The Brazen Gambit

Dark Sun: Chronicles of Athas #1

by Lynn Abbey, Brom (Illustrator)

After finding himself the odd man out in a palace conspiracy, a templar exiles himself from the court and joins forces with an outlaw band of clerics that may be tied to the corrupt Veiled Alliance. Original.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Dungeons and Dragons, Ebooks, Collections, Dark, Games

311 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published July 1, 1994

About the author

Lynn Abbey began publishing in 1979 with the novel Daughter of the Bright Moon and the short story "The Face of Chaos," part of a Thieves World shared world anthology. She received early encouragement from Gordon R. Dickson.

In the 1980s she married Robert Asprin and became his co-editor on the Thieves World books. She also contributed to other shared world series during the 1980s, including Heroes in Hell and Merovingen Nights.

Abbey and Asprin divorced in 1993 and Abbey moved to Oklahoma City. She continued to write novels during this period, including original works as well as tie-ins to Role Playing Games for TSR. In 2002, she returned to Thieves World with the novel Sanctuary and also began editing new anthologies, beginning with Turning Points.

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently reread a different Darksun series from my youth, and this sparked an interest in checking out other novels in this universe. Troy Denning’s Prism Pentad was one of the first series of books I read (without being forced) when I was in middle school, and I have always had a special place in my heart for stories set in Darksun. I’m not sure why I never got to this series back in the day, but I can say that the first one was a lot of fun and immerses readers in the brutal setting right off the bat. Abby does a great job with her descriptions of the harsh world and it inhabitance…the word ‘visceral’ comes to mind.
The plot is a slow burn, but I never felt bored. I think in these ‘longer’ series, especially when multiple authors will be working on it, the first book has a lot more set up than the books to follow. And I’m okay with that.
Characters were good and had layers, I like that we are in a new City State setting with a new Sorcerer King, and interesting new baddies to become familiar with.

All and all, a fun read.

[Ronald Wilcox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good start to a five book series set in the campaign setting of Dark Sun.

Pavel is a regulator in the templarate of Urik. He begins to see how corrupt things are within the city and how the main ingredient of a pain-relieving medicine is being perverted to a drug that kills. He is forced to flee the templarate and go into the wilderness, arriving at the Quraite, a hidden area ruled by druids. There he works with members of that society to try righting the wrongs he has seen.

Good introduction to the story with an interesting protagonist in Just-Plain Pavel. Dark Sun campaign setting is intriguing also with its world decimated as magic steals life from the world.

[Steven Fowler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably one of the best novels set on the world of Athas. Together with Cinnabar Shadows and The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King this book starts what could be read as a trilogy. Although all three books are told by different protagonists and are stand-alone novels, they come together quite nicely narrating the events surrounding Pavek, the ex-Templar, during the waning days of the rule of the Lion King of Urik and his inevitable transformation into Athas' most feared and powerful creature, a dragon of Rajaat.

[Rio · Rating 2 out of 5]

Athas, the scorched world, where land defiling magic has made immortal kings out of the sorcerers who destroyed the world and wiped out entire races out of existance. Immortal kings, who with using their defiling magic, still maintain an iron fist over the asheft behind by their pilgrimage

By all means, this is a setting that SHOULD have given you a story that writes itself. The sorcerer kings and their history of genocide, the struggle between defiling and preserving magic, how preserving magic is always weaker than defiling because of its very nature needing you to hold back from taking too much from the land.

Instead of embracing all that made this dnd setting great and striving to work within (or even against the setting, as the players often do), Lynn Abbey takes this in possibly the most boring, noncommittal way possible.

We follow a Templar, Just-Plain-Pavek, as he is often called in the book. An ugly brute, again as he is described, who yearns to be able to cast his own magic instead of being a regulator of the merciless king Hamanu and getting his magic from him. Pavek had moments were he could be a good character, but all of those moments are undermined by how much his personality, ambitions, wants and beliefs change at the drop of a hat.

The fact that he has a life in Uric, the city state he got sneaked out of after he uncovered the whole secret plot about the Laq, and yet that which haunts his memories from that city barely gets mentioned.

His former girlfriend, the woman with the tattoo sleeve of serpents and her backstory, are both tragic and tragically underutilized. She barely makes three appearances, all of which involved no conversation or banter with Pavek. You could replace her with gromit acting out her role as the bad guy's henchman and it would not change anything other than having Pavek feel uncomfortable whenever she was there.

Speaking of underutilized characters, Zvain. The kid who Pavek sort of adopted after both his parents got killed by laq and the kid who had an ATROCIOUS relationship with Pavek before he got stolen away by the Akashi and Co, there was SOMETHING THERE with the bad guy making him believe that he made a defiler out of him and that Zvain could no longer turn back, but then he does not get mentioned again till the very end of the book where he is by the evil guy's side and doing puppy dog eyes at Pavek to guilt him into taking him with to the grove so he can tell the bad guy of its location.

At that point, I think the writer herself was also just indecisive as to what to do with Zvain cause the whole time his fate and the way Pavek treats him shifts. Not for a moment did it feel like the writer knew what she was writing next when it came to Zvain so she chose to just, keep bringing him up and write intuitively hoping that at some point the coin would stop flipping itself and land on one side (exs: The druids took the traitor away until Zvain's whines could no longer be heard, Zvain taking on a much more mature sinister tone before going back to whining when begging Pavek to tell the druids to forgive him, Pavek treating Zvain like he is beyond saving and undeserving of basic comfort one moment, despite his guilt, to fully yelling and proclaiming how HE IS JUST A CHILD WHO HE FAILED AND HE DOESN'T DESERVE TO BE LOCKED AWAY during the funeral procession of the fucking archdruid, only to just place the final decision of where home is and where to go next on Zvain???????

And oh my god. The Hamanu ex machina. Dear fucking god, getting to a good point where a final battle might take its place only to rip it away when the mc seems to be losing by calling on his sorcerer king and humanising him??? Revealing that Telhami was his former lover and also a former high Templar of Urik????????? That just took away from the story so much so quickly that it felt completely out of left field, a twist for the sake of a twist to justify why the sorcerer king did not raise Quarite to the ground the moment his biggest threat was dealt with.

It is a shame that the story left such a bitter aftertaste despite its happy ending, the world of Athas is rich with possibilities for many great stories, but this ultimately felt like a draft with some rather shallow and underdeveloped characters, 2 stars cause I am using it as a tour guide of Urik for a campaign I am writing, but it isn't worth more than that

[Ian Mathers · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a re-read; as a kid I grabbed pretty much every D&D novel I could find or afford, and I've gotten rid of the vast, vast majority of them. But the couple that Lynn Abbey did for this kind of anthology quasi-series in the Dark Sun setting always stuck with me and I figured if I did want to read them again they might be hard to track down. Dark Sun was one of my favourite 2E settings, and when I started playing D&D again in grad school after a significant hiatus it was a Dark Sun campaign. I will say rereading this one now, I'd hesitate to recommend it to anyone who doesn't know the setting; things are explained, to a certain extent, but I still feel like it'd be pretty opaque if you're coming in totally cold.

Middling or bad D&D novels, to me, are often the ones where I can feel the bones of the game mechanics poking through. This character is probably level whatever specialty class with this magic item, etc. Not only is that feeling pretty absent here (which does not mean obscuring anything identifiable), but it really just is this downbeat character work instead of anything more flashy or power fantasy-esque. I think I remember being kind of nonplussed by it as a kid and then finding it more compelling on a re-read a few months later; it didn't have the kind of rising power level for the protagonist and his friends that I expected, but it replaced that kind of arc with something that felt a lot more real and emotionally involving. Hell, even "friends" might be getting ahead of things.

So instead you've got a guy deeply scarred by a pretty traumatic upbringing and some serious structural/societal stuff, and not shielded from much of that just because he was able to become one of the enforcers of that society. Even the people who see he might have something redeemable in there barely grasp what's really going on with him, anyway. It's the kind of book that has people act in ways that might seem baffling if you assume everyone is essentially rational, healthy, and free but puts a lot of work into making you feel just how understandable those "mistakes" and needless conflicts really are. And it doesn't give us a heroic triumph that wouldn't fit that narrative. I don't want to overhype it, but I was really glad I kept this one, especially since I remember the third book Abbey did being maybe my favourite D&D tie in novel I kept. That one I have on my shelf; looking up this one made me remember there was a second in between them that Pavek appears in, so I've ordered that one too.

[SapphireRose26 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't play Dungeons and Dragons, but I know of it, and I have friends who do. I mention this because that's the world in which this book takes place, yet even with my limited knowledge, I was able to follow everything that went on. More than that, I enjoyed the book from start to finish. The world building was trickled throughout the story and explained easily enough for a novice like me to follow. The only thing I found myself Googling were the names of the creatures mentioned, and that didn't impact my enjoyment of the story at all. It had a good mix of inner dialogue and action, and the settings were interesting.

The main character, Pavek, lives in a society that conditions its people to be cold and violent. They aren't supposed to care about others, let alone question anything, and forget having aspirations or wanting to better yourself. Yet he's somehow managed to cling to his humanity, and he even develops a sort of moral code for himself to determine right and wrong. I liked him immediately. I empathized with his "fish out of water" situation and the conflict that inevitably happens because of it. I'm looking forward to the rest of the series.

[Nenad Pavlović · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was on a fence about giving it 2 or 3 stars.

To give credit where it's obviously due, this book is CONSIDERABLY better written than the Prism Pentad ones: it's much more nuanced, with better style, more complex characters, details of everyday lives and so on.

But still, it makes for a worse novel, or at least a worse Dark Sun novel.

I get it that this is a whole other city-state, and that the conditions of life have changed because of the Tyr storms, but still, it doesn't feel as the same world: there's too much water, too much produce (they wrap Ral's Breath in PAPER?? REALLY? Paper is made of trees you know, one of the things not commonly found on Athas), too much culture.
Character interaction seems weird, especially in key moments. I didn't know what to make of Pavek beating the sh*t out of that boy all the while shouting "I love you! I support you! Die, scum! I believe you!"

I could rant some more about the flaws of this book, but the fact remains that I really got engaged in the story, and I guess that means it did something good too.
Oh, and I really liked the ending.

[Laurence · Rating 4 out of 5]

After the epic, setting-shattering events of 'The Prism Pentad', Dark Sun moves onto smaller stories. However, they've also started re-using art from RPG sourcebooks rather than custom pieces, as in this example the cover depicts a random elf, no character found within its pages.

Anyway, this book centres around a low-ranking templar in the city of Urik, doing his best to keep his head down and survive in the savage bureaucracy. Unfortunately, a conspiracy and a hidden group of druids threatens to upset all this.

The book could be described as slow, but that's merely because it takes the time to establish the characters, each of whom is well-rounded and complex.

The 'Chronicles of Athas' books, of which this is the first of five, were advertised a standalone stories, but it is worth mentioning that, while 'The Brazen Gambit' does wrap up neatly at the end, it does leave hooks for sequels dangling, and in fact does have two follow-up titles in the series, establishing a trilogy of its own.

[Erich · Rating 2 out of 5]

90’s fantasy loves to have a blow by blow recounting of fight scenes

The plot was haphazard in the second act but came together eventually. Some character depth from the protagonist but only a smidge. I soldiered on bc of nostalgia and sunk cost.

[KillDeer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some early stuff here that I loved but it all falls apart in the end with a happy ending that plays way too much with the Athas setting to be believed. Even the loose ends at the end are all tied up. What reason does the next book in the series have to exist? What a strange ending

[Cindy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fantasy is not my 'gambit' but better than most.

[Paschalis]

elibrary

[M.A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

A better-than-average D&D novel by an established fantasy author - lots of fun to read. Recommended.

[Egghead · Rating 3 out of 5]

Putz learns healing drug
really mind-control drug.
Guess he's a hero!

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

A better read than Prism Pentad. It is still what it is, a D&D novel meant for young readers, but I found many of the developments interesting, and the protagonist as well.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good story, but gets slow at parts.

[Benjamin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Accurate to Darksun Seting

[Nathalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story was good but got a bit confusing at times and the ending doesn't answer all the questions you might have. Presumably you have to read the rest of the series to understand it all.

[Selim Tlili · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great fun and reminded me of my dorky high school days. It's stood up surprisingly well as a fantasy novel.

[Patrik Sahlstrøm · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unimaginative with horrible plot, stay away!

[Cerinawithasea · Rating 4 out of 5]

After finding himself the odd man out in a palace conspiracy, a templar exiles himself from the court and joins forces with an outlaw band of clerics that may be tied to the corrupt Veiled Alliance. Original.

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