#castle roogna

[nonenosome2]

"I will never be the man you are," Dor said humbly.

The King rose, clapping him on the back so that Grundy almost fell off his shoulder. Trent might be old, but he was still strong. "I was never the man I am," he said. "A man is only the man he seems to be. Inside, where no one sees, he may be a mass of gnawing worms of doubt and ire and grief."

-Dor and King Trent (Castle Roogna)

[opin88]

Inktober Day 14: Castle

So... time for a reference that no one will get! when I was a kid, there was this book series that my mother had collected several entries of and was sitting on a shelf at her place. It was a medieval high fantasy comedy series called "The Magic of Xanth". The first book in this series came out in 1977 and the most recent book was released in... February 2023... oh damn, it's still ongoing! I did stop reading several books in, but the second I saw that inktober prompt, I immediately thought of the third entry in the series: "Castle Roogna"! So I tried to draw the castle as it appears on the coverart of that entry.

[deepdarkspaceblog]

Castle Roogna

[bound4escape]

That's Courage

That’s Courage

[disquietedpalefish]

Crunch Ogre, searching for his son: Smash baby ogre, 'bout like you; now he gone and we too few.

Prince Dor, horrified: You smashed your baby?

Grundy Golem: Dodo! Smash is the name of their baby.

[happymeishappylife]

Book #19: Crewel Lye by Piers Anthony Xanth Novels, Book #8

It’s been a while since I’ve read a Xanth novel. I took a break not only because I actually had a physical copy of this book, but because it got to the point where the rampant sexism was taking over the fun stories. And this one toed that line of almost being that way, but avoiding it. But if the only way I can avoid it is by having the narrator pretend to read to a child so he has to censor itself, then that’s a problem. But I like the adventure stories, so I will continue for now and hope that maybe as the books age, Piers Anthony will get better? That’s high hopes I know.

In this book, Princess Ivy who is five is upset by the arrival of her new baby brother. But nobody will tell her where he came from or why they won’t put him back, so she goes off on her own adventures but manages to hold her own when she travels to Humphreys tower and survives his traps to get his get his help for the tapestry. She’s interested because one of Castle Roogna’s ghosts named Jordan wants to tell her his life history but he doesn’t remember it because the tapestry isn’t clean. Once Ivy returns and she cleans the tapestry we learn of Jordan’s adventures.

At first it’s a typical boring male adventure story, wanting to kill monsters and get laid by elves. But then he comes across his quest which involves surviving against the Magician Yang who wants to be the next King of Xanth and bring back the object missing from Castle Roogna. The object is a woman (because of course, it’s sexism!). But then this random long tale of how Threnody is part demon and cursed from the castle and how Jordan can’t succeed in his quest of bringing her back without destruction to Xanth is put together with a greater adventure of surviving Yang’s objects and travelling with Threnody and the best companion ever, his ghost horse named Pook.

Now the interesting part of the story was that Jordan’s skill is he can’t die, which seems pretty Magician class, but he insists he is only a Barbarian. He uses this skill quite often including getting decapitated and having all limbs hacked off, which ironically becomes a plot at the end of the novel where having scattered all his bones, Ivy helps bring them together and Jordan is now alive. Again, magician class but we’ll see how that actually affects him in the later novels since Ivy has a pretty strong talent and now her brother has arrived which means Xanth has is successors.

Overall Rating: 6/10

[laryna6]

Aaah, going through old comments reminded me of my Xanth fic and the Xanth worldbuilding I didn’t have the energy to use.

For those who don’t know it: Xanth is a long-running fantasy series that starts out a Death World - the way things are at the start of the first book, Xanthian humanity is going to be extinct in a few generations, and there’s a whole other book about all the work it took to get the human population’s precarious survival even that stable. 

Later books are in-universe justified ‘absolutely certain to be a happily ever after and everyone knows that’s how it works’ basically because... well, spoiler for the first book, but basically the MC of that book’s magic talent is Magnificent Bastard Plot Armor. 

After this is revealed at the end of the first book, in the second book the MC, who is a Very Good Person + Badass Normal bc his talent made sure he’d grow up that way to be able to harness the Power of Friendship, is fucking pissed at his talent because it made the love of his life get impaled in order to save him; his best friend/the new king Trent loves Bink dearly but is a student of history who was deliberately raised in the paradigm that magicians kill each other for the throne and since Bink is stronger than him Bink is morally obligated to kill him so Xanth can have the strongest king/protector and to make matters worse the last time a magician with a power like Bink’s went after the current king Xanthian humanity was utterly fucked, like, more so than by the usual genocidal invasions that happen every so often there; and one of the three personalities of the love of Bink’s life Chameleon is fucking pissed because Bink and one of her other personalities decided to get pregnant despite the fact she’d talked with Bink about the risk of children inheriting her mutation and thought he’d agreed not to risk having kids. 

So like, Bink gets sent on a mission where the ambient magic is so high it’s considered a region of Madness and fucks around with the local Demiurge, as you do. Amazingly, this ends well for in-universe reasons and it’s pretty jaw-dropping. It ends so well that it’s revealed later that it’s the shit Bink’s talent pulled here that over the course of over a dozen books causes Xanth to go from Warhammer to light, fluffy airy romps where everyone knows bad endings don’t happen.

Tl;dr Bink’s Talent/Fanchon OTP ‘my love is scared for her baby... don’t worry dear I will immediately go and fuck around with an eldritch being of unfathomable power in order to reshape the fundamental nature of reality so that nothing bad can happen to your baby ever’

Fanchon is very right to be worried, because it’s spelled out that Chameleon is the first of a new species, and if you think for five minutes about what kind of fantasy creature Chameleon’s traits match?

Yeah. It would be very bad if any other members of that species were born because the species in question is God. Unleashing Greek/primordial gods full of humanity’s flaws on the setting is literally the one thing that could make early Xanth more hellish.

The godmode magician married a literal Goddess in a setting where ‘the strong kill their way to the top and rule over everyone else’ is enshrined in the actual legal code as a matter of survival. If Xanth hadn’t been forcibly genre shifted their children would have been terrifying.

Instead Dor is born with a talent that seems kind of eh and not at all OP at first glance, but according to the tactics of combat between magicians as laid out in the first book, is actually invulnerability... but only if you’re a nice person. A jerkass with that power is going to fucking die. Bink’s Talent made sure Bink grew up into a paladin type bc of the advantages that gave and clearly gave Dor a talent that’d force the same thing. It’s also a power where if you want to use it to be op you need to exercise those braincells, but Dor is a moron compared to his dad because he grows up surrounded by Castle Roogna’s protective enchantments and doesn’t develop proper paranoia/get traumatized by nearly dying multiple times before he hit double digits the way his dad did... in the largest and most secure human settlement in Xanth at the time. 

One of Bink’s formative memories is dying of poison gas over and over again as his dad desperately rewound time until someone could help. This was when he was younger and his talent hadn’t gotten as good at its job yet. It’s a thing in the second book that staying inside Castle Roogna’s protective enchantments is making Bink’s talent sick because it’s adapted to the death world environment to the point it can’t deal with Bink not being surrounded by stuff that can kill him.

This explains why Bink goes from being very smart and observant about threats in the first book to deliberately putting himself in the most dangerous situations possible and just chilling when characters encounter him in later books. His talent made Xanth a much safer place for everyone, but that means that Bink has to periodically go to the top of a mountain in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armor and shout ‘all gods are bastards! (except my wife, who is a bitch and I love her!)’ for the sake of its health.

[jaenellehilligas]

JUMPER CABLE- Jumper Spider, a spider many times decended from the Jumper Spider in the Xanth novel CASTLE ROOGNA, gets snagged by a plot hook and is now a giant spider roaming around Xanth against his will, much like his namesake. To get back to his proper size he must go on a quest for the Good Magician in the form of a human. 14/52 • #cardio #workoutreads #xanth #piersanthony #jumpercable #minnesota #novel #fantasy #dadjokes #puns #punsfordays #punny #thelandofxanth #magic (at Badger, Minnesota) https://www.instagram.com/p/Ce9wUNfpXcz/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[canuckianhawkbi]

I got tagged in a thing by @must-be-mythtaken, having internet friends is fun!

STAR SIGN: Libra (same hat!!!)

HEIGHT: 5’8″ish / 173cm (I did not know my metric height until now, neat!)

PUT YOUR ITUNES/SPOTIFY ON SHUFFLE. WHAT ARE THE FIRST 4 SONGS THAT POPPED UP?

Rock & Roll – Led Zeppelin Flower of Scotland – Alestorm The Days Passed – Turisas Canvas – COOLON

(holy shit I feel like that’s literally everything you need to know about me summed up in those songs alone??)

GRAB THE BOOK NEAREST YOU AND TURN TO PAGE 23. WHAT’S LINE 17? “He was tailing her, no doubt about it.” Republic Commando: Order 66, by Karen Traviss

EVER HAD A POEM OR SONG WRITTEN ABOUT YOU? actually yes, one of my exes wrote a song about me either just before or while we were still going out and I’m not supposed to talk about it but she isn’t on this hellsite anymore so frankly idgaf

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU PLAYED AIR GUITAR? on my walk home from work tonight, actually!

WHO IS YOUR CELEBRITY CRUSH? Daisy Riddley, she could deadlift me and make me laugh (swoon) also is it a copout to say Paul Rudd? I feel like everyone is at least a little in love with Paul Rudd whether they know it or not

WHAT’S A SOUND YOU HATE + SOUND YOU LOVE? some people have voices that just don’t work for me, you know? anyway, I’m going to have to copy my friend here and say the ocean, especially on a rocky shore with a foghorn far in the distance – I left a piece of my heart on an island called Newfoundland, and every so often I go back and leave a little more

DO YOU BELIEVE IN GHOSTS? as in actual dead people? nah. but if you’re talking figurative ones I do have several. they’re up for sale, if you want them.

HOW ABOUT ALIENS? I mean come on, there’s got to be

DO YOU DRIVE? when it’s most convenient/enjoyable

IF SO, HAVE YOU EVER CRASHED? not per se, I’m pretty handy behind a wheel, but I have done a couple stupid things at low speeds

WHAT WAS THE LAST BOOK YOU READ? I’m currently reading Dark Disciple by Christie Golden. @immadothething and I read to each other, I’m reading the aforementioned Order 66 to her at the moment and she just finished reading The Source of Magic by Piers Anthony to me – we’re about to start Castle Roogna!

DO YOU LIKE THE SMELL OF GASOLINE? mostly no. old cars smell cool though

WHAT WAS THE LAST MOVIE YOU SAW? Ant-Man and the Wasp, for the second time

WHAT’S THE WORST INJURY YOU’VE EVER HAD? seven-year-old me jumped on his bed, tripped, and cracked open his right eyebrow on one of the corner posts (not as fancy as it sounds) 23-year-old me still has the scar and is proud of it as a physical characteristic

I also severely injure my pride and grievously wound my dignity on a frighteningly frequent basis, but I don’t think that’s what’s meant here

DO YOU HAVE ANY OBSESSIONS RIGHT NOW? Star Wars, Hogwarts Mystery, The Old Sod by Spirit of the West, and making bad decisions with money and sleep (or lack thereof)

DO YOU TEND TO HOLD GRUDGES AGAINST PEOPLE WHO HAVE DONE YOU WRONG? I am petty as hell, but not as much as I used to be

IN A RELATIONSHIP? five and a half years with my reading partner and best cuddlebuddy, my actual girlfriend @immadothething and still going strong, but also a longtime flirtation with @theamtscout and a working marriage with Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition

aww man do I have to tag people now? oh geez uhh, @luxleytherabbit @patchothepuppy @clint-you-dummy and that’ll probably do it eh?

[brokenbow]

((Idk how many people read the Xanth books, but an alternative to Apollo and Lester sharing bodies is that when Apollo came in, Lester was shoved into something else, a la Dor and the Barbarian who’s body he was borrowing in Castle Roogna.

The Real Lester Papadopoulos is like a flea on Apollo’s head or something, scuttling back and forth over his scalp and biting at him impotently whenever Apollo makes stupid decisions that nearly get them killed.

[rmdreier]

Lot of 4 Piers Anthony #xanth books! Castle Roogna, Blue Adept, Up In A Heaval, The Source of Magic. Conditions range from acceptable to very good. $5 plus ship. Link in bio or claim below. 📚📚📘📖⚔️🏰🧙‍♂️🐲 #piersanthony #scififantasy #xanthseries #fantasy #vintagebooks #bookseller #booksofinstagram #bookstagram #booklife #bookworm #magic #fantasybooks #scifi #booksbooksbooks #bibliophile #bibliomane #bookaneer #bookaneer4sale #bookaneerbargainbin (at Dodge Center, Minnesota) https://www.instagram.com/p/BuUqLeDn_Gi/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=17yqw29vtcwkz

[disquietedpalefish]

But what filled the nest was even more remarkable. There were eggs, of course—but not this bird's own eggs, for they were of all colors, sizes, and shapes. Round eggs, oblong eggs, hourglass eggs; green ones, purple ones, polka-dotted ones; an egg the size of Dor's head, another the size of his littlest fingernail. At least one was an alabaster darning egg. There were also assorted nuts and berries and screws. There were dead fish and live wires and golden keys and brass-bound books, and pine and ice-cream cones. There was a marble statue of a winged horse, and marbles carved from unicorn horn. There was an hourglass with a quarter hour on it, and three linked rings made of ice. A soiled sunbeam and a polished werewolf dropping. Five goofballs. And Dor.

Castle Roogna, Piers Anthony

[tourettesguysdream]

[abitofafatass]

"No, that's not cowardice. Being terrified but going ahead and doing what must be done --  that's courage. The one who feels no fear is a fool, and the one who lets fear rule him is a coward. You are neither."

The Gorgon Castle Roogna by Piers Anthony

[soursavior]

Castle Roogna by Piers Anthony

Castle Roogna is the third Xanth book and rounds out the original trilogy. Either Castle Roogna is far less insanely sexist than the first two books (don't get me wrong, it's still insanely sexist) or the other two books left me incapable of properly perceiving sexism. Anthony's attitudes towards women may have been blunted somewhat by the relative scarcity of female characters this time around. The women, while still being essentially useless and/or malevolent, spend a lot less time in focus. Another way that Roogna improves itself is that it features an adolescent protagonist. That wouldn't normally be points in the book's favor, but when an author insists on writing nothing but coming of age stories it can be helpful to cast protagonists that aren't grown men. The adventure aspect of this novel is also an improvement over previous offerings. Dor's "talent" is something he has to actively use rather than being a mechanism for far-fetched coincidence. It lends itself to a story where the "hero" actually seems to contribute to his own successes and where victory is not technically ensured. I would recommend it to: still no one. Better does not necessarily mean good, especially with such a low starting point. Book rating: D+ Cumulative series rating: D-