The Binding Stone

Eberron: The Dragon Below, Book 1

By: Don Bassingthwaite

Narrated by: Adam Epstein

Length: 13 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's summary

The first book in a series of dark tales and high adventure in the Eberron™ campaign setting. The Binding Stone features the brand-new races that were created specifically for the Eberron campaign setting. It's also the first Eberron novel to take its listeners on an exploration of many uncharted territories in the setting.

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

Whiny

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

I'd recommend the physical book but not the audio version. The narrator's portrayal of the characters came across as "whiny". I like the story but not the reading.

Book was great, narrator was not.

There were many characters in the novel and the reader strained to give each one their own accent and style, it went poorly. Book was unlistenable at base speed as the entire thing felt like it was slowed down and slurring, 1.3x or 1.4x were closer to understandable speech.

Great book, poor narration

Good book, but it felt like the narrator just did one take or didn't take it seriously? Geth's voice sounds like a drunk Stallone impression, the narrator keeps calling one of the main characters Singe "sing" and just a bunch of other blunders. Just really makes for an unpleasant listening experience for something that's a clear good read

Presenter is very dry and story doesn’t catch you

Could not even get through the first full chapter. The presentation is dry and uninspiring, and what I got of the story did not keep my attention to keep reading.

Story was ok, narration wasn’t great.

The story held my attention well enough. The narrator mispronounced several words that got on my nerves. I can understand certain words that are made up for this world, like kalashtar, but other words like glowering just grated on my nerves. He was also an extremely slow reader (I had to increase speed to 1.8x speed.) I also wasn’t a fan of several voice choices he made. One of the main characters, the shifter Geth in particular, he made sound like he was very dim witted and slow. Overall, with a better narrator, this would’ve been a better book.

Not that... Good.

Played on 1.3 speed and the narration wasn't horrible. He took a page. Out of the. William shatner school. Of talking.

Frustrating

This is a decent series of books, one that perhaps could hve done with more descriptive text of the characters, and less reliance o All of this is let down by a narrator that makes everyone sound far older, whinier, and in some cases stupider than they are. The main villain is the only character pulled off well.

Combine all that with baffling mispronunciations of real world words (in a story filled with fantasy jargon) as well as a very slow pace, and you got a somewhat disastrous audiobook. The story is good, but this audiobook has a lot going against it.

Adam gets a lot better throughout the series.

I had trouble slogging through this at first, because I felt the narrator wasn’t engaging. He gets better towards the end of the three books, and by the end he’s one of the best narrators I’ve listened to.

So, if you feel like I did on this, push through. It’s worth it.

Poor Performance Distracts from Great Story

First off, the story is fantastic. The narrator, however, has terrible pronunciation and talks so slowly and with such erratic cadence that I had to speed up the audio to tolerate it. It's a shame he does all the books in the series, as I'll have to suffer through it to hear the amazing story!

Decent story, terrible narrator

Honestly if he didn't make Geth sound so dumb, he'd be a decent narrator. I listened at 1.35 speed like others suggested as well.

Story is solid. Not great, not bad. I'm not sure how it got "must read" praise but I suppose D&D fair is such that it towers among the competition. The way combat kinda breaks down into a round by round action is just clunky to me. I don't know why D&D authors insist on it.