In January 2006, as a part of its growing line of Eberron-themed novels, Wizards of the Coast released the second part of Matt Forbeck's The Lost Mark trilogy. The Road to Death is the sequel to 2005's Marked for Death and picks up where the action of the first novel left off.
Fantasy is filled with book series and when the latest book in a series arrives there are usually multiple reviews of the newest offering. The same is true in this case. You can read a very thorough book of the month club discussion over at Essential Eberron. What is usually lacking are "reminder reviews" of the first book in a series. After all, readers who don't discover a series until the second book is released will have to decide if they desire to catch up.
Marked for Death is a shared universe media tie-in story by Matt Forbeck, a long-time veteran of the role-playing game industry. Marked for Death is a part of Wizards of the Coast's marketing efforts to promote their newest campaign setting for the Dungeons and Dragons game. Forbeck's novel takes place in the Eberron world, like the other novels in the line, but does not share any protagonists with the other books in the series.
The Eberron world is a fantasy environment that combines elements of pulp and detective/noir fiction with traditional fantasy tropes. A nice, if reductive, analogy would be to say that Eberron is like a fantasy version of Earth just after the First World War, or the Last War as it is called on Eberron.
The magic of the world is pretty much what one would expect in a Dungeons and Dragons-based fantasy novel with two exceptions. First, in addition to its traditional role in fantasy, the magic of Eberron has also developed in a manner similar to that of technology in our world. Powerful magic is still limited to trained users, but architecture and technology incorporating minor magic effects are common.
Second, some aristocratic bloodlines in the world have magical powers associated with their ancestry, the so called Dragonmarks. Most individuals who bear a Dragonmark are members of an aristocratic family associated with one of twelve well established Marks. There are currently twelve such Marks, the aristocratic status of which was determined long ago during war between Dragon-marked houses. It was during the War of the Mark that one of what were then thirteen Dragonmarks was destroyed, the aptly named Mark of Death.
It is with this background that Marked for Death begins. The story focuses on the friends and family of a man named Kandler, a veteran of the Last War. Kandler lives with his close friend, the semi-lycanthopic "Shifter"Burch, and his step-daughter, an elf-child named Esprë. This small band lives in a community that borders what was once one of the great nations of the world, but which is now a land of dust and death having been destroyed in an almost nuclear cataclysm at the end of the Last War.
Recently citizens of the town have been disappearing mysteriously, and Kandler's step-daughter has manifested a Dragonmark now that she has entered puberty. Things are very tense in the small border community, but are about to get worse.
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