Douglas Niles

A really fun read, especially for fans of the Dragonlance world. This book takes place almost entirely in the south pole region of Icereach, though there is a brief interlude in Silvanesti. The heroes are a young Arktos warrior woman and her friends, an elf Mariner and an ogre prince. Dragonlance style, the ogres are quite civilized, though still warlike.

I enjoy Nile's writing. He does a good job of pitting the various factions and tribes against each other, creating distinct personalities show more and cultures. Well done and nice to read a Dragonlance story again. For those who've read his Forgotten Realms novels, this might feel a bit similar, but not too bad. show less

Part 2 of the Icewall trilogy picks up a couple of years after the previous book, The Messenger. The humans and ogres of Icereach have kept an uneasy truce for the last few years while the humans recover. Now, the ogres, with the help of The Alchemist have discovered a new extremely powerful magical weapon. Stariz, the High Priestess, forces the King into an all-out attack on the humans. Kerrick, Moreen and Strongwind must find a way to survive and neutralize this wonder-weapon. They also show more pick up where they left off in their very slow burning romantic triangle.
Compared to the previous book, the plot here is a little rushed and obvious. There's also what feels like an extremely contrived appearance by two of Krynn's more annoying races, tinker gnomes and gully dwarves, almost as if the author was forced to include them. Still, this was faced paced, well written and fun. The other problem with this one is the wonder-weapon, it is very much off of the top end of the scale for Dungeons and Dragons weapons of any kind. show less

This book was excellent -- one can regard this as DnD 2.5. Prior to this everyone of the same class and race was essentially the same minus whatever treasure the characters owned and roleplaying fluff players added, and since most people can't play anything other than 1-dimensional orc slaying, treasure stealing sociopaths, every character of the same race and class was the same. The core mechanic of character creation is the "character point". With the points you customize your racial show more powers, class powers, proficiencies, and non weapon proficiencies. I had many hours of fun with the player's option system. If you like AD&D 2e, the player's option series will take your game to the next level. show less

Of the "Chaos War" novels, I find this one the best one so far. Douglas Niles did a better job here than in "The Last Thane" at making it an exciting story, full of political intrigues, and family ties and so on.

What's also a nice change in style, in my opinion, is telling the story as a flashback. At the end of each chapter there's the three characters - Samar, warrior-mage and assistant of Alhana (exiled queen of Qualinesti), Silvanoshei (son of exiled Speaker Of The Sun Porthios and show more Alhana), and the green dragon Aerensianic, who gives his account of what happened - discussing things.

It also seems the Dark Knights aren't that cruel after all, or rather, the Chaos War doesn't really allow for the classic conquering and ruling. All have to join forces to avoid being killed themselves by Chaos's evil creatures(fire dragons, shadow wights, shape-shifting creatures, ...).

The only way to destroy them is by using weapons blessed by the gods (or with dragon magic), and those weapons are few in number compared to the masses of elves.

Again, "The Puppet King" is the best one so far, also in that it somehow rekindles my reading interest in Dragonlance novels, whereas the previous reads were rather mediocre. show less