You know, hooded figure aside, that’s pretty darn sexy and much preferable to the photorealistic cover for The Black Prism, while still retaining the same feeling for the series. This isn’t the final cover, but gives us a good idea of the direction that Orbit Books is taking with the series. I like it. Great colours. I’ll be sure to post the final cover when I get my hands on it.
Thoughts?
Remember this post? It was incredibly popular. Well now, thanks to Justin Landon at Staffer’s Book Review, you can watch a snippet of the now legendary D&D game featuring the likes of Jim C. Hines, Saladin Ahmed, Joe Abercrombie, Patrick Rothfuss and several other great authors. The full video is rumoured to exist and will, at some point, hit the ‘net.
(I can’t guarantee the completeness or veracity of this account of the D&D game at Epic ConFusion. As a kid, I never got past rolling a character before my friends lost interest, so if it appears that some players didn’t do much, that’s likely because I spent their turns squinting at the handbook.)
“Wait,” I say, “we’re going to role play this, right? I mean, we’re not all just going to go for the racial min/maxes on stats, are we?”
Nine flat stares.
Everyone does racial min/maxes.
We’re rolling stats the night before our Epic ConFusion D&D game. I notice Joe Abercrombie (The First Law Trilogy) is definitely rolling more than six times. “My first rolls weren’t very good,” he explains, perfectly nonchalant.
Huh, guess I don’t understand the rules very well.
Peter V. Brett (The Demon Cycle) claims to have only rolled once. And he’s gloating. I’m too wrapped up in Abercrombie’s cheating to tell if Brett got that many 17’s naturally.
We’re playing old school D&D. First Edition old school. Everyone agrees an assassin is gimped at level 2, so because I’ve played the least, I buddy up with Peter Brett. He’s going with a half-elf cleric named Glendrin Smythe. I’ll be his little brother by 22 years, also a cleric: Grrthog Smythe, half-orc. (Clearly, Dad Smythe’s charms declined with age.)
Read More »
In a shocking turn of events, the cover of Brent Weeks‘s next novel, The Black Prism features a menacing looking dude, a white background and a splash of bold colour (obviously signifying magic, or something). This is a major departure from The Night Angel Trilogy, his first series.
Okay, seriously. I suppose they want to give Weeks his own identity, so you know a Weeks novel on the shelf, but this is a little blatant. The original covers were interesting when they first hit the market (and effective, too, given Weeks sales and popularity), but couldn’t Orbit have done something to give this new series its own identity? Removing the hood from the Hollister model on the front doesn’t count.
