Scans_Daily

Jokes aside, it's derivative in a relatively unusual way. Fantasy writing often suffers from what I call "The Dead Hand of JRR Tolkien" -- the man's vision was so strong that it's coloured everything since then. Take dwarves and elves: the whole "Dwarves and elves hate each other, dwarves live in vast cities underground and elves live in magical kingdoms in the forest" was just the Professor's take on them. Yet you don't see very many attempts to move away from that since LOTR was published. There's lots of other examples (not least The McGuffin Quest and the Mystical Big Bad who wants to take over or destroy the world).

The other less-used strain is sword-and-sorcery in the Weird Tales vein, subtype baroque as per Jirel of Joiry and Averoigne as opposed to subtype lusty AKA Conan. Moench is mixing and matching elements from that, and doing not a bad job at all. Extra points to him for inventing a complete new world, too, rather than sticking to ancient Earth as was the norm.