YMMV / Harold Shea

• Funny Moments: In The Mathematics of Magic, the heroes try to turn water into wine for a banquet, but instead end up creating Scotch whisky, leading to all the knights and ladies getting dead drunk (and violently hung over the next morning).
• Memetic Mutation: "Yngvi is a louse!" became a meme among science fiction fandom long before the Internet.
• Moment of Awesome: Shea pulls off one by accident in The Roaring Trumpet. To get himself and Heimdall released from the trolls' dungeon before Ragnarok begins, he tries to pull a con on the troll warden, who is self-conscious about his big nose, making up a fake magic ritual to make the troll believe his nose has shrunk... except, since Shea carries out the ritual according to all the rules of magic, it ends up working. This marks the moment when he starts using magic for real and professionally.
• Seasonal Rot: The second series of solo-penned De Camp stories are considered this, as they are considerably more cynical and focused less on exploring magical systems.
• Squick: In-Universe; in The Castle of Iron, Shea's friend Vaclav is quite disgusted to see the magic used to clean dishes in Atlantes' castle: a dog licks a plate that is magically linked with the dirty plates, causing the food on them to vanish. Shea explains to him that the cleaned plates haven't actually been in contact with dog tongue.

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