The Icewind Dale Trilogy

The Icewind Dale Trilogy is the first series of books by R.A. Salvatore written in the Forgotten Realms setting. Although originally intended to focus primarily on the barbarian Wulfgar, by the end of the third book it has shifted to a character who was originally meant to be Wulfgar's mentor/sidekick: the good dark elf ranger Drizzt Do'Urden. Drizzt became so popular that he would get his own prequel series of books and would become the star of pretty much every novel in the series set afterwards. This trilogy also introduces Drizzt and Wulfgar's friends: the dwarf king Bruenor Battlehammer, his adopted human daughter Catti-Brie, and the halfling Regis.

The story begins in Icewind Dale, a frozen wasteland that's populated by settlers who have established fishing towns around the three lakes, barbarian tribes, monsters, and sometimes visiting wizards. Some of these wizards trick an inept apprentice into killing his master (and their rival) for them, and then they leave him behind to freeze to death, which is when he comes across an artifact that gives him the power and desire to conquer the whole place. After he gets defeated, Bruenor decides to go on a quest with the others to find the lost dwarven kingdom of Mithral Hall, which he is the heir to but was abandoned when he was still a child. On this adventure, they have to deal with all sorts of obstacles including, but not limited to: finding out where the hell the place is, orcs, barbarians, racist humans, trolls, bog blokes, evil wizards, dark dwarves, invincible golems, a dragon, and a certain master assassin by the name of Artemis Entreri. Entreri has been hired to hunt down Regis, who had stolen something from his employer years ago. Entreri is impressed with Drizzt's combat skill, which seems to equal his own. Thus, he becomes determined to fight Drizzt to the death in order to find out who is better. He doesn't just grab Regis, but another friend of Drizzt's, and tells Drizzt to come and get him if he cares about them. The chase is on until it ends in the desert city of Calimport, where the story concludes.

Books in the series:

The Crystal Shard (1988)
Streams of Silver (1989)
The Halfling's Gem (1990)

See Forgotten Realms, Icewind Dale, The Dark Elf Trilogy and the Legacy of the Drow Series.

Tropes used in The Icewind Dale Trilogy include:

Action Girl: Cattie-Brie doesn't do very much fighting at the start of the trilogy, but has become this by the third book.
Artifact of Doom: Crenshinibon, the Crystal Shard. See The Corruption for what it does.
Back-to-Back Badasses : Drizzt and Entreri in the second book.
Batman Gambit: Drizzt and Entreri pile one or two of these on top of each other in the third book, as they try to guess each other's moves and fool each other.
Beware the Nice Ones: Drizzt, so much.
- A notable example is in Streams of Silver after the Companions have come to the aid of riders from Nesmé (see Ungrateful Bastard below), one of the riders attempts to kill Drizzt. The rest of the riders later make several verbal jabs at Drizzt based on his race and threaten him. Drizzt takes this with his usual quiet stoicism. However, he spots one of the riders going for his bow and immediately whips out his own, taking out the guy's cap and tells the rest of them that if anyone of them make another move against him or his friends, they will die.
Berserk Button: See above.
Bring My Brown Pants: A citizen of Ten Towns decides to provide intelligence to the attacking barbarians in return for future considerations. Heafstaag doesn't trust him, and swings his axe as if to decapitate him. The guy's been told not to flinch or struggle, that this will be a test, and he doesn't. So he lives, but tries very hard to make sure nobody notices the puddle he's created...
Breakout Character: As mentioned in the main description, Drizzt.
Bond Villain Stupidity: The dragon Icingdeath could have immediately killed Wulfgar with his ice breath, but he didn't want to freeze his meal solid, so he tried to kill him another way. He should've just settled for frozen food.
- Don't forget why Drizzt ended up chewing Wulfgar out after they kill the dragon; Wulfgar woke it up to fight it rather than just killing it while it slept.
- Or how about Drizzt's obsession with Entreri, which leads him to stop Catti-Brie from shooting the assassin.
Bungling Inventor: The Harpells, an extended family of wizards with their own town, experiment a lot with magic, sometimes with disastrous results. One of them has even turned himself into a dog by accident, and the others can't figure out how to reverse it, so they just keep him around as a pet. (He does eventually regain his humanity in a later book.)
Chekhov's Scimitar: When Drizzt is fighting Entrer in Mithril Hall, he falls down a pit trap and his friends assume he's dead. Bruenor finds one of Drizzt's scimitars, the one enchanted with ice magic, and takes it with him. This later comes in handy when Bruenor is prepared to make a Heroic Sacrifice to kill Shimmergloom, and ends up covered in flames.
- It's later invoked again when Bruenor escapes Mithril Hall and tries to flee the evil gray dwarves by running through the red-hot furnaces of the dwarves' forges. He actually extinguishes the flames as he runs through them.
- And then there's when the blade saved Drizzt himself from Errtu. Our hero had found the scimitar in the treasure hoard of a dead dragon, and the blade kept Drizzt from being incinerated by Errtu's fires, and eventually extinguished the demon himself.
Cloudcuckoolander: Some of the Harpells exemplify this trope more than others. Harkle Harpell is the most cloudcuckoolanderish of them.
Combat Pragmatist: Everybody, really, but Entreri take the gold here when he fights Drizzt in a sewer and collects some of the water in his mouth to spit into Drizzt's eyes.
The Corruption: Akar Kessel isn't a Complete Monster to start out with; although he murders his master, he does that because the other wizards manipulated him and exploited his desperation and frustration, and later on he feels remorse for it. After first finding Crenshinibon, all he really wants is a nice, warm place to call home and maybe some female companionship. The shard corrupts him to the point that he wants to kill or enslave everybody in the whole world.
Death Is Cheap
Damsel in Distress: Subverted with Catti-brie, who saves herself in the second book.
The Dragon: The demon Errtu in the first book.
Enemy Mine: Drizzt and Entreri team temporarily in order to survive and find their way back to their respective parties. And it is glorious.
Even Evil Has Standards: Beorg, one of the barbarian kings that plan to conquer and enslave the people of Ten-Towns, feels nothing but contempt for deBernezan, the Ten-Towns resident who betrays his own people in an attempt to line his own pockets.
- Drizzt notes that Entreri held Catti-brie captive but didn't rape her.
Fantastic Racism: Drizzt has to put up with a lot of this.
Fearful Symmetry: While not physically identical, Drizzt and Entreri have similar body types and seem to be mirror images of one another when they fight.
Five-Man Band: Drizzt, Bruenor, Wulfgar, Cattie-Brie, and Regis, later known as "The Companions Of The Hall."
Foe Yay: The way Entreri reacts to Drizzt's rejection in "Streams of Silver" is just hilarious - like a disappointed fan boy. In fact, every time Drizzt and Entreri are on the same page expect Foe Yay to follow, especially from Entreri's end.
For the Evulz: In the third book, Artemis Entreri needs to get off a ship with his captive, and there's no reason why he couldn't just sneak away with a lifeboat in the middle of the night. Nevertheless, he decides to murder the whole crew in their sleep and then set the ship on fire so that the captain will burn to death. Even though he wants Drizzt to follow him, and more witnesses to their path would help...
- This troper read it as being something of a punishment/warning to Regis, who faked have a contagious disease to try and get them tossed off the ship ("attempt to slow us down again and see what'll happen to the people around you" sort of thing) as well as being a form of twisted revenge against the captain of the ship for making him get off early.
Fridge Brilliance: Drizzt and Entreri probably would have thrived in each others' bodies. It's noted at several points that Entreri would have prospered as a drow in Menzoberranzan, to the point where even the bigoted dark elves admit that he's drow in everything but skin color. On the other hand, if Drizzt were human he never would have had to put up with Fantastic Racism to begin with, and without the goal of earning a place for himself, his prowess might have made him grow proud...
From Nobody to Nightmare: See The Corruption.
Gender Blender Name: The most feared and skilled assassin in the world is named Artemis. Though the name would seem very appropriate if Artemis had been a girl.
- Subverted in that no one ever makes any comment of Artemis' name (granted, doing so to his face would most likely be a bad idea), and due to Toril being a different world than our own this trope may not even apply.
General Failure: In "The Crystal Shard", Akar Kessel might have conquered the world if he didn't shoot himself in the foot more than once. In the end, the titular artifact stops responding to his commands and lets itself get buried in an avalanche because it's tired of watching him screw things up and wants a more worthy wielder.
Heel Face Turn: At the beginning of the story, Wulfgar and Bruenor face one another in battle when Wulfgar's tribe is trying to pillage Ten Towns. Wulfgar gets his ass kicked and is taken prisoner, finds himself in indentured servitude for a number of years, and during that time becomes friends—and in a couple of cases, family—with the people his tribe had been trying to kill.
Heroic Sacrifice: Bruenor jumps onto the back of a flying dragon and lights it on fire, killing it. The last anybody sees of him, he and the dragon are falling into a chasm, both in flames. Everybody is sure he is dead, and Bruenor probably expected to die, but he happened to be carrying something that made him immune to fire without him knowing it.
Ho Yay: Lots and lots of it. In The Halfling's Gem the captain and Drizzt get really friendly on their journey; culminating in the captain stating that Drizzt looks more handsome as himself rather than looking like a surface elf.
I Surrender, Suckers: Drizzt kills a monster his pursuers have sent after him, and then waits for them while pretending to have been incapacitated by it.
I Thought You Were Dead: Drizzt is seen by his friends falling victim to a trap that they're sure he didn't survive...except he does and rejoins them later. Also, Bruenor (see Heroic Sacrifice ).
Karma Houdini: Artemis Entreri, who beats Catti-Brie and threatens her with death in order to ensure her cooperation, cuts off two of Regis' fingers, and leaves them behind as "gifts" for Drizzt in order to further goad the drow into a fight to the death, murders a ship full of people and burns the captain alive For the Evulz...and by the end of the story, he's still alive, not seriously injured, and capable of causing more mayhem, death, and suffering later on. So Entreri escapes karma...at least in this trilogy...
Kick the Dog: Akar Kessell comes close to doing this literally, except it's a cat and he tries to kill it with a magic spell (for practice) instead of kicking it. Animal lovers have nothing to worry about, since at that time he's pretty hopeless when it comes to spellcasting.
Kill It with Fire: Fire is the only thing that kills trolls for good.
Licking the Blade: Drizzt pulls a non-evil version of this in The Crystal Shard after spearing a piece of mutton with a dagger (and subsequently accidently dropping it) while he and Wulfgar are clearing out a den of giants.
Made of Iron: The companions take a ton of punishment in the final act of The Halfling's Gem, yet it barely slows them down.
Moral Dissonance: Really weird case in Streams of Silver, where Regis uses his magical gem to try to brainwash a prostitute into sleeping with him out of "loneliness," becoming the first halfling main character in the Forgotten Realms to be an attempted rapist. Oh, and he tries it in front of Wulfgar, who is described as being too shocked to do anything. It doesn't work because a bar fight breaks out immediately afterwards and no character ever mentions this incident again, as if even Salvatore is trying to forget that he wrote that scene.
- The way Bruenor tricks Drizzt into going on the search for Mithril Hall is just downright mean. And no one of his friends reproaches him for that. Not even Drizzt himself. That's made all the Harsher in Hindsight if one considers that Bruenor was the first 'true' and longtime friend Drizzt had since his father's sacrifice. Granted, in Streams of Silver Bruenor at least acknowledges, that it was a dirty trick.
- At the end of the third book, the friends leave Regis in control of the thieves' guild, apparently quite comfortable with the idea that he would make a living of organized theft.
Play-Along Prisoner: Regis only pretends to be under Kessel's mental control until he can throw a monkey wrench into the villain's plans.
Precision-Guided Boomerang: Wulfgar's warhammer.
Royals Who Actually Do Something: Bruenor and Wulfgar.
Shout-Out: Where else have we seen a small group of heroes invade a long-forgotten dwarven kingdom where the previous occupants have Dug Too Deep, unleashing/awakening a demonic creature that massacred their entire civilization? With a character apparently performing a Heroic Sacrifice by falling down into a giant underground chasm with said creature while defeating it? Or for that matter, an exiled dwarven king leading his companions (including a reluctant sneaky halfling) to reclaim his kingdom from the clutches of a dragon?
Smug Snake: Rassiter.
Spoiler Opening: Or spoiler-book cover, to be precise. The third book, The Halfling's Gem, shows the heroes fighting demons in Tartarus, which only happens at the very end of the book. Also, it shows Bruenor, who is still thought dead at the beginning of the book, alive and well.
Super-Persistent Predator: The trolls of the Evermoors; no matter how hard the Companions fight, no matter how many trolls they incapacitate or kill, there are always more ready to take their places, and the ones they cut apart grow back their missing body parts (including heads and vital organs; cutting the head off of a troll results in the head eventually growing a new body, the body growing a new head, and then you have TWO hungry trolls coming after you). As mentioned above, only fire can kill them, and even when they've got that it's still difficult for the good guys to hold off all of the trolls.
The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: Artemis Entreri does not react well when he finds out that Pasha Pook has tried to have Drizzt killed before he, Entreri, has had the chance to fight and kill Drizzt himself.
Ungrateful Bastards: The Companions come to the aid of a group of riders from Nesmé who are being attacked. The rider that Drizzt saves immediately tries to kill him (and would have, had Wulfgar not intervened) once he gets a good look at him. The riders then surround them, refuse them entry into their town, threaten them, and make several verbal jabs at Drizzt. The only reason things don't come to a head is because the riders decide they really don't want to fight them.
Weak-Willed: Akar Kessel.
Would Hit a Girl: Being Entreri's prisoner is not a fun experience for Catti-Brie.
- Cattie-Brie also provokes Jierdan into hitting her, but he regrets it immediately afterward.
- In "Streams of Silver"; when Whisper tries to charge Bruenor ten times what they'd originally agreed upon for a map and has a dagger ready to stab him if he tries anything funny, Bruenor headbutts her, takes the map, and leaves her the amount he agreed to in the first place.
You Have Failed Me...: Eventually the Crystal Shard becomes tired of Akar Kessell's screwups, and refuses to help him when he's about to be buried in an avalanche.