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Eli

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The Goblin Tower (The Reluctant King #1)

by L. Sprague de Camp

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May 13, 2026 05:54AM

Eli is currently reading

Abyssal Archive: The Mythology of Dark Souls

by Lokey

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Eli said: " First, a caveat: my rating does not at all reflect the production work of Tune & Fairweather. T&F did a great job with this book (with the possible exception of being more thorough with editing the text for usage and clarity), and, considered purely First, a caveat: my rating does not at all reflect the production work of Tune & Fairweather. T&F did a great job with this book (with the possible exception of being more thorough with editing the text for usage and clarity), and, considered purely as a physical object, the book is very appealing.

With that said, my major problem with this text is that its author fails to consistently separate fact, speculation, and personal opinion, as other reviewers have also noticed. This, in turn, somewhat damages the credibility of the entire project. Just speaking for myself, I noticed places where Lokey's text was inconsistent with either itself, the real world, or both - and if there were places where I noticed those inconsistencies, then there must also have been places where there were inconsistencies that I didn't notice. How, then, can I trust that this text does the one thing that it's supposed to do, namely, to piece the lore together in a reliable way?

Let me give an example. On page 53 of my version, Lokey writes: "Since souls are homogeneous concentrations of magic, the medials could assign a value to any soul, using the Lord Souls as a barometer. Souls are plentiful, but limited; one can't simply generate more souls to completely destabilize their value. This makes for an ideal currency."

To start with, I have no idea why there would need to be a "barometer" (or, perhaps more accurately, a benchmark) for denominating currency in DS. If the people in DS want to compare soul density (or whatever), they don't need to have a single, unchanging reference value. Just like I can notice that 100 is a better score in bowling than 50 is even if I have no idea that the highest possible score is 300 - and just like a $1 bill is not five times as large as a $5 bill - there are lots of ways to build stable systems of comparison without having to rely on a "barometer." That's simply not how assigning value to things works in real life, and I have no earthly idea why the currency in DS would need to work that way, either.

Nor do currencies have to be materially (or even conceptually) "homogeneous" in order to function as currencies. People and other animals have been used as currency at various points throughout human history, but there's certainly no way to pretend that all members of the same species (let alone different species!) are homogeneous in this way. Indeed, there isn't even a truly objective means by which to measure the worth of one animal against another. (Comparing a goat to a chicken is nothing at all like comparing 1 ounce of gold to 2 ounces of gold.) This objective type of homogeneity happens to exist in DS (...we guess), but so what? It's simply not true to say that homogeneity is what allows people to "assign a value" to currency.

Furthermore, it's both anachronistic and false to bring up the idea that "limited" resources prevent people from "destabilizing" a currency's value. The commodity-vs.-fiat-currency debate is largely an artifact of the 20th century, which is a point in history that's centuries beyond anything we see in DS. There is, therefore, absolutely no way that the people in DS were thinking about issues of money issuance and currency destabilization when they transitioned to a soul-based economy. For the purposes of this book, that whole line of thought is just a total non-sequitur.

Moreover, that line of thought is also, once again, factually wrong. Commodity currencies (like ones based in a gold or silver standard) can *and have historically* been victim to major runs of inflation, often because the supply of the commodity in question is not actually as limited as people thought. And if you look at the value of bitcoin over time, you'll see quite clearly that a "currency" can fluctuate wildly in value even if it really is based in a static, finite amount of its base commodity.

Indeed, we can't even really be sure that it *is* impossible to "generate more souls to destabilize their value," because Lokey says the exact opposite thing several pages earlier. Specifically, they say that sexual reproduction in DS "create[s] an entirely new soul" (36). If this is true, it would be incredibly easy to make your own printing press for souls. All you'd have to do is breed animals in large numbers. Even in DS1, lizards, rats, spiders, and other non-anthropomorphic animals grant souls when they're killed. So, if reproduction really does result in new souls, it would be incredibly easy to set up a system where you just endlessly breed and slaughter, say, rats in order to get rich off of their souls. This is not a new or complex idea. It's just farming.

I won't keep piling on, but please believe me when I say that I could say more. (In particular, price stability is not remotely the only criterion that makes for an "ideal currency." Souls make for a suboptimal currency in a lot of pretty serious ways.) Instead, I want to reiterate why all of this is a problem for me.

In discussing souls as a currency, Lokey manages to invent a weird piece of nonsense about how comparisons work, contradict themselves, lie about the history and nature of money, and, in a very Walter Sobchack-esque kind of way, inject a sweaty modern-day political debate into a story that has nothing whatsoever to do with the debate in question. And this is just in the space of three sentences! Just imagine, then, how much might be wrong with the rest of this book!

This is not to say that lore theorists can't bring their own ideas or opinions into the process. To the contrary, I would have been much happier if Lokey had openly disclosed their own biases, consistently labeled their opinions as opinions, and explicitly differentiated between documented fact, simple logical deduction, and loose speculation, as many other theorists do. I think it's fascinating when people bring their own point of view to these conversations - but not, sadly, when they misrepresent their point of view as an objective, unquestionable fact.

So, look, I think this book is still probably pretty useful. For linguistic reasons alone, Lokey's understanding of the DS lore surely deserves to be heard and recognized. But readers need to be very careful what they take away from this text. It would be mildly unfortunate if people came to this book looking to learn about DS and ended up believing something about the game that wasn't true. But it would be a real tragedy if they came to this book for DS lore and ended up believing utter garbled nonsense about the actual, real world. ...more "

Jan 20, 2026 07:21PM · see review