I found my copy on a discount shelf at Half Price Books, out in the Chicago suburbs. Reading Homeland now is less like catching up on a classic and more like rediscovering an ancient period of history in nerd-dom, a whole stratum of the hobby I had been walking past for years. I miss the fantasy of that era, the small and plentiful paperbacks that once filled a spinner rack, and I miss having used bookstores to hunt them in. We have so few left around here. Dungeons & Dragons was a perennial institution back then too, though a derided one, fueled in the popular imagination by misguided mothers and overzealous theologians. The 21st century has since embraced it, much like the mainstream acceptance anime has earned, so pulling this book down felt like stepping into the era before that turn, when the game and its fiction still lived closer to the fringes.

For the uninitiated, the fundamentals are straightforward. D&D is collaborative fiction. A group of players and a Dungeon Master come together at a table, the DM voicing the non-player characters, painting the scenes, and running the world. Meanwhile the players take on the roles of their characters, each with a history, a class, a set of capabilities, and a race. Those pieces collide with the players' own personalities, and the stories that result can rival, even eclipse, most popular media. The adventures unfold across many worlds, and the most famous of them is Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms, which began as a handful of one-off modules before becoming the official setting for most of what followed, cemented by 4th Edition. But let's not drift too close to the present. Today we're going back to the dark ages, in some respects. We're checking in on Toril, and the most famous Drow adventurer the Realms have produced: Drizzt Do'Urden.

There is one thing worth holding onto before the bodies start dropping. At the center of Homeland sits a mirror. Zaknafein and Drizzt are the same man born a generation apart, one worn down into the system's weapon and one who slips its grasp entirely. Nearly everything the book does works to set those two reflections against each other, and it is that argument, more than any swordplay, that has kept the story alive for readers. Watch the father as the son grows, because the tragedy is Drizzt walking toward the fate that already claimed Zaknafein, and then turning away from it.

While not the first story to feature one of the rare "good" Drow, this tale follows Drizzt from his birth to his eventual sojourn out of Menzoberranzan.

What is Menzoberranzan? A mouthful, and one of several Drow kingdoms in the subterranean realm known as the Underdark. Here the light of the surface is beyond reach, and a torch would only paint a target on your back, assuming your ambient body heat hadn't already done the job. In a realm with no natural light, buried this far down, a species must adapt, and the Drow have. After a great deal of deity-versus-deity conflict, a contingent of surface elves fell under the sway of a corrupted being named Lolth. She is despicable and dangerous, a spider queen who enforces a harsh matriarchal rule where death is the closest thing to a slap on the wrist for disobedience. Her subjects certainly got the memo on theming. The rules are many, and the hierarchy of Houses is strict.

Menzoberranzan runs much like a Klingon ship. If you want a promotion, you are going to have to spill some blood. If you can take down another House, go for it, provided they are already out of Lolth's favor and you don't get caught. Everyone knows when it happens; it is not always clear who did it. As long as the whole family is dead, there is no one left to speak against you. This night, House Do'Urden means to attempt precisely that.

It also happens that Matron Malice, head of House Do'Urden, is with child, and he is coming tonight. This is no cause for celebration. As the third son of the family, the newborn is destined to be ritually sacrificed to appease Lolth. That fate would have come to pass, if the second brother had not killed his older sibling to secure his own position. The death opened a door, and Drizzt slipped through it into life.

The change of circumstance sits poorly with the rest of the House. Drizzt is raised, begrudgingly, by his older sister, and he shows a rare capacity for both magic and combat. For 15 years he lives within the claustrophobic walls of the chapel, yearning to see the rest of Menzoberranzan. Eventually he begins training with Zaknafein, the House Do'Urden weapon master, and here the mirror comes into focus. Unbeknownst to Drizzt, the weapon master is his sire. Matron Malice keeps something that could loosely be called a husband, though that arrangement does not account for her dalliances.

Zaknafein is unlike the other Drow. He feels compassion, he feels emotion, and he recognizes the abject cruelty of Drow society: its treatment of other races, its constant scheming and backstabbing, the oppressive rule of Lolth and her priestesses. He has survived by making himself the finest killer in the city, turning his blades on the priesthood whenever he can manage it unseen. He hopes to find a little of himself in the boy, and to both his dismay and his joy, he finds his spitting image. The father shows what happens when a good Drow stays; the son will spend the rest of the book showing the alternative.

Happiness, of course, is no one's destiny in Menzoberranzan. Drizzt is eventually sent to the Academy to be forged into a true, indoctrinated warrior. The night he was born, the night that began his life, also ended a House. House DeVir had fallen out of Lolth's favor, which made it a fine target for Matron Malice's machinations. In one stroke the House was wiped out, and with no one left alive, no one remained to accuse House Do'Urden. That same night left Alton DeVir, the last of his line, alive and hungry for a vengeance he could not yet aim, and a member of House Hun'ett was there to nudge a decades-long plan against the Do'Urden clan into motion.

That plan is where Masoj comes in, and where the panther enters the story. Masoj Hun'ett is a mage of the rival House, studying at Sorcere, the Academy's school of wizardry. His matron plants him as Drizzt's magic tutor for six months, ostensibly to teach, actually to study the young Do'Urden up close and find the weakness House Hun'ett can exploit when the two Houses inevitably collide. Masoj also happens to own an onyx figurine, a relic that summons a great black panther from the Astral Plane, Guenhwyvar the latest in the litany of tongue twisting character names. The cruelty of Masoj's world extends to the cat. He treats Guenhwyvar as a tool, and she knows it. When Drizzt joins the patrols that range the wild tunnels beyond the city, he and the panther fight side by side often enough that something like friendship forms between them, and she comes to prefer the young warrior to her cold master.

Out on one of those raids, the patrol is sent to the surface and falls on a gathering of surface elves, and the drow show them no mercy at all. Sickened, Drizzt spares an elf child, hiding her beneath the body of her slain mother and smearing her with blood so she will be seen as another corpse. It is the smallest possible act of defiance, and it is enough to mark him.

That mercy proves the final straw. His family understands now that he will never become one of them. Their cruelty drives them to arrange an execution for Zaknafein, whom they have identified as the source of Drizzt's corruption. Matron Malice welcomes Drizzt back into the fold only to spring a confrontation that ends with his father dead. Zaknafein, the man who stayed and let the city hollow him out, gives everything so the son can become the thing he never managed to be. Drizzt flees into the Underdark with nothing.

Almost nothing. As he runs, Masoj makes his move, the long Hun'ett design finally coming due, and sets Guenhwyvar on Drizzt to finish him. The panther will not do it. Drizzt kills Masoj, lifts the figurine from the ground where the mage dropped it, and claims Guenhwyvar for good, unwilling to leave her to anyone who would spend her on cruelty. A friendless exile walks off into the dark with the one companion who chose him.

Before him, the Drow was a monster on an encounter table, a dark-skinned boogeyman to be killed for experience points. Homeland turned that stat block into a role a person could actually inhabit, a template with enough give to hold a paladin's conscience or, in my case, a thief's appetite. I have played the good Drow myself. In a homebrew world called Caldera, built by my old college roommate Colin for D&D 3.5, I ran a Drow rogue named Kalannar Khalazza. He was traditional in the way Drizzt is not, born and raised to the dark elf mold, and he set himself against Lolth all the same, escaping the fate she reserves for her failures, transformation into a drider, half elf and half spider. Where Drizzt refuses out of conscience, Kalannar refused out of temperament. He is all about the coin, a firebug when the mood takes him, and what he ultimately wants is ease and comfort rather than righteousness. A different motive, yet the same refusal. That range is the inheritance Homeland left behind for us fans. It is a large part of why a battered paperback on a discount shelf is worth stooping to pick up. I only wish I had more places to peruse. I've got a craving for classic D&D Novels now, and with very recent announcements we most certainly haven't seen the last of Drizz't.

Many of these older tales are available digitally, and I’d say they are worth a look, but the smell and feel of an old book lets you step back into a time where the once niche hobby was truly in a world of it’s own.