The Red Knight by Miles Cameron

The Red Knight
Book 1 of the Traitor Son Cycle
Written By Miles Cameron

The internet works in mysterious ways. I bought the Red Knight a while ago when it was on sale with the intention of reading it whenever it fits into my schedule. But as I have a ton of books that fall into that category, the time never seemed right.

Then I was reading on Mark Lawrence's blog about 'grim' fantasy books, and The Red Knight was receiving high rankings in a list. Being a fan of Mark Lawrence's Prince of Thorn's book, I immediately went and downloaded the Red Knight.

Fantastic stuff.

It's a massive tome being well over six hundred pages.

It takes place in its own fantasy medieval Earth or at least medieval style Earth. It retains tropes of real-world religion while throwing magic and divisions of that magic into the mix. The 'Wild' that of nature is green in hue and wild in power. The 'Sun' or religious power, is Gold and pure in power.

The Red Knight is a 'nameless' knight known as The Captain for most of the novel. He leads a ragtag band of mercenaries through the war-torn world, currently in an Arthurian country where a true king leads his knights into glory for his beauteous queen.

The author's writing perhaps isn't the pinnacle of 'grimdark', but people come and go with some frequency. Just when you think, "Ah, this character is important to the plot... oh wait, a spike in the neck, nevermind."

Since the Red Knight has a mercenary group at his command, there are a lot of characters to play with. That not being enough though, the author gives us viewpoint characters for the 'Wild' as well, including 'Thorn', the former royal mage who betrayed humanity itself and now looks more like Groot or Treebeard.

The Red Knight himself is almost typical in his design. A young man blessed with an extraordinary power which is filled with heresy because of his emo origin. He's an excellent swordsman, he's a great magician, he's a great leader. Yet he's not happy. His angst makes him less than perfect and makes those around him want to help him.

As more of his background becomes known, the reader has to wonder how much of his rage is justified and how much of it is wasted. For example, when the Red Knight meets one of his brothers, the two are more or less on the same page and join forces.

There are numerous complexities in the novel and multiple factions. The author does what I thought was a great job in showcasing elements that lead you to believe one thing only to turn out to be an entirely different thing.

One of its overarching themes though was that of love and sacrifice. In some ways, it reminded me of Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman is there to show how love and sacrifice for others can better the world. When the Wild is perhaps closer than its ever been to victory, one of the key players on the Wild side finds that he cannot do what needs to be done to cement that win. I found it ringing true.

But there are also elements that ring about the sacrifice part. The heroes don't just walk away from all holding their heads higher. Many die in the battles, many gain new scars, some scarred in ways they thought themselves immune to.

The Red Knight has a lot of things going for it. The large cast of characters, the numerous factions, the exploration of how magic itself works, the red herrings, all provide hours of entertainment.

Miles Cameron, in addition to his writing chops, is also a gamer, so if you want to support players who write fiction, especially great fiction, you could do worse than the Red Knight.

The Red Knight and the Art of Making NPCs

The Red Knight
Book One of the Traitor Son Cycle
Written By Miles Cameron
$11.80 at Amazon

When making Non-Player Characters in Dungeons and Dragons, the question is really how much is too much? How many game stats do we need for the effective playing of such characters?

If you're an artist or have an artist friend willing to help out, portraits are a quick way to customize your NPC's.

If you're strapped for time though, having a list of names and associations with those names is another route. It's a route Miles Cameron takes in the Red Knight to describe many of the mercenaries who follow their nameless Captain, the Red Knight.

Some examples:

Sauce had won her name as a whore, giving too much lip to customers. She was tall, and in the rain her red hair was toned to dark brown. Freckles gave her an innocence that was a lie. She had made herself a name.

Ser Thomas: Bad Tom to every man in the company was six foot six inches of dark hair, heavy brown and bad attitude. He had a temper and was always the wrong man to cross.

Two Veteran archers - Kanny, the barracks room lawyer of the company, and Scrant, who never stopped eating.

Bent, the eldest, an easterner, and Wilful Murder...

Geslin was the youngest man in the company, just fourteen with a thin frame that suggested he'd never got much food as a boy...

The book is filled with such characters. Sometimes a few sentences of description, sometimes not even a single whole sentence.

Giving the characters something for the players and the Dungeon Master to latch onto, makes the keeping of said characters easier, even if you don't list out height, weight, hair, eyes, or even armor. This is probably much more important to keep in mind when dealing with characters that the players are not going to engage in anything more than banter in. Extra work that the Dungeon Master enjoys is never wasted work but is it work that you could be doing something else you enjoy, that will see game play?

Miles Cameron brings his wide cast of the crew to life with quick descriptions and it's a great mining pool for those Dungeon Masters who want examples of how the pros do it.

Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson

Three Hearts and Three Lions
Written by Poul Anderson
$6.15 at Amazon

Three Hearts and Three Lions is another book by Poul Anderson that is recommended in the original Appendix N of the original 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game in the Dungeon Masters Guide.

Despite that, I'd never read it until now. It's a book fit to be placed in the same realm as the Red Book of The Illustrated Bulfinch's Mythology, the Legends of Charlemagne. While Charlemagne and his paladins are perhaps not as popular as King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, heroes such as Roland hail from the time of Charlemagne and one of TSR's green historical books focused on those paladins.

Being an older book, Three Hearts and Three Lions has many covers. The current one is serviceable enough, but my favorite would probably be the following:

Holger atop his black horse, the mighty swan behind him, his wood dwarf comrade at his side. The sense of motion with the clouds moving from left to right. It's a great piece.

Concerning writing, Poul Anderson is a writer worthy of reading just to study his word crafting. His descriptions are not overly long but provide a reader with detail enough to know where the characters are, what the character looks like, and what the mood of the land is. He tells in one book something that another author might have taken six to do so.

The main hero, Holger, is a 'modern' man who while fighting Nazis is grazed in the head by a bullet and awakens in another world. Poul doesn't spring everything on the reader at once. There is a build up of one scene to the next, each increasing the hero's awareness that he is not in his own time anymore, indeed, not even in his own reality anymore.

This time traveling hero bit borrows a little from the even older A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court: by Mark Twain and is even referenced in the book itself.  The adventures of 'modern' man in other worlds was a favorite device before it fell out of favor. Even authors like Robert E. Howard used it as a means of taking modern giants of the world into environs more fitting for their strength and powers.

Holger's trip to the fantasy realm is one of the troublesome issues in that he appears to be of this new world. The horse he spies upon awakening seems to know him. The arm and armor he spies fit him perfectly. His knowledge of the language of the world is quickly mastered. His knowledge of deeper issues comes and goes at times prodded to the surface by current happenings.

This book brings many bits to fantasy. Here the troll is not a mythic race like those of the Norse, able to use magic and arms and armor, but rather, a massive brute with a huge nose and black eyes with green skin. Its most fearsome power though is its ability to heal from any wound.

Here is also perhaps one of the earliest examples of Law and Chaos in war. Chaos is wild and free and often evil while Law being civilization and the uplifting of man. Even in his time, Nazis were known for what monstrous acts they'd committed, and Poul Anderson puts them firmly in the grip of Chaos, evil entities intent on ripping down the civilization of humanity.

We also get a taste of courtly love as Holger travels with a swanymay, Alianora, a young woman raised outside of the norms of humanity and kin more to the wood dwarves and spirits of the woods like the unicorn she rides. Being a swanymay, Alianora is capable of becoming a massive swan with powerful wings and a stinging bite.

She does this through a magical garment, gifted to her supposedly from the Valkyries, as opposed to being an innate shape changer.

The use of Chaos and its minions, like the timeless and fey elves, who aren't evil necessarily, but are bored and are capricious at best, are intent on spreading their world. For them, the sun and its light, for example, are anathema. Their own world lies in a subtle shade that protects them, and there is a distinct difference between the world of man and that of the Fey.

The arrival of Holger is during a time when Chaos is on the rise. A time when Chaos may make a great play for the world. A time when Giants stalk the land and when those whose inheritance may have a touch of the old blood, are stirred to action.

Holger's travels bring him against wild men of the woods, fey courts, and one of the most powerful allies of the Fey and of Chaos, Morgana of Avalon.

The novel ends with Holger knowing who he finally is and wielding his sword, Cortana, a blade made of the same material as King Arthur's Excalibur and Roland's sword Durendal. In the restored Holger, better known as Ogier the Dane, a hero who, like King Arthur, went to dwell on Avalon until he was needed, rides forth to save the world form Chaos.

Given how far removed modern readers are from the story, it's hard to emphasize how unique and enjoyable this book must be to someone who's spent years reading Games Workshop's various tales and their own Moorcock inspired tales of Chaos. How far Dungeons and Dragons have taken the rare and powerful paladins of older editions and made of them another class that's equal among the others with their own distinctions.

Given its age though, the novel's prose remains top notch and easily readable. If you're looking for a way to kill an afternoon and to wonder at where some of the foundations of modern fantasy come from, Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions fits the bill.

The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson

The Broken Sword
Written by Poul Anderson
$6.15 Amazon Kindle
208 pages


Let loose the red tide! Let the men be heaped like reaped golden wheat! Fall back in this telling in one book what would take modern authors a dozen times more pages!

Poul Anderson, one of the original quoted Appendix N authors in the original Dungeon Master's Guide, brings a tale of Norse revenge across generations.

If you are a fan of the show Vikings, if you're a fan of Elric of Melnibone, of cursed swords, of dire destinies, or cruel, uncaring gods, or things that never were but fit into the tales of old lore, then you should read The Broken Sword.

Poul Anderson weaves together some things that we say now are not true, such as the winged helmets of the Vikings, as well as land conquest as England suffers the raids of the Vikings. Of the rise of the One True God against those gods who used to rule. It showcases many different elements of mythology into one where there are still differences, but the mythological world is shared.

The gods of old Ireland are half gods, the elves here, not mere mortals with long hair who are good with bows. The trolls here are ancient and elderly powerful creatures that are not mere brutes that only know how to howl, but how to plan, how to set forth on ships warded against the wild seas, of using weapons of massive stone and bone because their strength allows them to do so.

The elves here are masters of magic, they control the weather, they can heal, they speak with the dead and are all things cruel and capricious. But they are few in number and even as they are timeless, they are not immortal. So when the opportunity arises to steal a man-child and add his mortal strength to their own, they take it.

Sadly they take this man child from a family that has wronged natives of England, and one woman who survives grows powerful in the dark arts of Witchery and sells all including her soul to darker powers to cast dark fate against the family that slew her own.

Into this mix comes the elves who when they capture the man-child, replace him with a troll born changeling. A heartless brute who has sisters and brothers and who will find his destiny leading the trolls against the elves and their kin.

Here the elves and trolls share a weakness to iron, they share magics even if the trolls are not as advanced as the elves, the two are both moral-less entities that are unseen by men as their battles are not fought in the mortal world. They both dislike the sunlight...

Poul Anderson crafts the tale and moves through the lives of these twins, the elf raised Skafloc, a champion more elf than man, more inhuman than human, and his pale troll kin shadow, Valgard.
Their lives intersect in unknown ways as the witch sets her sights on Valgard, a non-human raised among men whose brutish lusts for battle and his desire for the women who manipulate him through the whole of the story.

So much happens in The Broken Sword, that Poul only hints at some of it. When Skafloc must seek to mend the Broken Sword, this cursed weapon forged long ago, a weapon whose fate spirals down time with such doom, that mighty Thor himself shattered it, Skafloc seeks out the heroes of Ireland. He sails with the lord of the Sea to the lands of Jotun where the sword is forged anew but the travel there and back is merely hinted at.

Even at the start of the tale, when we are introduced to how much of the culture of elves flows through Skafloc, we are given a description of Imric, the ruler of the elves, the one who stole Skafloc, fighting against "with a troop of exiled gods, grown thin and shrunken and mad in their loneliness but still wielding fearsome powers."

That in and of itself sounds worthy of more pages! Who were these old mad things that were once gods?

Other gods, more familiar, are still about. The Dark Prince himself, claims to have known Odin in the guise of Loki and liked not the one-eyed Lord. Odin, the master manipulator, the one who pulls strings, who would be a good fit for Merlin from Excalibur, weaves a fate to the son of Skafloc that is again, only hinted at here. The final fate of the gods, or mankind, or the Broken Sword itself? Vague prophecy but no finality.

And for this book? It works perfectly. It casts the net of the tale against a background much larger than what we see here. We are visitors to the tragedy that besets violence and only for a limited time. We see how the effects of the coming of a new religion forces out the old, we see those ancient powers still mighty, still magnificent in their own realms, know that their time is limited even as they themselves are timeless.

Poul Anderson brings us no glowing heroes. There are none here who escape without the reader seeing their faults. The elves, proud and haughty, the witch consumed by vengeance, the old gods striving to survive, the trolls, equally proud and equally haughty, the old glory of Ireland, the sorrow of the fauns who survived the passing of the old Gods of Greece and Rome... it's a tale that set forth so much more than modern readers, especially those who say enjoy A Game of Thrones, might even be aware of.

If you want to see where the roots of modern fantasy come from if you want a rousing Viking tale of old gods and cursed blades, The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson is the perfect fit.