Forgotten Realms: The Ring of Winter by James Lowder review

“Mezro?” Artus managed to gasp. “I discovered the lost city of Mezro?”

Rayburton’s gentle laughter filled the library. “It’s hardly lost to the people who have lived here for four thousand years,” he noted. “But if you want to put it that way, the Mezroans probably won’t mind. I said the same thing when I stumbled across the place, and they haven’t thrown me out yet.”

    THE RING OF WINTER by James Lowder is one of the Harpers series, back from when Forgotten Realms was publishing a lot of standalone novels. I’ve always been a fan of James Lowder’s work and this is no exception. It’s arguably one of the most well-written and entertaining standalones in the entire history of “D&D fiction” and would have been ranked as my favorite for the Forgotten Realms if not for the fact that it has a slight issue: some elements have aged extremely poorly. While it doesn’t reach INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM levels of cringe, there’s a few things that I can list as “cringe” that are very noticeable. These elements may not even bother you and you might perhaps argue I’m being oversensitive.

    The premise is that Artus Cimber is Indiana Jones or pretty close to the character as exists in a Medieval Fantasy World. A member of the Stalwart Adventuring Society, he travels across the globe to seek out treasures in lost ruins as well as dungeons. The big difference being that Artus also takes time to study these ruins and record their secrets for posterity. The association of treasure hunting with archaeology by James Lowder is quite clever and something that we’re only now starting to become a bit more accepting of outside of fiction.

    Artus, like Indy, Lara, and Nathan, has a particular artifact that serves as his personal grail: the titular Ring of Winter. The Ring of Winter bestows the wearer with the ability to generate vast amounts of frost and immortality. Which are admittedly some pretty good benefits here. It’s also being hunted by the evil Kaverin Ebonhand, who is basically a Bond villain with his deformed hand as well as a female henchwoman named Phyrra al-Quim (i.e “Fiery Quim”, a dirty name that probably only a handful of fans would have gotten before the Avengers movie had Loki use the latter in its proper context). He serves as our Belloq figure.

    The very short version of the plot is that Artus heads down to the kingdom of Chult, the miniature Africa that exists as a peninsula in Faerun, and seeks the city of Mezro in order to find the Ring of Winter. Mezro is a bit like Wakanda in that it is a highly advanced civilization of magic-users that has completely isolated itself from the rest of the country in order to protect itself. This has resulted in all of the people left outside of the city being screwed as they’re subject to the hordes of cannibalistic goblins as well as other threats abounding. Yes, the superstitious cannibal goblins that worship monsters and offer human sacrifices to it while fitting quite a few stereotypes of tribal peoples.

    James Lowder’s book runs into the uncomfortable problem of wanting to do a big Alan Quartermain-esque pulp adventure with all of the tropes but not actually be racist or colonialist. For the most he succeeds. Mezro isn’t “lost”, it just doesn’t want to deal with White Cormyrians. It is shown to also be more “civilized” than Cormyr. Artus also has to deal with the fact that a lot of his guidebooks to Chult are horrifyingly inaccurate as their writer was, in fact, a racist jerkass.

    However, making the racist European stereotypes into monsters instead of people isn’t really a fix for problematic content as Watto from The Phantom Menace proves. There’s some uncomfortable bits here too like when Kaverin casually feeds a female henchman to the goblins because he needs his supplies more. At one point, one of the Mezro leaders also discusses how he committed genocide against an inferior tribal people in Chult and is annoyed he was exiled for it.

    There’s some other minor issues that are just the result of D&D’s long history as well and expectations thereof. James Lowder doesn’t actually bother to stay within the rules. Artus Cimber is officially a Ranger but he could have been a Fighter, Bard, or Rogue since he doesn’t follow any character sheet write-up. He’s just the way the book writes him as a Pulpy action hero and scholar. The people of Mezro are called Tabaxi but they’re human beings but Tabaxi would later be used as a name for the cat people of the setting. It gets more confusing because there are cat people Tabaxi in Chult as well. This isn’t on James Lowder, though, as I’m sure he thinks its better to tell a good story than keep Artus’ abilities consistent with his class.

    The Ring of Winter has a lot going for it but it is trying to be a rollicking good adventure while dealing with things like the legacy of colonialism as well as tropes based on really awful views of the world. This is a book with two Cockney talking wombats, it shouldn’t have to deal with uncomfortable subject matter. Still, props to James Lowder, he does his very best to navigate the minefield of homage and satire. At one point, Artus Cimber passes the test of Ubtao and has the option to become an immortal god king in Mezro. He points out how grossly inappropriate that would be given he’s a foreigner to Mezro. It just would have been better if there wasn’t already a white guy on the council of god kings. There’s nothing wrong with problematic elements in books as long as you recognize them but James Lowder does and struggles to reconcile them with his desire to just have a magic treasure hunt in the jungle.

Available here