The Binding Stone

Eberron

by Don Bassingthwaite, Adam Epstein (Narrator)

The first book in a series of dark tales and high adventure in the Eberron™ campaign setting.

The Binding Stone features the brandnew races that were created specifically
for the Eberron campaign setting. It’s also the first Eberron novel to takes
its readers on an exploration of many uncharted territories in the setting.

AUTHOR BIO: DON BASSINGTHWAITE is currently an editor for Black Gate Magazine and a contributor to the award-winning Bending the Landscape anthologies. His most recent work with Wizards of the Coast, Inc. was Yellow Silk, a
Forgotten Realms® novel.


From the Paperback edition.

Genres: Fantasy, Dungeons and Dragons, Fiction, Forgotten Realms, Novels

Audible Audio

First published August 1, 2005

About the author

Don lives with his partner in Toronto, surrounded by gadgets, spice jars, and too many books.

No, I don’t normally refer to myself in the third person. That’s the official author bio from the back of my most recent books. You want some other trivia?

I’m a fan of the serial comma.
I’m a huge fan of breakfast cereal.
I own one (and only one) stuffed animal — a Highland cow from Edinburgh named “Ewan MooGregor.”
I love Edinburgh and London — other large cities visited in the UK include Bath and Plymouth. I’ve also been to Cheddar where I ate a really good cheese sandwich.
I like cheese, especially hard and blue cheeses (Mmmm. Stilton.).
I look terrible in hats with the exception (for unknown reasons) of a few ball caps of particular colour and design.
I look good in rugby shirts, but don’t really own any as I neither play rugby nor follow the sport enough to feel honest buying the shirt of any particular team.
I don’t play or follow soccer either, but that didn’t stop me from choosing a “shirt team” in the last World Cup, wearing their shirt, and cheering for them in pubs. Go Netherlands!
To quote Paul S. Kemp, “Mmm. Beer.”
I have seriously considered buying a kilt. Update March 2008: The kilt has been bought!
Kilt, cow, and fondness for Edinburgh aside, I’m not Scottish.

More to come, I’m sure!

Reviews

[Ubiquitousbastard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alright, so I went into this with low expectations, which was probably a good thing. I'm not saying that this book was bad, it just wasn't an amazing piece of fantasy literature. Overall, it was highly readable and veered just enough away from cliches to not make it painful. Of course, I don't mean that the author didn't fall back on cliches on a regular basis, only that the book also took enough risks and plot turns atypical of the genre to make up for the tropes.

The characters were surprisingly decent, although the villain is absolutely boring in his one-dimensional depiction and Dandra was kind of awful as a character herself. Ashi, however, wasn't so bad, so I think that Bassingthwaite has it in him to write okay female characters, he just failed with his female protagonist.

I also have to give credit for making the world understandable (to an extent) for me, even though I'm not at all familiar with the subject material. I'm sure if I was familiar this would have been more comfortable to read, but as it was I didn't feel lost or that I had missed something important.

Overall, I think this was a decent attempt at fantasy, which is a compliment coming from me. Most fantasy is so terrible I can't make it through 50 pages these days, and I read this in only two readings, so obviously I wasn't hating it. I'll check out the next book and see what I think about it.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is really great D&D novel! It's my first read into the world of Eberron and certainly won't be my last. I'm totally in love with Geth the Shifter. And if I'm not wrong, there's some gay subtext here. He's motivated by the loss of his live-in druid boyfriend. I'm delighted that there are five more novels by Bassingthwaite featuring Geth. I have a feeling I will burn through all of them before the end of summer. Bassingthwaite is a very good author. Everything works here. The characters, the plot, and the pacing are all pitch-note-perfect. I am going in search of all his other novels. Also, I found this novel to be a very solid introduction to the Eberron setting.

[JJacy1 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eberon done right

This is a solid story and a well crafted tale. Start off with some “adventurer types” slip in just enough motivation and back story so we care a little about them and off we go. Subtract/add more characters as the full sense of the obstacles are revealed. Character growth is the key driver of this book and it’s all the better for it.

The only downsides are that Eberon as the backdrop is sort of “flat.” No majesty or mystery of the city of Sharn, just some mostly normal forests and a swamp. Minus the dragon shards one could be in any generic fantasy setting.

Well done and looking forward to the next in the series.

[Matthew Pennell · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think this might be the book that convinces me to stop buying second-hand juvenile fantasy novels; the nostalgia factor is never enough to counteract the terrible prose and one-dimensional characters. Throw in a bunch of printing errors on top of an already unreadably small font and there's really nothing to recommend it.

[Michael T Bradley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm trying to read through all the Eberron novels (because I'm insane), and this one was really enjoyable, but also really difficult for some meta reasons.

The meta reason is that I was reading it at the same time as Marked for Death, which has nearly identical main characters for the first quarter or so. Bassingthwaite pulls a switcheroo, but I assumed it was a fake-out and kind of zoomed along on autopilot for so long that when I realized these other characters (not NEW characters, but still) were now our main characters, I was a little confused.

Frustratingly, I didn't care for these new characters that much. We get a lot of backstory on one of them, for instance, and it just felt so ... meh. Like it was this clever twist on how psi-crystals or whatever work, but man did I not care. I guess because I didn't give a damn about the character?

Anyway, I skimmed a lot of it, and my issue was that it felt so much like, LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO THE WORLD OF EBERRON at times it was super distracting. I did enjoy the whole "dragon below" aspect, which, since it's the series title, makes me excited to read the rest of the trilogy.

I skimmed around to get to the end, and I think there were some rebel warforged? Which, again, is like WELCOME TO EBERRON - WITH A TWIST! I'm amazed with these books how WELL Keith Baker was able to introduce the setting while still telling a fun story with characters I gave a damn about. Ah well.

[Bradley · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a halfway decent story but the small print was arranged in such a way that is physically hurts to read this book. Wizards of the Coast have used this font style before.. but not to this effect. I love the tale but.. while avoid this book at all costs. You will want to gouge out your eyeballs than finish this one. I read two other books while struggling with this one. A book on terrorism and a book on Hannah Montana. I only hold moderate interest in terrorists because of September 11 and a sappy girlie book to counter the agony this book caused me. If you value your sanity stay away. =)

[Yavor Vlaskov · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book based on an existing world and license is certain to have some limitations to its writing, but Don Bassingthwaite does a marvelous job of circumventing them, subtly weaving worldbuilding (that he clearly understands and appreciates to a degree you seldom see in 3rd party writers of a licensed fiction) into the narrative, making for an extremely easy flow. The only negative is that I found it hard to care for the unique and interesting, but ultimately unappealing characters. I am looking forward to the second book, though, as maybe then they'll build up some repute in my eyes.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This trilogy was an incredible reading experience! If you play Dungeons & Dragons or other TTRPGs, I think you will truly appreciate the array of characters that are tied together by fate (a solid "hook") and the slow burn of a building terror that must be vanquished to save this world.

The web of character relationships and the complexities of their personal goals are woven together so well. These books had me deeply invested in the many subplots and there many reveals that had me gasping! I only wish there were more books.

[Lorewarden]

This novel was exciting and engaging. Three adventurers find themselves embroiled within a single conflict and have to put aside suspicion and even a negative shared history to survive. I find adventuring parties with tension like this realistic and interesting. The story has lots of action and character development, and I look forward to the next book in the trilogy.

On a side note, the cover art by Michael Komarck is amazing.

[Marvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great start to a trilogy of books that showcases the flavor of the Eberron setting rather well. Maybe the best first hundred pages I've ever read in a Dungeons & Dragons novel, or at least since I was ~12 or whatever and started the Dragonlance Chronicles. Action-packed and moves right along, pretty clean prose. A fun read.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yep. A near perfect RPG fiction. Great characters, edge of the seat action sequences, exactly what I wanted. It probably doesn't hurt that I'm a huge fan of the Eberron setting.

[James Merrett · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the lore of Eberron but this struggled to keep me going through.

[Jeff Ginger · Rating 3 out of 5]

It might be a decent book but I just can't get through it with the voice actor on the audio copy - he's deplorable.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stuff I Read D&D Edition – The Binding Stone by Don Bassingthwaite Review

So this marks the first book in the Dragon Below series by Don Bassingthwaite, and is rather a welcome relief after the utter disappointment that was Taint of the Black Brigade. While not a deeply moving work by any means, The Binding Stone is what it seems to be, and does what it sets out to do with a compelling enough style and grace. The characters are more or less well defined, and though some of the novel suffers from the traditional trappings of D&D, like evil for evil’s sake and mysterious villains and unexplained lots of things, at the very least Bassingthwaite provides an entertaining romp through the world of Eberron. The story opens in the Eldeen Reaches, as a Shifter named Geth and a druid named Adolon meet a mysterious woman on the run from aberrations. As far as D&D books go, this book does a fair job of providing instant access to these character, at least in terms of skills and classes and such.

And also as far as D&D goes, the story does a fair job of introducing some interesting aspects of the game into novel form. At least, there are some things that break what some would consider the “rulles” and as such I appreciate that the author is able to write some new tings that make sense for the setting but do not explicitly exist in the setting. Transferring a consciousness out of a psicrystal and into a person and the sorts of other experiments that the villain in the story carries out push the boundaries of magic and psionics in ways that I think work. I am always looking for things like this, in actual campaigns as well as D&D novels, to add that something to the story. Because while the “rules” are all well and good, I think any good story needs to really be doing something new with the materials. So the story does that fairly well, complicating matters while still staying very grounded in the theory behind the magic.

That said, the story is not what one would call the most complex. I have no reservations about it, but the novel is definitely a fighting campaign. Meaning that like any sort of campaign that focuses pretty much solely on combat as the only way to challenge the party, the story moves from fight scene to fight scene. Luckily the fights are portrayed in an interesting enough manner, with a good level of danger, success, and failure that I normally ended up caring about them a bit. I pretty much always knew how they were going to play out, but I was a little surprised by an early death, and while that became really the only surprise in the various combats, it did catch my attention early enough that the combat in the rest of the book felt a bit more dangerous. I’m not sure that it would last further than the end of this book, as the series does go on, but at the very least it worked here.

And the characters aren’t too bad, though they tend to suffer from being a bit simple. The fact that Geth and the magic user Singe have a history was interesting, and the Kalashtar character provided some nice contrast, what being all crazy and her body being possessed by a psicrystal. The villains pretty much uniformly lacked good characterization, however, and as most of them were aberrations or brainwashed hunters, they felt quite flat. I imagine that we would find out a bit more about their motivations in the other books, but to this point all we are really told is that they are evil. Which is obviously enough for the main characters, who resolve to fight against this threat rather quickly. There are quite a few elements of convenience running throughout the plot, where characters just happen to be there, and I can see the shape a campaign like this would have. And for a D&D novel that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

So I guess what I can say most about the novel is that it is good for what it was. It is an Eberron book, taking up the areas of the Gatekeepers, the Dragon Below, the Last War, and things of that nature, though perhaps because it happened a bit out in the boondocks it feels a bit like it could be in any fantasy setting. There wasn’t a whole lot of the trappings of Eberron, nor the feel of mystery that I tend to look for. But, a bit like Lady Ruin, it delves into an aspect of the setting that isn’t quite as recognizable, and does a fair job being interesting and entertaining. At the end of the day, this is a D&D book. I probably wouldn’t like playing it as a campaign because it really does seem to be pushed along a very set track, but as this is a novel I can forgive it. It is combat heavy and intellectually light, but still enjoyable. And so I am left to give it a 6.25/10.

[Crow · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would absolutely recommend this trilogy to anyone looking for good dnd novels, or fantasy in general! The characters are all engaging, and it was easy to become immersed in the world. It feels like a d&d campaign in all the good ways. I like that it goes over the less-touched aspects of the Eberron setting, and can tell a story within it without reintroducing the same main points.

A highly enjoyable read, and a fantastic trilogy (as well as it's sequel trilogy)

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent beginning for an otherwise pointless trilogy. The characters were surprisingly interesting for mass market fantasy and the overarching plot was engaging and made me want to pick up the 2nd book right away (mistake). The editing for this book is terrible - I didn't actually red mark my book because there would probably be at least 1 per page, if not 2 or 3 simply for spelling.

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Started out kind of 1-dimensional, but it got better over time. It kept the action pretty consistent throughout. I liked that it's set in Eberron; however, there's not a lot of Eberron-specific setting here. Still, what's cooler than Psions and Spellblades?

P.S.
Lots of typos in my copy.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first book I have read in the Eberron setting. It is pretty good, I really like the Shifters and the Psions, though I haven't finished yet I hope I see some war-forged at some point.

[Soeren Staun Biangslev · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really slow start, but turns from nasty to brilliant!

[Mphecker · Rating 4 out of 5]

After a somewhat slow start, this turned in to a very fun book. It captured the feel of Eberron without throwing every nuance of the setting at you like some of the other novels do.

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't think I ever finished this trilogy. But I remember enjoying this first book.

[Mickey Gousset · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the Eberron setting, and Don does a great job with it and the characters.

[~Cyanide Latte~ · Rating 5 out of 5]

[REVIEW TO COME AT A LATER DATE UPON A FULL SERIES RE-READ.]