Those who don’t want their reading of this novella spoiled by people of poor opinions, please look elsewhere as spoilers are bound to creep up in this review in one form or another.
City of Fire is the fourth volume of the Dungeons & Dragons “Iconic series.” The basic thrust of the story, not minding misleading cover-copy, is about the last scion to the Opal Throne in the City of Fire, and returning his key to close the gateway between the material plane and the outer planes of fire.
Sounds easy, except enter the antagonist, a really undefined, female blackguard, who follows Hextor to get the key and open the material plane to war—via the outsider army that would be generated at the command of the Opal Throne. This blackguard attacks the scion as he is returning the key, and he passes the key, before he’s killed, onto a half-orc barbarian to complete the mission.
The reader is then treated to an assault on an orc-infested stronghold by several characters, fighters, rangers, rogues and a wizard attempt to clean out this orc tribe before returning to the village they pledged to save from the orcs.
Several of the party lie injured or dead by the end of the second chapter and the ogre leader of the orcs almost finishes the rest of the party as they make they escape, except that the party is rescued by a paladin.
They return to the village and find the half-orc strung up and ready to be killed for being an orc (or just orc-like) by the villagers, and the paladin saves the barbarian. This act leads the party to learn of the mission, and volunteer to help out. (Plus having twenty gnolls pin the village in the inn with arrows and threats of fire helps too.) The party makes a break for it, and begins its journey to the fabled City of Fire.
The Iconics that form this party are Regdar, Naull, Alhandra and Krusk. The action is decent, and the characterization sags in places (notably in the character of Krusk), but that doesn’t ruin the overall feel of the book.
The City of Fire is on another plane, which makes this book begin to highlight some of the upper range adventures of the D&D game line. The novella isn’t better than the third one, but fair enough to continue reading (plus being able to finish the novella in two days helps greatly for those out there that want some light, entertaining fiction to read about their favorite game).
The character development between Naull and Regdar doesn’t carry the same tone as the first novella, I didn’t feel that their subplot was as well defined as the in the third volume of the series.
Some other foibles in the series, other than shortness of the book overall, is the feeling that the story never really concludes—it just hangs there, giving the book a “useless middle book of a trilogy” feel.
Which wouldn’t be bad, if the reader knew which books where part of which meta-arching series books. (Say, like the books are to be pared like 1, 4, 7; 2, 5, 8; 3, 6, 9...) But with the volume setup the way it is, there’s not a good ending to the book, and 192 pages isn’t much space to be doing that without clueing in the audience.
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