to torture and kill anyone unfortunate enough to cross their path. But these people wear turbans and perfume so that makes them “fouler” for some reason.

I want to refute his argument but I don’t know what it is, the decision has just been made that oriental stereotype people are bad, and the only justification is that they can’t murder their way to the top for some reason? Even though that’s exactly what Artemis, Pasha Pook, and every other villain in this city has done?

This was me while reading the entire final third of this book. When I wasn’t screaming that is.

• Salvatore begins shipping Catti-Brie and Wulfgar together really hard. The problem with this is that they’re basically siblings, having been raised together for five years by the same adopted father. Why are they into each other? That’s weird Salvatore.
• There’s also some bullshit about Catti-Brie having once been into Drizzt, which is also skeevy as heck. Drizzt has known her since she was eight years old, at which point he was fifty. He’s her dad’s weird friend who knew her all through her childhood and god I feel gross just typing that. Everyone in this book should be be doing the sex offender shuffle.

Officer Buzz says “Bee on alert”

Conclusion

For those unaware TSR (the original owners of the D&D brand) began encountering numerous financial difficulties starting in about 1983, and eventually led to them being purchased lock, stock, and barrel by Wizards of the Coast in 1997.

During their final years pumping out novels was one of the best ways they had to keep themselves afloat, they were cheap to make and easy to distribute, and they didn’t have to deal with the fractured fanbase their numerous game settings had created. I came to these books hoping for stunning insights into Drizzt, as well as Salvatore’s other creations, instead I got a depressing glimpse into the low standards TSR had when they were pumping out books like these to keep themselves afloat.

At least I hope a cash cow mentality is to blame for the existence of this trash, I’d hate to have to accept that at one point these books were considered good. Contemporary reviewers universally gave the trilogy scores around the 3/5 mark, and seem to support it being considered competent but clichéd. If it were reviewed today with its outdated thinking and uninspired plots, settings, and characters I would expect it to receive a far less enthusiastic reception.

Halfling’s Gem stands out as the worst of the bunch, with Drizzt’s angst reaching physically painful levels, a jaw droppingly offensive setting and cast, and of course the whole book being about rescuing the absolute worst character.

In short, this entire trilogy is a waste of your time, except for the handful of times it’s so stupid it loops around and becomes great. An unironic “giant monster in a 10x10 room” is my personal favourite.

1/10 Would not recommend.