dozens's review
1.0
Okay so this space ship crash lands on a farmer's house and ruins all his melons and he gets a magic cloak that doesn't do anything, so then the farmer and his new friend, a giant gun-toting space hippopotamus-man, are on the run from these fascist space spider-eels who want the do-nothing cloak and who have giant insect-ape slave/servants who sometimes carry them around like Oscar the Grouch and Bruno the Binman, and so Farmer and Hippo keep running and get the help of some crazy tiny scientists who live in a hollowed out volcano who build a new space ship out of spare parts, and they all run away into outer space.
Pros:
- fun, light, easy fantasy romp
- I wanted to read something in the spelljammer setting, and this was unarguably that
- The gnomes were funny
Cons:
- My copy had typos and grammatical errors, which was distracting.
- Tropey and predictable. Shallow, one-dimensional characters
- The cloak itself is a super lame plot device. The fate of the multiverse depends on it! But it literally does nothing. We should have been given some kind of a taste or a hint at its powers, assuming it has any.
- I wanted some outer space stuff, and didn't get any until the epilogue
- The entire sea-faring bit was.. very D&D campaigny: "Here's a tangential side quest so you can level up a little bit before the next big encounter."
Overall, very entertaining, but pretty poorly written and executed.
Pros:
- fun, light, easy fantasy romp
- I wanted to read something in the spelljammer setting, and this was unarguably that
- The gnomes were funny
Cons:
- My copy had typos and grammatical errors, which was distracting.
- Tropey and predictable. Shallow, one-dimensional characters
- The cloak itself is a super lame plot device. The fate of the multiverse depends on it! But it literally does nothing. We should have been given some kind of a taste or a hint at its powers, assuming it has any.
- I wanted some outer space stuff, and didn't get any until the epilogue
- The entire sea-faring bit was.. very D&D campaigny: "Here's a tangential side quest so you can level up a little bit before the next big encounter."
Overall, very entertaining, but pretty poorly written and executed.
apostrophen's review
2.0
This was the only book in the cloakmaster cycle that I read, and it wasn't that good. I loved "Spelljammer" as a D&D player, and I loved "Dragonlance," as a world and book series, but man, it just didn't mix well.
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