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Anyone read The Gods Are Bastards? The author threw in the towel which is too bad, it was entertaining when he could get it together enough to actually write.

re: knight and smith- BOOK 2 prologue and ch 1 are out.

Interesting.....


from what was said in the prologue (entire prologue is tessa POV from ~11 years ago)

supposedly, there is only one Heir at any one time......and Tessa's Brother is smith to the princess that is the Current Heir..

Orin is Heir #2............

and ya we need A LOT of background on wtf an heir is......

bets on orin and elora-eventually- opening the spires in the capital.........

the capital is built around these tall tower spires..

chapter 2

The palace of the Venosian Royalty was different to near every single other palace I had ever seen, in that it was built in a perfect circle, surrounding the golden spires that, even here, took my breath away at the sight of them.

They truly did look like a trio of sword blades, sticking straight up and out of the ground. They seemed to be made of pure gold and the sunlight could reflect off them blindingly. They were shear, utterly and completely, with absolutely no handholds or way up their surfaces. The palace itself was built as some kind of barrier to actually getting to the pillars of gold and very little was known about them, even to the citizenry of Myrin itself.

The commonly held belief was that they were the result of some magical experiment gone wrong, or right, depending on who you asked. The most popular theory was that it was a Knight who had created them, in some tremendous battle many centuries ago. All that was known was that they predated the Kingdom and were the reason that King Gilderbrand had set up shop here in the first place, believing that these spires held some kind of unfathomable power.

Quite unfathomable as no one had been able to figure out quite what they do yet. At least, no one outside the grounds of the palace itself.

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i am pretty sure it is mentioned later on no one has been able to open them not even the people in the palace in contrast to that quote where the commoners think that the king's family knows what they do/are/can enter.

Ukerric said:

When it comes to cultivation stuff, I recently discovered Memories of the Fall, which is full-on xianxia written by a westerner. By full-on, I mean sects plots, multiple worlds, mega-powerful million years-old cultivators, corrupt families, the inevitable Arrogant Young Master...

And a god squirrel that likes to steal pills. And Cthulhu (or his very good likeness). And general weirdness.

It's also an ensemble fantasy story - lots of points of view, not just some generic MC. 3390 pages so far in 74 chapters - most chapters are huge.

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I read the first two chapters of that one, but I've found it a bit hard going so far, as it's basically a blizzard of unfamiliar names, clans, factions, groups, politics, ratings, types, cultivation levels etc.

Not helped by a weird quirk where the author is writing in third person but referring to viewpoint characters as 'she', which occasionally makes it hard to tell who is actually talking during dialogue. E.g.

'Hi', said Sue.
'Hi yourself', she said.

Does this settle down a bit as it goes ? I am not sure I'll be able to follow it without a reference manual otherwise ;p

velk said:

Does this settle down a bit as it goes ? I am not sure I'll be able to follow it without a reference manual otherwise ;p

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No it doesn't, it also doesn't help that these characters are pretty flat in the personality department. The five main perspectives can basically be summed up this way: the guy with the magic sword who says um a lot, older herb girl who leads, the interchangeable sisters, the pissed off blonde. Later on they get flavor i.e. this one has this many crazy voices in their head and this cultivation manual and/or this physique but aside from that they have just as little personality as they ever did at the beginning. A large part of the problem is that with so many perspectives very little ever actually has a chance to happen apart from action sequences and some info dumps.

As for the story... once it gets going it reads like an endless action sequence. The main characters bumble from one death defying encounter to the next while suffering horrific injuries so often and from which they recover so quickly that it becomes impossible to take the "danger" seriously past a certain point. As for the politics in the overworld it's a morass of characters that aren't really relevant yet and probably won't be for a long while. When they become so it would most likely only be to serve as a foil for the now super powered up main 5 characters once they escape from their anomaly dimensions.

If you want to know if you'll like reading it but find the beginning boring then you should jump ahead a few chapters to where the main group of young character gets separated while being pursued in the mountains.

Another note is that the author likes to play up the "oppressed medieval women" schtick from time to time while also forgetting that almost every single supreme cultivator that has throw their weight around so far has been a woman. The men on the other hand have mostly been either the minions of these women or antagonistic fodder characters. Oh and the author decided to bestow "older herb girl" and "pissed off blonde" with a trauma which is generally only used to fill pages with and to brow beat "sword boy who says um a lot" with from time to time. So that gets a bit tiresome.

I just read the first 10 chapters of Magic-Smithing. I really dig this series so far. I'll plow through all the free chapters (60) in the next week or so. Very entertaining.

Mom
Lvl: 32
HP: 1050
Sta: 573
MP: 200
Vit: 105
End: 32
Str: 35
Dex: 82
Senses: 45
Mind: 73
Magic: 20
Clarity: 20
Extra Stat Points: 0

Total Stats: 412


Dad
Lvl: 36
HP: 1410
Sta: 1113
MP: 40
Vit: 145
End: 69
Str: 120
Dex: 53
Senses: 38
Mind: 17
Magic: 4
Clarity: 1
Extra Stat Points: 0

Total Stats: 447


Girl
Lvl: 37
HP: 1000
Sta: 666
MP: 500
Vit: 100
End: 50
Str: 50
Dex: 50
Senses: 50
Mind: 50
Magic: 50
Clarity: 50
Extra Stat Points: 96

Total Stats: 546


She's crushing them with stats. She's a lot like Grid from Overgeared in that way.

Yup. But common or not, I find it very enjoyable.

i like magic smithing.

good- initial world building, good characters etc.

it is cute, i wonder what the reaction is going to be when SHE finds out she is the granddaughter of the owner of the trading company and vice versa, when the grandfather finds out that the smith is his granddaughter.