Sanctuary

This collects three gritty shared world anthologies, with many deaths, sorcerers, and some thieves also. There are some really good stories here and some that fumble forward. Characters that are favorites share pages with characters I'd prefer to skip. Overall rating for me, around three stars.

Like many anthologies, I had some favorites. Lynn Abbey's The Face of Chaos, Philip José Farmer's The Spiders of the Purple Mage, and Diana L Paxson's The Rhinoceros and the Unicorn were among them. Some of the stories read like a role playing adventure - Vonda N McIntyre's Looking for Satan is a great example of those.

I purchased this collected edition from the Science Fiction Book Club as a youth and have carried it around with me for more than 40 years unread. I'm glad I read it, I don't own the other collections but have seen them at used book stores, and may tackle another in the future.