Subject: Review: _Another Day, Another Dungeon_

From: [email-masked] (Kent Paul Dolan)
Date: 6 Jan 91 06:19:11 GMT

Another Day, Another Dungeon
                               Book One
                                  of
                           Cups and Sorcery
                                  by
                            Greg Costikyan
                             A Book Review
                                  by
                            Kent Paul Dolan
               (This review is a public domain document.)

Pricilla "Sidney" ("Call me 'Sid'!") Stollit has a cash flow problem in
the breaking-and-entering business. She also has a problem with her
ex-SO and still partner Nick Pratchitt, who's most likely to be found
under some tavern girl's skirts, to Sid's vocal disgust. Timaes
d'Asperge, newly graduated fire mage with a little control difficulty,
is looking for a trade that will help him work off a pot gut and retain
the respect of his professors while dodging the draft. Father Geoffrey
Thwaite, priest of Dion, the god of drunkards, has been a little too
zealous about practicing his religion, and is most likely to be found at
dawn's rosy light basking in a nice warm gutter. Kraki Konarsson,
barbarian swordsman and predestined Hero, is in a bit of a tiff with the
tavern keeper about his bar bill, and is wrecking the place. Garni ben
Grimi, exiled former dwarven prince, is three months behind on his rent
and the landlady wants him out, out, out!

Fate, necessity, and a campaign arranger (like a marriage broker, but
for bigger groups) throws this bunch of misfits together into what is
supposed to be a simple dungeon crawl, but ends up involving high magic
and the fate of nations, in a novel that work on many levels. It is a
send up of the D&D genre, a broad farce, a sustaining comedy, an
adventure story, a treasure trove of rationalizations for D&D abilities
and creatures, a tale of magic, a war novel, and more, and it all works
as a seamless mesh.

There are perhaps half a dozen real belly laughs throughout the book,
but a high level of amusement holds throughout. The characters are
anything but cardboard: they have motives, and motives behind the
motives, and self doubts, and behavioral quirks, and yet each is an
archtype of the D&D genre as well.

Lessons we learn reading this story: 1) a good civil servant stays
bought, again and again; 2) it's hard to cram a dozen warring armies
into a downstairs flat guarded by an angry, umbrella weilding landlady;
3) some simple spells don't work at all well in a small room, if you
happen to be in the room too; 4) even a perch on a basilisk's back isn't
all that safe when the enemy starts turning to stone; 5) it's no use
saving for your golden years if you're a fire mage; 6) even a cyclops
swordsman likes marmelade with his tea and crumpets, 7) not every
harmless senile bum in the street is a two millenium old liar, 8) once a
backstabbing orc, always a backstabbing orc, and 9) rising from the
manure pile to bed a baroness can be bad for your health even if you are
a grand duke with a mushroom fixation.

Lots of fun if you're looking for a light read. Recommended. I'm looking
forward to the sequel, especially after the "Shameless Cliff Hanger
Ending".

Kent, the man from xanth.
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