"A new creed kindled from despair...
Kalak; an immortal sorcerer-king whose evil magic has reduced the majestic city of Tyr to a desolate
place of dust, blood and fear.
His thousand-year reign of death is about to end.
Banding together to spark a revolution are a maverick statesman, a winsome half-elf slave girl,
and a man-dwarf gladiator bred for the arenas. But if the people are to be freed, the mismatched trio of steadfast rebels
must look into the face of terror and choose between love and life."
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The Tome of Treasures Rating:
Troy Denning's novel The Verdant Passage was to support the launch of a new TSR campaign world: DARK SUN.
Denning also contributed to the Dark Sun campaign setting.
The book served its purpose, namely to give gamers an insight into the new campaign world, where the traditions of Tolkienesque
fantasy were grotesquely distorted: A desert world under a burning hot sun, once in bloom, but drained by the use
of magic; a magic where sorcerers draw the power for shaping spells from plants.
No gods, but tyrannous sorcerer-kings instead, feeding magic to their templars.
Seven city-states are scattered through-out the desert and Tyr is one of them.
Ruled by the ancient evil king called Kalak, it needs to be freed from the tyrant or suffer utter desctruction. A band of heroes
finds together to attempt the assassination. They did not choose to work together, but eventually found each other.
Agis, the noble who - like all other nobles - owns slaves, but cares for them like for his own children.
Unfortunately we do not understand why Agis did not start to free his slaves years ago. Agis should have known how much freedom really means to a slave and how far he'd go for it.
Rikus is a stubborn breed between dwarf and human, with honor in his deeds, a killing machine out of
the arena of Tyr. Perfectly fitting to him is Neeva,
a bitter female gladiator whose words burn like acid to those who do not wish to hear the truths she speaks without regret.
Then there's Sadira, the beautiful sorceress who learned her spells from a master of the Veiled Alliance while enslaved.
Denning did a great job in weaving the stories of those individuals together to one great and epic heroic tale.
It illustrates every gamer, why it is so important to work together as a group. More importantly, Denning excelled in describing the land and
its inhabitants and their habits - especially the city scenes in Tyr come to mind.
Conclusion: After finishing this first novel, the reader is ready to either go
adventuring under the dark sun himself, or grab the second of the series from the bookshelf and read on.
Very well worth reading and a must if you intend to play in a Dark Sun campaign. (RALF TOTH)
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