I'm reading Saevus Corax by KJ Parker (powerword Tom Holt), currently on the second book and second attempt -- I'd dropped the first one a while ago because I couldn't stand the narrator.
Update: it sucked. The protagonist retires to be a happy cuck. No malfunctioning cannon and no clever tweest, but there was a head in honey, yet another omnipresent KJ Parker trope. Not recommended.
Re-reading
Stormblade (a 1988 Dragonlance novel) by Nancy Varian Berberick.
Dragonlance is a D&D
setting game designed by Tracy Hickman, a D&D writer and a Mormon. The original intention for it was to be a
setting tha focused on dragons, to mirror Greyhawk, a setting that focuses on dungeons and is named after a dungeon. It ended up a standalone
game encompassing a traditional
literary fantasy epic quest to defeat the big bad rather than the classic Gygaxian D&D adventures. (The referee could pick one of several variants of each individual setpiece, Clue-style.)
The game included several pregenerated characters, for players to pick and play, for artists to portray in art, and for referees to, uh, refer to when assessing the appropriate power level (the player characters in Dragonlance started out much more powerful and resilient than classic D&D adventurers).
TSR hired Margaret Weis, a children's book writer, to co-write tie-in novels featuring these pregenerated characters, which were hugely successful. Suddenly, the pregenerated characters became ossified "canon", part of the setting, and there was nothing for your own characters to do.
For that reason, including
Stormblade, there are only two novels set in the timeframe of the game that do not have pregens as main characters. Both of those have to do with dwarven politics, a topic thankfully skipped by the original novels (literally
skipped, the original v2 starts with "lmao you know that long-lost hammer of dwarven kings we never mentioned? here it is, we found it off-camera"). Later, Weis and Hickman would write terrible cash-in novels to fill these gaps and contradict other writers' output. Weis and Hickman don't acknowledge anyone's writing but their own.
Stormblade doesn't quite fill the gap as exists in it. The titular Stormblade is yet another artifact of dwarven rulership that dwarves managed to lose. As a kid, I liked the book and was excited to see proof that Dragonlance could be a real setting.
On a reread, well,
it fucking sucks. There are plot holes and contradictions (the number of people present at the scene constantly changes, random lucky ambushes, see-in-total-darkness sun-hating dwarves lighting fires to see better at night), and the short scenes and constant cuts are annoying. Worst of all, character motivation is not particularly sympathetic, especially in light of Current Year.
So there are six dwarven clans (subraces) under the mountain. Dwarves are nominally neutral, as is their creator god. Two clans are "good" and worship the Mormon Virgin Mary. Two are "evil" and worship Tiamat. One is hill dwarves (immigrants). One is gully dwarves, deformed parasitic retards who do no work and can't count beyond 2. This is not a joke or exaggeration. One of the "good" clans is considered the ruling clan and lives in
Washington DC a giant stalactite at the center of the city.
Each clan has a seat on the council. The ruling clan's leader is the permanent head of the council. The hill guy and the retard always vote with him. And yet, and yet, it's not enough. The "good" leader wants to be the ultimate absolute ruler of all the dwarves and get dwarves into the world war on the side of "good". The hammer will make him King and the Stormblade alone will make him King Regent, which sounds less cool but is equally terrible.
In the timeframe of the book, a caravan of 800 migrants (human slaves who escaped from the mines) approaches the dwarven kingdom. They are described as consisting of men and mothers with small children. There's too many small children for them having been mining workers (it's a major plot point in Dragonlance worldbuilding that the current crop of Evil leaders is extremely bad at human resource management). They walk without food for weeks, then camp on the plain and light up cooking fires (with what? to cook what? nigger). It is implied they can and would storm the dwarven kingdom and break in (how? there was no description of Southgate but if it's anything like the melon door from LotR, they're shit out of luck). Their representatives go to parlay with the dwarves and demand to be let in. The dwarves hold a vote and it comes 4-2, with two conservative nays, and the other "good" clan head votes yeah on the condition the migrants should be fed and put to agricultural work in currently fallow underground farms. The wannabe king lies and agrees to this. Instead, third-person limited narration confirms, he wants to put them in the best accommodation (five star hotels, anyone?) and use them as soldiers to fight the two conservative clans. (No, 800 humans, or for that matter an army of evil lizardmen, can't possibly win against dwarves in dwarven tunnels. Dragonlance doesn't have orcs so nothing can fight dwarves underground except other dwarves.)
Oh and: there's a tavern in an occupied human town that the occupation government designates as off limits to their own forces. A traumatized orphaned girl (she saw her family and home get incinerated by a dragon) works there as a waitress, and the locals -- not the occupants, the locals -- try to sexually assault her, so much that after three weeks of working she just reflexively dodges sexual assault attempts while serving drinks. Lol.
And worry not! I won't give up!! 
