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Title: Storm Knights by Bill Slavicsek, C.J. Tramontana ISBN: 0-87431-301-5 Publisher: West End Games Pub. Date: September, 1990 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $4.95

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Average Customer Rating: 1.5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 2
Summary: Bad novel, great Roleplay-Game
Comment: Well, this book IS a bad role-playing game. The novel itsel, quite plainly, is a pain to read. There is only one reason why you should buy this book - and the two sequels. They are the introduction to the TORG role playing game by Westend Games. TORG, to be quite honest, is a great game, but unfortunately the designers expect everybody to have read the novels. You can play the game without having read these books, of course, but they really help you figuring out what's going on.
Fans of the RPG should get them, others - avoid!

Rating: 1
Summary: Pure unadulterated crap!
Comment: There is only one reason that I kept reading this damned book... A gaming buddy of mine wants to run a TORG game; I stated that the genre just wasn't for me, but he advised that I might get into the spirit of it if I read the first novel...

The book's literary style was one that I tend to dislike anyway. Emotion was conveyed by reciting the melodramatic reactions of the characters and by excessive use of adjectives. The characters seemed flat and stereotyped. The book had everything from the priest calling to God wondering if God has abandoned him, to the child genius scientist. Not only the characters were stereotyped; the tone of each scene was melodramatic. "He would make her death a slow one, that he promised his far-away master." And chapter 53 is the funniest thing I've read in a long time (That's the chapter which begins "Deep within Illmound Keep ... the Gaunt man sat upon his throne of bones" and ends "'For those are the souls that shall be ours!'") The sexist tendency to give long descriptions of female's appearance was apparent in several places. "She had been in the Senate for as long as Decker could remember, and she had to be in her fifties, but she was still a fine figure of a woman. Decker could only imagine what she must have been like in her younger days. Her raven-black hair was styled short and had only a hint of gray, and her clothes were nothing but conservative, but on Conners the effect was striking." "Bryce studied the woman closely, noting a dusky creaminess to her skin that hinted at a Mediterranean heritage despite her name. Her eyebrows were straight and dark, over a high-bridged nose. She had a strong, square chin under a wide, full-lipped mouth. She had the figure and muscle tone of someone who worked to keep themself in good physical shape." (Note also the mixing of case -- the singular 'she' 'someone' tries to keep 'themself' fit -- this is just one example of bad copy-editing through the whole book.) The sci fi was presented as a list of technology. It was not science fiction, but weird science. No effort was made to offer an explanation of how, for example, Ms. Mara's trans-cosm telescope was supposed to function. Some of the slang, I will grant, was quaint. "'Giga-rad,' Mara exclaimed to the empty street. 'It worked. I'm here.'" I never really liked stories/worlds in which there is such distance between "heroes" and "regular folk." The dang thing reads like a bad roleplaying game. "... A few more stabs would bring it down." Um, why are even bladed weapons assumed to do only _concussion_ hits? Worst of all, the book implied some very nasty things about Homo Sapiens Neanderthallensis. "They became brutal, bestial, more Neanderthal than homo sapiens." Dang it all, whatever scraps of decency there are in humanity clearly come from our Neanderthall ancestry, as the Cro magnons were just aggressive jerks.

I was more excited about the genre before reading this book... Now it feels, at best, sort of kitsch like Xena:Warrior Princess.