As part of getting old, I find a lot of modern versions of things really suck. Rock music most notably (save for Greta Van Fleet). But also fantasy fiction, it's basically long boring epics or urban/romantic stuff.
Glen Cook and Lawrence Watt-Evans are basically the only two fantasy authors I still like who aren't dead. Sadly, both publish less and less, but the latter has just put out a new Ethshar novel, Stone Unturned, also available in hardback
Ethshar was originally based on his PBM game back in the early 1980s,
but turned into a novel when a player asked him a question "What can a
character do with a single spell?" which led to the novel "With a Single
Spell"
Unlike a lot of other fantasy, the focus was typically on a normal person (even if they sometime happen to be wizards, they aren't major wizards but average ones), who is not really caught up in a major epic event, but something of a strange situation or problem. In this case (have bought but not read it yet), a wizard who stumbles upon a bunch of petrified people and decided to unpetrify them.
The Ethshar novels were originally published as a paperback by a Del Rey (with
covers by Darrell K. Sweet (though in once instance, the wrong cover was
used), the type of quirky, personal, somewhat low key fantasy declined
in popularity in favor of more epic or romantic stuff and he's had to
write them basically just for fans and published by Wildside Press
(which at this point seems little more than a vanity press)
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