The City of Splendors

Forgotten Realms: The Cities, Book 4

By: Elaine Cunningham, Ed Greenwood

Narrated by: Nicole Greevy

In the streets of Waterdeep, conspiracies run like water through the gutters, bubbling beneath the seeming calm of the city’s life. As a band of young, foppish lords discovers there is a dark side to the city they all love, a sinister mage and his son seek to create perverted creatures to further their twisted ends.

And across it all sprawls the great city itself: brawling, drinking, laughing, living life to the fullest. Even in the face of death.

City of Splendors is set in the most important city of the Forgotten Realms setting: Waterdeep, city of intrigue and secrets. Its authors are considered to be among the most authoritative figures writing in the Forgotten Realms setting. This novel is their first collaboration.

©2005 Wizards of the Coast LLC (P)2012 Audible, Inc.

Not for the Uninitiated

This book is an interesting experience, but there are many hurdles in reading/listening to it.

The story is part of a story-world with a very big publishing-history, but though it is a part of the "The Cities"-series, the book doesn't really do anything to introduce the city of Waterdeep to the listener, simply throwing street-names around as though the listener was meant to already know them intimately, something only meaningful if one is already a fan.

The book also doesn't truly have a "story" but rather simply has events occur in a somewhat disjointed, natural-though-random way. It is also difficult to identify who the book's actual protagonists are, as characters jump in-and-out of relevance at a fast pace and at very sudden points throughout the story; some important characters don't show up before hours of the book have passed; while the early introductions of characters all are presented as unsympathetic characters.
This results in a very disorienting listening-experience.

With all of this said, the book does manage to introduce plenty of sympathetic characters over time and transform several of the characters into people the listener ends up wanting to spend time with, but at the cost of several grinding hours first.
As a result, if people are already invested in the Forgotten Realms, there is still plenty of enjoyment to be had in "The City of Splendors" if one is willing to work through its dragging nature.

A long, slice-of-life D&D story.

No great heroes or epic quests here. just people surviving in the biggest city on Faerun.

The performance was stilted and over or under acted at times.

Voice actor

Poor choice for the voice actor. Very monotone at the beginning. Other that that it was a fairly good story.

It’s just pretty great.

Required listening if your PC has the “noble” background. Entertaining Forgotten Realms city intrigue. Stellar Elminster cameo.

Only thing worse was the reading

The boredom of this book and the number of Noble houses of irrelevance made this impossibly boring, but the worst is the narration. Nicole Greevy should stop reading…. Even for entertainment in her free time. I will start a Go Fund Me so we can have someone read to her so she never has to do it again. Just terrible monotone and mechanical without any emotion. Usually I love Ed Greenwood, this was just awful.