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Drizzt Do’Urden is the dark elf ranger that almost everyone of my gaming groups have had to deal with for a while—as in, everyone wanted to play the two-sword wielding drow ranger. While this lead my gaming groups to frustration as I said “no,” we did enjoy reading most of the dark elf’s tales until a point where my suspension of disbelief shattered (somewhere in the Legacy or Starless Night). The Drizzt of the Dark Elf trilogy wasn’t the same character that appeared in the Crystal Shard and it showed. My enjoyment of the character waned as his adventures skyrocketed to proto-Epic, so I turned away... Until my friend said that the latest Drizzt book was better than the last he read. So I grabbed a copy of the Thousand Orcs, hoping not to be let down.
I was and I wasn’t.
It seems that the lower part of the Spine of the World has an orc and giant problem, as these two groups have joined forces to take out the other forces in the region, like Drizzt’s friend Bruenor’s Mithral Hall and its dwarves. Behind these groups are a small coterie of drow hoping to rid Faerûn of Drizzt and take over the area for themselves (very much akin to the Against the Giants/Descent into the Depths of the Earth modules for D&D, though with an added orc population.))
Salvatore has a way of making his characters go above the epic fantasy standard of cliffhangers and character-point-of-view problems (like seeing a hero killed in the distant, but its not who they thought it was). You can feel the tension racking up, but after so-many close calls, it’s hard to believe that this would be the last of the hero. And you’d believe that the characters would feel the same. Having the dark elf ranger and his magical pet cat take on giants and a few orcs (not quite the ones in the title—those got saved for his friends), Salvatore tells a decent adventure story, a high adventure story. The way this book reads, it seems that Salvatore wants emphasis added to the “high” of the high adventure story.
The book drags on before getting to the action (not) depicted on the cover (Drizzt fights the giants, not the orcs). After a lengthy build up, the orcs attack the characters as they hole-up in a small town and try to defend it. With the orcs running a siege with the giants providing artillery fire, the characters are hard pressed to win, and they don’t really, as they are rescued by reinforcements from Mithral Hall. With Drizzt still in the field, the other characters move back to heal the wounded Bruenor. Drizzt comes across the rubble of the town and believes he’s lost a friend and he starts to hunt down any survivors of the enemy’s army to kill.
The Thousand Orcs is a decent novel, but not so much that it provides more than just an escape while reading it. Added to Salvatore’s panache for poor character names and poor characterizations (Pikel, from either pickle or pixel, I’m not sure, is a laughing dwarf that says wee more times than a 2 year old toddler and the character’s “wee” can mean anything from “having fun” to “turn left, silly”), the book feels the weight that could have been cut to make it read better. Overall, I can remember why I stopped reading the Drizzt series: its too-much-over-the-top styled writing makes it hard for me to empathize with any characters, I just get to watch things happen to some wooden characters for a while.
