Forsaken

Dead God #1

by Richard Lee Byers

Desperate TimesThe elves of Scarn remember a time when the lands were whole. They remember when sympathetic gods protected them from the thoughtless titans who dominated the earth. They remember the wars that raged when those titans fought to destroy the usurpers. The divine battles shattered the landscape, decimated many races and left gods dead -- including the god of the elves. The titans have since been overthrown and imprisoned and the world has moved on, but without their god, the bereft elves of the Scarred Lands are dying out.

A Desperate Quest

One elven priest, Vladawen, has not given up in these godforsaken times, despite the ravaged earth and the titanspawn who terrorize good people. Confronted by so much tragedy, he knows only one way to preserve his people and their way of life -- to resurrect their slain god.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction

288 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published June 3, 2002

About the author

A resident of the Tampa Bay area, Richard spends much of his leisure time fencing, playing poker, shooting pool and is a frequent guest at Florida science-fiction conventions. His current projects include new novels set in the Forgotten Realms universe and the eBook post-apocalyptic superhero series The Impostor.

Reviews

[Derek · Rating 2 out of 5]

I never really connected with it. Like the cover art and the flattened-to-grayscale map, it was busy, murky, and without a central focus, a bunch of elements put together. While the plot of the entire series is readily understood--Vladawen quests to resurrect the god of elves, who had perished in the Divine War--it was unclear how that connected to what happens here, other than "it would be really nice to have these supremely powerful weapons." And the path to get there was one thing after another: free the sphinx to seek the dwarves to kill the gorgons to get the weapons to defeat the army.

The characters are all driven by grim necessity, willing to sacrifice each other and even their own principles, and this grittiness pervades the setting itself without the joy of adventure. Everyone acts because they have to, not because they want to.

The setting expands on the earliest details of Greek creation myths, the overthrow of the primal force-of-nature titans by the humanized divinities, and portrays the aftereffects. Far from being the envisioned paradise, this is a compromised, deeply damaged world, with lurking titanspawn creatures, dead or traumatized divinities, and upended social systems.

[Michael T Bradley · Rating 2 out of 5]

This had that same problem that I had with Byers' other D&D stuff: I felt like I was coming in in the middle of a story (was this continued from somewhere? I did some searching and couldn't find anything, though I'll admit I didn't dig too deeply), and the characters had ... attributes that allowed me to tell them apart, but none of them popped in a good way. Well, actually, a couple of characters caught my interest early on, but they quickly drop from view.

I was excited because I like the Scarred Lands setting, and credit to Byers, he does incorporate the setting with the main character in an interesting way (his end goal is resurrecting his god), but especially when the plot takes a detour where we're just helping out a bunch of dwarves and suddenly it feels like a Dragon Age sidequest, I was just never really pulled into the story.

I doubt I'll continue with this trilogy.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good book about the Scarred Lands, a rpg setting from a few years back. This book was a kind of departure from the norm back then, being epic and in a very unique setting. A pretty short and quick read, and yet satisfying.

Danny

[Brett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantasy

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really 2.5, I don't think I will read the rest in the trilogy. It just didn't capture me.