Shadowmoor

 

Shadowmoor
Editor - Philips Athans & Susan J. Morris

Cover Art - Adam Rex

First Printing - April 2008

The Lorwyn/Shadowmoor story didn't have enough plot to fill its three novels, so we're lucky they didn't try to stretch it to four. Instead the remaining set in the double-block gets an anthology, with one 88 page novella by Scott McGough and Cory Herndon which tangentially features some of the characters from the main story, and 8 short stories like the ones we've been getting in previous anthologies.

In theory I think giving us a bunch of short stories for each plane is a good idea. It allows you to showcase more of the setting without having to force it into the main story. In practice though I find that I usually prefer the main, more "important" stories. If a story has no connection to larger continuity, and doesn't feature any characters from the game or the main story, it has to really damn good for me to care about it. But if previous anthologies are anything to go by many writers seem to go "let's just bang out an extended fight scene or a Twilight Zone-style twist story and be done with it" when asked to contribute to one of these, rather than crafting a short masterpiece. Will that pattern hold? Well, let's dive in and see!

Lorwyn, Morningtide & Eventide

 

Writers - Cory J. Herndon & Scott McGough
Cover Artists - Mark Zug, Steve Prescott & Christopher Moeller
First Printing - August 2007, January 2008 & June 2008

SUMMARY

Lorwyn: There are a bunch of mysterious occurrences happening on Lorwyn. Magical creeping vines are killing elves, boggarts are being extra bloodthirsty, someone has razed the Murmuring Bosk, and a routine spell from elvish hunter Rhys blows up his whole hunting squadron (and his own horns).

Treefolk sage Colfenor has some idea what's going on. He's not telling anyone though, but he does have a plan, which involves getting Rhys, his former apprentice, to plant one of his seedcones in the remains of the Bosk, manipulating kithkin hero Bridgid into kidnapping flamekin pilgrim Ashling, and then using Ashling to lure a great elemental to set himself on fire. All of which is part of a ritual to be reborn in a "new world".

There's a bunch of other character tagging along, including the giant Brion, his brother Kiel, and the merfolk captain Sygg, but they add very little to the overarching story, so I'll give more detail on them below. The one important character is Maralen. In the prologue we see her mysteriously get killed by those vines, she then mysteriously shows up alive but amnesiac after Rhys's explosion. She eventually mysteriously gets control of the Vendilion Clique, after they discover she is unique in some mysterious but unexplained way and kidnap her for a mysterious meeting with Oona, the Queen of the Fae. Mysterious!

Between all that the crew is also followed by Rhys's former superior Nath and his former friend Gryffid, who want him dead for what he did to his fellow elves. Rhys ends up killing Nath.

Book one ends with the crew back in the Bosk, where Colfenor's sapling has miraculously grown into a full treefolk already.

Updating the list of sources

A long, long time ago I made a list of storyline sources for this blog, which I've since been updating... veeeeeeery sporadically. Before I launch into the post-Mending storylines it seems like a good idea to do some housekeeping and finally give it a thorough update. With Magic's storyline being what it is we are once again dealing with a whole host of sources released in a variety of different media, so it'll be easy to miss something. This "article" is thus merely a list of everything I could find, and an open invitation to all of you to point out if I'm missing anything. 

For those of you who just want reviews: the next two weeks are very busy for me, but I'm aiming for July 16th to post the first Lorwyn coverage!

For those of you interested in the post-Mending sources list, do read on!

Figuring out the post-Mending timeline

WHY THIS ARTICLE IS A WEEK LATE...

This article was always going to end with a call for criticism. Figuring out a framework for the post-Mending timeline is a bit of a challenge as we don't have an official timeline to use as a base like we did before. Instead you have to piece it all together from in-story references, meaning everything is contingent on everything else. I'd hate to have to redo the entire thing in a few months or even years after I've already used it to place a whole lot of stories, so I was going to invite you all to comment on any mistakes I had made or important sources I had missed.

Then on the day I was going to post this, I was made aware of a Tumblr post made two months ago by Vorthos extraordinair and writer of the "Magic: a Visual History" books Jay Annelli, in which he gives an overview of the entire timeline I'm covering here. And guess what? On first glance, it didn't seem to line up with mine.

What to do with that information? Since Jay is a published Magic author these days I was tempted to chuck all my work in the bin and just declare his Tumblr post official canon, but it only covers in which years blocks happen, and the post-Mending timeline is so compressed that in order to place individual stories you have to work with references to months and sometimes even weeks. The timeline I came up with does go into that much detail, and re-reading it for the third time since finding that Tumblr post, I did still think my logic was sound. So I decided that the article was going to have to be delayed for a while so I could figure out how I could harmonize my timeline with Jay's.

It took a week for me to find a quiet moment to do so, but in the end all it came down to was some tricky conversion between ZC and AR dates. In fact, using Jay's timeline and one or two assumptions I could make my timeline even more detailed! So below you'll find the article I had intended to post last week, and then a short addendum where I put my results next to Jay's for an even more specificity.

All that said, the call for criticism still stands. I haven't re-read all the post-Mending sources for this article (I mean, obviously, the whole point of this was to create a framework for the future re-reading I'll do for the blog), so if you think I'm missing a crucial bit of information, please do share it with me so I can see how it fits with my conclusions thus far.

The Aftermath

This was going to be the Lorwyn review, but I ended up saying very little about that book and a whole lot about the aftermath of the Mending for both the storyline community in general and for me personally, so it works better as a separate article.

Too dramatic?

When it comes to people's least favorite stories there are a bunch of usual suspects. Prophecy. Scourge. Quest for Karn. War of the Spark: the Forsaken. If you've been reading this blog for a long time you may suspect that my list includes a few more obscure stories, like The Cursed Land. But I think most people will be surprised to hear that my least favorite of them all are the Lorwyn-to-Eventide quadrilogy. I don't think these are very high on most people's hate list, and to be honest a lot of my animosity comes from the context in which I first read them.

Now don't get me wrong, I think these books are very bad. Slow, padded, boring, lacking in interesting characters, just a real slog to get through. At least Prophecy had some insights in Keldon culture to entertain me. At least Scourge was terrible in bizarre and interesting ways. At least The Cursed Land had the decency of ending after one novel! But to really get my dislike, we need to go back a bit.

The years leading up to Time Spiral block had been pretty good for the storyline community. Kamigawa and Ravnica were very well received, the number of stories we were getting was slowly increasing again, and with Coldsnap and Time Spiral WotC seemed to be getting back to more continuity driven stories. Personally I was having a lot of fun as the moderator of the MTG Salvation storyline forum, where we were setting up the MTGSally wiki (which would eventually evolve into the current MTG Wiki) and which was visited frequently by the likes of Scott McGough, Cory Herndon, Will McDermott, and occasionally Brady Dommermuth, though he hung out more often on the official Magicthegathering.com forums.

Times were good...

...and then the Mending happened. 

The Mending

So. The Mending. Probably the most important event in all of Magic's storyline history, and certainly a contender for the most hated one. But we're now 15 years onward and the flames of anger seem to have dimmed in that time. Many people have left the fandom in those years, while others have joined, and in the meantime the community has found other things to hate (War of the Spark anyone?). So let's take a look back at the Mending from this distance, and see if all that vitriol we spilled over it was deserved.

CONTEXT

At the time this massive shake up of the status of planeswalkers took the community completely by surprise. I think everyone was still in the "the storyline is an afterthought for WotC" modus and thus expected it to coast for a while longer, guided by the same handful of authors who had done so over the previous years. But in hindsight, I think it was to be expected that there would be some kind of reappraisal of the supposed main characters of Magic.

A few years before Brady Dommermuth had wondered why the storyline stuck to Dominaria when the game was supposed to be about discovering new planes. That led to the planeshopping and world-building that proved so successful that WotC is doing it to this very day. Bill Rose's insistence on making Kamigawa a top-down set seemed to have rekindled a love for flavor and storytelling with people within the company, which led to the Taste the Magic articles and an increase in online stories. So change was in the air. A year after Future Sight, new CEO's at Hasbro and WotC moved Magic's focus away from the Pro Tour and towards "emotionally resonance" and marketable characters. (Here's a good article on that last bit.)

The timeline doesn't line up to simply say "a new CEO forced the change", but you can see how all these changes illustrate the environment in which Matt Cavotta asked the same question about planeswalkers that Brady Dommermuth had already asked about the planes: if they're what our game is all about... why are they not actually in the game?

...and I fully agree with him. It was weird that when a character became a planeswalker they suddenly couldn't be printed anymore. In my eyes the planeswalker type is a great addition to the game. But did they need to pair that with this in-continuity change?

Future Sight Player's Guide

After a bunch of less than interesting player's guides, this one actually has some important information. Not much of it, so we'll go through it quickly, but this is defintely one for the "why did they bury that information in such an obscure source?" pile.