The Dying Earth was always the book I heard referred to as the inspiration for D&D’s “Vancian” magic system. In more recent days, the publisher has taken to calling that book Mazirian the Magician, the first book of The Dying Earth series. I’ve had this book sitting on my ereader for around ten years waiting to get around to reading it. My recent Appendix N reading gave me the impetus to finally get around to it.The book is structured as a series of vignettes, each featuring a different point of view character. Strangely, in choosing the name of the volume, the publisher chose a character who only appears in the first vignette.Each vignette takes place in a far-future Earth where certain magics (or maybe sufficiently advanced technologies under Clark’s Law) exist amid life awaiting the final burning out of the Sun. The protagonists are far from perfect heroes, Mazirian being a bit of a sadist who tortures others in his quest for knowledge of more spells and Liane is basically a highwayman in the employ of a witch.My favorite vignettes were those of T’sais and Guyal Sfere. T’sais is a synthetic human whose creation left her seeing all things as ugly and evil. She is inspired by an encounter with her sister/clone with improvements to seek out beauty and love. Her vignette is a great look at what those things mean. Sfere is a man who goes on a quest for knowledge and finds more than he bargained for.Like most pre-1990s fantasy, the stories are more concerned with how the plot progresses than with how characters are changed by the plot, but the characters are each pretty well described in their being.And the statement that you’ll find the basis of D&D magic is 100% true. There are scenes where wizard characters make choices about which spells they’ll cram in their brain and how many will fit and weighing the options of what to prepare. Also, Excellent Prismatic Spray gets several appearances through the book, and I will now never refer to Prismatic Spray by any other name during my games.I’m glad my look back at RPG inspirations led me to finally get around to this one. I’ve already picked up the second book.Something to Take AwayThe air car (read: airplane) from Ulan Dohr’s story. We’re told this is far future Earth, but it didn’t really click how true that is until Ulan Dohr starts up an abandoned airplane to get around a city.So I think figuring out fantastical way to describe modern things and then just slipping them into your game as weird little artifacts players might find.
