The Imaginary Realms of

Gilbert M. Stack

2 The Village of Noobtown by Ryan Rimmel

Jim returns for a second adventure in this excellent sequel to The Mayor of Noobtown. Now that Jim has killed a lot of goblins in the last book, he’s forced to deal with a truly frightening problem—economics. The problem? This is a fantasy town and its economy appears to depend on non-existent adventurers going out to adventure, kill monsters, and bring back their loot to spend in town. Without those adventurers, Jim has to try and establish trade with its nearest neighbor. Unfortunately, while there are two routes to get there, one is blocked by a forest with an unbelievably high number of ferocious pack-hunting pumas, and the other is blocked by a very large group of well-organized bandits. Jim gets himself chewed up by pumas on the way to town and carved up by bandits on the way out and he still hasn’t fixed his problem. If anything, he makes them worse by hiring a mercenary company to help him with the bandit problem.

Then things get really difficult, because all of those thousands of goblins from the first book are still around and still causing trouble for the town. Those troubles are greatly magnified when the goblins unite and lay siege to Noobtown. This forces Jim, his town militia, and his new mercenary company to try and figure out a way to defeat the goblins without getting themselves killed.

In and around all of these very interesting problems, Jim is still trying to figure out how his many skill trees work and how to turn himself into a much more powerful character. His unusual beginnings give him great breadth, but he’s rapidly figuring out that he needs at least a couple of his character classes to advance to a respectably high number if he’s going to survive in this world.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, that not all of Jim’s troubles can be solved with a sword. One of the townspeople he saved from the goblins is rewarding him by trying to overthrow Jim as mayor and claim the job for himself. As much as Jim might like to, he can’t simply stick a sword in the guy to end his political revolution. He has to find a nonviolent way to resolve the problem. Fortunately, there are skills on his skill trees for this sort of trouble as well.

1 The Mayor of Noobtown by Ryan Rimmel

LitRPGs always need an excuse to create the game world mechanics that will govern the book or a series. In this case, Ryan Rimmel chooses the afterlife. For reasons that he makes no serious effort to explain, the afterlife is set up as an RPG, and our hero, Jim, recently died in a car crash and now has to start over in this new reality. He has one big thing going for him, and one big thing going against him. In his favor, the demon creating him used an alternate set of rules that basically allows him to advance in all classes in existence. Against him, the demon reconsidered and would like to wipe his memory and start again.

So, Jim’s afterlife existence is at stake as he escapes from hell(?) and into the gaming environment—an area that has fallen out of use over the years and in which the monsters have stepped up their game enough to be a serious problem for a lone first level character.

Much of the novel is Jim gaining experience and applying it to his skill tree which leads to never ending readings of Jim’s character sheet. If I hadn’t been reading this in audio format, I would have skipped all of those sections, but as it was I had to listen to a blur of data without any easy way to compare it to previous versions of the character sheet. But that is the only problem I had with this novel. The rest of it succeeds in being an exciting adventure tale in which Jim has to decide what kind of person he wants to be in this new world. Will he be completely self-centered, or will he try and help others. Accompanying Jim and serving as a sort of reverse conscious is one of the demons who created him who has managed to lose his power and become bound to Jim—not as a servant but as a pest.

I’ve read a lot of this style of novel over the past few years and Rimmel does an excellent job of focusing on the adventure rather than the mechanics. The mechanics are definitely present (as in the constant rereading of the character sheet and announcement of progress in skills and levels) but they don’t get in the way of a good story. And the story really is good. Goblins have taken over the area and are enslaving a lot of humans. Jim decides to try and do something about it and in doing so starts to build the town he is mayor of because he was its only active citizen when he first arrived and drove out some goblins.

I’m looking forward to seeing what Rimmel will do in the next book.

Black Dawn by Nathan Ameye

Black Dawn is a gritty LitRPG that happens in the “real” world as opposed to in a game. The premise of the plot is that aliens screw with earth’s physics to make them follow game mechanics—a process that kills the vast majority of earth’s population. The suggestion is that five or six thousand years ago, this is how the world functioned and for some reason that stopped. Now it’s back and demons have begun to populate the world. Three friends are camping when the event happens and they manage to survive character creation and their first encounter with a demon. Then they set about finding out what’s happened to their town.

This is an action-packed, fast-moving adventure which is frankly lots of fun. It mixes the need for the heroes to combine solid real-world tactics with game strategies. It captured and held my interest throughout the novel. The only thing I didn’t like is that dice are actually rolled when the characters try and use their skills. While it’s true that dice are rolled in RPGs, my friends and I always saw that as an approximation of the chance that our characters could perform an action. If we were actually trying to perform said action instead of pretending to while we sat around a table, the dice would be unnecessary. We would succeed or fail. I thought the dice were just a little too much RPG in the LitRPG, but other than that, I loved the book.

Goldenshield by J.R. Andrews

Goldenshield broke the mold on LitRPG novels. The heroes aren’t playing a game. Gerald is a deputy sheriff responding to a disturbance in a store when he encounters a strange old man who hits him and his friend with a staff. Both young men then wake up in a different—a world that is similar to their gaming universe with a few small but important differences. Gerald’s friend, Zeke, is excited by the new world ,but Gerald just wants to get back home. He doesn’t think that things in the “game” universe are important and he certainly doesn’t want to take any responsibility for what is happening around them.

As Gerald fights against accepting his new reality, he and Zeke learn they aren’t the only earth-people trapped here in the game-verse. And they learn that one really important game function doesn’t work in this universe. There is no resurrection or respawning. This solidifies Gerald’s commitment to getting back to reality, but unfortunately for him there are lots of more immediate problems in his way—local bandits, an invading army, and an usurper king.

J. R. Andrews has put together a very nice story here with lots of action, strong worldbuilding, and credible character growth. I thoroughly enjoyed it and am looking forward to the sequel.

Awaken Online: Catharsis by Travis Bagwell

One of my long-running complaints about LitRPGs is that while they all seem to start with a person in the real world living a crummy life that he or she wishes to escape, there is rarely any genuine synergy between the game experience and the real-life experience. We see character growth in the game, development of tactics, greater self-awareness, and often enhanced maturity, but that growth occurring in immersive game experiences rarely has any impact on the player’s real-life experiences. That’s not the case in Awaken Online: Catharsis. More than any other book which I have read in this subgenre, it consciously uses the gaming experience to influence how the player deals with life in the real world and it does so in a way that develops the plot in both game and life.

The book is a little bit slow getting started as it establishes just how crummy our protagonist’s, Jason’s, life really is, but once the game gets going the tension builds and the pages fly past. Jason gets expelled from school when the administrators side with a bully over him because the bully comes from wealth and Jason doesn’t. He seeks to escape his problems in an online game which is much more sophisticated than it first appears. We learn about this sophistication through a supplemental narrative at the beginning of each chapter. The game is run by an artificial intelligence which is out of control, making changes to the game rules, and demonstrating the ability to both access players’ memories and write onto their memories. But since there is money to be made, the company hides this from government regulators and starts the game anyway. Evidently they have never seen the movie, The Terminator.

In the game, Jason discovers that his nemesis Alex, is the hero of light, Alexion, who, because he was a beta player, has a ridiculously high level character. Jason is encouraged by NPCs to act on his desires (i.e. seek revenge and power) and become a necromancer. As he develops his skill he discovers that kills made by his zombies give him experience. He also discovers that his city is being betrayed by the nobles and the guards to Alexion’s kingdom, and so he decides to try and frustrate their plans. He takes his small horde of zombies and by using excellent tactics, is able to wipe out all the noble families in the city in one crazy night. His levels shoot skyward and he decides to take out the guards as well cleverly creating a zombie apocalypse and transforming the city into an undead metropolis called the Twilight Throne. This is big news in the online community and Alex/Alexion quickly swears to take down the undead setting the stage for the real conflict of the novel.

Awaken Online 2 Precipice by Travis Bagwell

The second book in the Awaken Online series has all of the things that made the first book so enjoyable. It focuses on an outcast protagonist who has to grow inside and outside of the game if he is to continue to hold his life together. The villain of the piece is a man everyone thinks is great but we, the reader, know to be a sociopath who is truly evil. This is the basic juxtaposition that makes this series work. The hero plays the villain in the game, but actually shows more basic humanity than the true villain, who plays a hero in the game even as he makes dastardly moves against his enemies. He’s the sort of person who takes game problems into the real world with no fear of consequence.

So our protagonist, Jason, has to grow quickly both in game power and real world savvy to survive to the end of the game. A real-world bounty has been placed on his game head and lots of self-righteous players are anxious to have some fun making some money hunting him down. Jason, for his part, seems to relish the role of villain, coming up with exciting strategies to stay one step ahead of the opposition. To help him he has recruited two friends, but he doesn’t know how to be a friend and it’s another area where he really has to work on real-world growth.

All that being said, this book was slower moving than the first as Bagwell never succeeds in making the breakthrough moments of the first book replicate in this sequel. In many ways I felt like we were just setting pieces in motion for the next book in the series—an idea that was reinforced by its cliffhanger ending.

The Savage Realms by Willard Black

On the surface, this book appears to have a lot in common with Ready Player One. Both novels are about a quest to find a treasure in an immersive online gaming environment but the similarities aren’t really even skin deep. In Ready Player One the hunt is a mystery that has people acting both in the game world and the real word, but in The Savage Realms, after a brief set up, all the action takes place within the game and takes the form of a classic fantasy quest.

The Savage Realms game is an unusually realistic gaming environment—so much so that it seems to steal a lot of the fun from the fantasy gaming experience. There doesn’t appear to be character levels. People learn skills the way they do in the real world. Injury and death is as painful as in the real world. To log out you have to travel to specific ports that might take weeks or months of journeying to reach and pirates attempt to kidnap characters who have just logged in to abuse and enslave them. The treasures in the game can be converted to money in the real world and this is facilitated by a banking feature. Frankly, the whole premise fascinated me, but the only reason for most people to be in the game appears to be that crappy as their game experience might be it is better than what most people are experiencing in the real world.

Killdozer by Cory Gaffner

Ever thought about going after the bad guys in a bulldozer? I hadn’t, but the premise looked to me to provide a nice twist on the traditional shoot them up novel—and it does. Hank is a very uncomplicated guy who sees things in black and white, good and evil. When an evil man uses his wealth and power to steal Hank’s livelihood out from under him, he decides to go after him in his bulldozer, which he soups up into a killdozer. That’s when things get just a little bit complicated.

Aliens from an intergalactic police force arrive and tell Hank that his straightforward sense of right and wrong qualifies him for their force—and with enlistment comes souped up super powers that includes enhancing the weapon of his choice. You guessed it! Hank chooses his kill dozer. These alien police officers are hunting demons (who enlist people into their ranks the same way the good guys do). The more bad guys Hank kills the stronger he will become. (The more good guys the bad guys kill, the stronger they will become.) You can imagine the rest. It’s a lot of fun and involves no heavy thinking.

I received this book free from Free Audiobook Codes.com in exchange for an honest review.

Team Newb by M. Helbig

I think a LitRPG novel works best when it mixes its action in the game with events in the real world. Usually this involves characters learning about themselves in the game and applying their new understanding to their real life problems, but M. Helbig has placed a great twist on this theme by having his main character essentially trying to find out why he was murdered and to get some justice for the crime.

Resolving this situation is not easy for Lucas because, let’s face it, he starts out as one really stupid player with no impulse control whatsoever. But as you would expect, he matures as the game is played which in practical terms means he gets smarter through a believable story arc. This shows up in his dealing with his murderer, but also in his interactions with other players in the game and in his ability to resolve the many problems he encounters in the game.

Other subplots also involve real world problems. One of the players is looking for his son who has been lost in the game while a different player has some strange interactions going on which appear to be connected to life outside of the digital realm. Lucas has to put a lot of the brain power he’s developing through playing into solving the mysteries that these two players bring to the game.

Which leads me to another place where Helbig excels. While he includes tons of damage counts and hit point checks in his prose, most of the important battles are not solved by in game skills but by clever tactics and problem solving. I suspect that if I were playing the game, this would annoy me, but as a reader it made for a much more enjoyable experience.

If you like LitRPGs and are looking for one that is both clever and humorous, you should give Team Newb a try. And if you prefer to read in audiobook format, you’re in for a very special treat, because Will Hahn has delivered another superbly theatrical performance.

Tusk and Blade by Lavelle Jackson

At first glance, Tusk and Blade is the story of Logan Sharpe, a man who attempted to commit suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge but ended up being rescued only to face the rest of his life as a quadriplegic. What the story really is, however, is the tale of Necro Redhammer, an orc chaos butcher in the game, Exodus Online. Necro’s tale is a pretty standard LitRPG adventure story wherein he learns the rules of the game, gains a bunch of levels, and kicks NPC butt. There are a few interesting twists. The orc society is an incredibly cruel one with very little by way of acts of compassion. That means that Logan is actually playing an “evil” character whose powers are enhanced by him personally feeling pain. He doesn’t come off nearly as evil as the actual bad guys, but Necro is by no means nice and the player seems to thrive on killing NPCs in the most brutal ways possible.

The more interesting storyline revolves around how Logan got into the game, but unfortunately it is dropped completely early on and never resurfaces. Facing a life as a quadriplegic, Logan becomes more suicidal than ever, but is totally unable to act on his despair. Enter a corporation with U.S. government military sponsorship that has secretly developed a totally realistic virtual reality system. They approach Logan and offer him a new life in their fantasy VR world. The catch? Logan will be uploaded into the system permanently and can’t return to his physical body. Naturally, this doesn’t seem like any kind of drawback to Logan considering his paralysis, so he consents without any understanding of why this arrangement might benefit the corporation and the U.S. government—and much to my disappointment, we never get even the slightest hint as to what those benefits would be. Once Logan enters the game there is no connection whatsoever to this initial, utterly fascinating, storyline.

This raises a tough question—why take the time to develop these extreme circumstances if they were to have no impact on the story? I didn’t have to have the complete answer in this first novel of the series, but it was a major disappointment that the “real world storyline” was completely dropped once Logan entered the game. It makes me wonder if the author even plans to continue it in the sequels—and if he doesn’t, Exodus Online will prove to be a very ordinary LitRPG.

Morgana by Nevin Iliev

Morgana is the fourth book in a LitRPG series called Everyone Loves Large Chests that follows the homicidal exploits of a mimic called Boxy. In the very funny first book, boxy starts to gain some basic intelligence when he successfully eats a first level adventurer. He then begins to develop skills and learns to explore his dungeon home all the while getting stronger and stronger.

In this fourth book, Iliev tries to refresh an idea that has gotten very stale in the preceding two novels. War is coming to the land and Boxy sees it as an opportunity to eat tasty humans and collect more shiny things. At the end of the last book, he advanced far enough to be able to change his race from mimic to doppelganger and this sets up a wonderful surprise in the novel. The other standout aspect of this book is a major military action that dominates the last 20% of the novel. Anyone who has tried large scale (i.e. tens of thousands of soldiers) military combat in their RPGs will appreciate the serious thought that Iliev put into this battle.

Unfortunately, the negatives far outweigh the positives this time around. The book is way too long for the amount of substance it provides. Forty percent of the pages could have been hacked out and no one would have noticed because nothing happens in them. I still like the overall concept of this series, but Iliev needs to streamline the text if he wants to get his adventure rolling again.

Teresa by Nevin Iliev

Iliev finds his stride again in his chronicle of the adventures of a mimic-turned-doppelganger named Boxy Morningwood. War continues to ravage the Republic and Boxy continues to use the conflict as a way of earning tremendous treasure. It’s the war more than any other aspect of the story that makes this book work. Iliev has imagined largescale combat in a world where just about everyone has at least a few levels and it works very well. It’s imaginative and made me think back to my own days running and playing in roleplaying games. He also does some interesting things with his evolving cast of characters. He uses their abilities in fascinating ways that often impressed me.

The best thing about the novel, however, was his introduction of an under society of doppelgangers running the criminal elements in the city. Boxy’s initial encounter with these villains was interesting but it is the promise of future problems that whets my appetite for more.

Iliev also deserves kudos for coming up with a credible explanation of how a goddess of Truth and Justice could end up being the patron of such an unjust and dishonest empire.

Mortimer by Nevin Iliev

After four books that had their good points but really hadn’t captured the magic of the first novel, Nevin Iliev has finally gotten his groove back. He did it by remembering just how monstrous Boxy Morningwood truly is and at the same time throwing two shocks that I never dreamed were coming. This novel is everything I look for in this series. It’s funny at times, packed with action, and filled with well-developed surprises. That being said, it’s not a book that you can start the series with. If you’re interested, you have to go back and start with Morningwood.

Earth Force by Shemer Kuznits

In Earth Force, Kuznits tries to imagine what would happen if the real world were turned into a video game. Everyone on the planet is transformed (unknowingly) into a video game character with the advanced healing we see in games and the ability to see each other’s levels. At the same time, some humans “warp” into monsters and begin killing and eating everyone else to become stronger. The novel focuses on a handful of people who figure out how to level up and start trying to defend the other survivors.

The basic plot is okay, but the new “game” that the survivors find themselves in doesn’t have the level of detail that Kuznits’ excellent Life Reset series has. Characters are leveling up but it’s harder for the reader to engage in their decisions because we just don’t have the degree of information Kuznits makes available in his other series. In addition to that, the dialogue is weak in this book and often feels childish. In the other series, the hero rarely talks to real people so this weakness didn’t become apparent, but it becomes a serious annoyance in this novel.

Overall, there is a lot of fun in trying to figure out the mechanics of this new world and how the characters will survive it. You can definitely imagine yourself playing this adventure and I suppose that is the point of the LitRPG subgenre.

Life Reset by Shemer Kuznits

This is a very fun novel. Oren, our protagonist is probably the most successful player in the history of New Era Online (NEO) when a glitch in the system permits some of his most trusted fellow players to betray him by transforming him into a first level goblin. All his levels and accumulated wealth are lost and he’s transported deep into unexplored regions of the world to begin again if he can. The traitors expect him to delete his character and start anew, permitting them to inherit some of his most powerful and lucrative in-game powers, but Oren decides instead to rebuild his character and get revenge upon them.

Life Reset: Environment vs Player by Shemer Kuznits

In this sequel to the very enjoyable Life Reset, Oren, Dread Totem of his monster community, Green Piece, has a new and serious challenge on the horizon—the player characters are coming after him. The same group of players who betrayed him in the first novel have figured out where he is and are coming to finish the stealing everything Oren has created in the game and author, Shemer Kuznits, has cleverly managed to make this a real world crisis in addition to a gaming one.

To understand this, we need to take a step back and look at a few unique features in this gaming environment. Because of the enormous popularity of the New Era Online (NEO) gaming system, many of the top players actually make a living in the real world off the game. The most important part of this real world income revolves around “Prime” skills which are owned by the player who first thinks to create them. So if your player has made a new spell it becomes a “Prime” skill which he can give to other players and many times the skills are sold to other players. When Oren’s “friends” betrayed him they were trying to steal from him dozens (or maybe more than dozens) of prime skills that allowed him to live a comfortable life in the real world based on his gaming. In addition, Oren had built the most successful guild in the game (the Manipulators) which also added to both his game and real world wealth. Without Oren managing the guild and making all of these prime skills available to his guild members, the Manipulators are falling apart and all of this wealth is about to be lost to the people who stabbed Oren in the back. So the bad guys have developed a plan to save themselves: find Oren in the game, destroy his new goblin town, kidnap him and torture him in game until he agrees to use all his prime skills for their benefit. They have figured out that Oren, because of a glitch in the system that occurred in book 1 can’t log out anymore and so could literally be tortured forever. Notice how smoothly Kuznits has taken an in game rivalry and bumped it up into serious real world evil.

To protect himself (and eventually get his own vengeance by destroying the Manipulators so that he breaks the wealth of the betrayers) Oren has to build up the power of his goblin/hobgoblin/ogre community. This is the heart of the book—Oren learning to manipulate the system like the pro he is to permit him to take relatively weak monsters and boost them to a power level that will let them best some very high level characters. Kuznits does this very well, but it’s basically what he did for the vast majority of the first book and that part of the plot didn’t hold my interest this time. Fortunately, he has added some new subplots which did keep me intrigued. Oren is in danger of going native—forgetting that he’s really a human and not a goblin. There are some new players joining the game as monsters and one of them is clearly working for the Manipulators. Oren needs these players help to defeat his old guild, but can’t trust them. Also, his patron demon/god who wants to escape to cause the apocalypse is getting more powerful and closer to breaking out of prison. Again, Oren needs the power this creature is feeding him, but every success that Oren achieves brings Armageddon closer to fruition.

There is a lot to like about this book and the last fifth or so is all devoted to a mighty battle that everyone who’s played a computer roleplaying game will love working their way through to see how Oren bests a far superior force of player characters. That being said, I found myself skimming through many sections in the middle where Oren was building up his town and NPCs. I realize these scenes were important to the overall plot, but I think Kuznits could have trimmed this section down quite a bit and we’d have had a tighter, more action-packed novel. That being said, the last chapter lays out a lot of plot threads that have me looking forward to book 3.

Heroically Challenged by P.T. McCordic

There are four things I really like about Heroically Challenged by P.T. McCordic. First is the world building. This is a story that really fits solidly in the LitRPG genre, but unlike most of those books it is not about a bunch of people playing a game (or trapped in a game). Instead it’s about people who live in a world where people can level up in a host of adventuring professions. McCordic actually found a way to make “ascending” make sense by having this new ability have entered the world alongside magic when the Blight started to devastate the land. Before this, there were no monsters, no magic, and no adventurers. Now, the new wizards of the world are trying to understand their newfound magic while the adventurers try and keep normal people alive.

Second, there’s an awful lot of humor in these pages. Most of it comes from the absurd situations they characters find themselves in, but a lot of it is generated by McCordic’s dry wit. It makes the whole book a lot of fun because you really don’t know what bizarre twist McCordic will inflict upon his helpless cast.

Third, the character Alyx was absolutely wonderful—so much so that I wish the book had started with his situation instead of that of the reluctant farmer, Erik. Erik’s not a bad guy, but he’s a little dry in the beginning where as Alyx has a gift for getting right into the middle of things from the moment he first appears on the page.

Finally, the thing that puts this book over the top is the absolute incompetence of the characters. They are the Stephanie Plumbs (inept bounty hunter from the Burg) of the fantasy world and their hopeless efforts added a lot to the overall humor of the story. Yet, at the same time, it was easy to empathize with them. They are all courageous, trying to do their part to save their world, but their inability to do even the simplest things without mishap makes their adventures priceless. To tell the truth, I wonder how many of us might find ourselves similarly challenged if we were forced to pick up a sword and try to chop a skeleton to pieces.

If you’re looking for something that takes a humorous look at the LitRPG genre, you should give Heroically Challenged a try. I know I’m looking forward to the sequel.

I received this book free from Voracious Readers Only in exchange for an honest review.

Ordinary Hero by Ellis Michaels

One of the things that separates out a good LitRPG novel from a poor one is if the gaming experience impacts the player in his/her real life. Ordinary Hero seems designed for that purpose as it takes place in a simulation of the characters’ world and initially they do not realize that they are playing a game.

The action is fairly straightforward, balanced between James (our hero) having as much sex with as many women as is humanly possible (or probably more than is humanly possible) and James getting into dangerous situations in his need to keep impressing the women as a hero. There wasn’t a lot of depth here, but I think that might have been on purpose. If the storyline had been much more complex, James probably didn’t have the goods to resolve it. Still, watching him stumble through his virtual environment, figure out he’s in a game, and decide to play (in many senses of the word) was entertaining.

Michaels had the good sense not to end the story when James defeated the big bad, but instead brought James back to the real world where he had to interact with people he knew in the game and think about what he wanted from his life. There’s actually room for a sequel here as the player who was the big bad is clearly very angry that an “ordinary” guy like James managed to defeat him. It’s also nice to see James using his experience to change his life.

I received this book from Free Audiobook Codes in exchange for an honest review.

Welcome to Probet: How to Avoid Death on a Daily Basis by V. Moody

Here’s a twist on the glut of books that have people from our world get stuck in a game environment where they have to advance levels so they don’t get killed. There are no levels or classes in V. Moody’s new series. There are no special skills magically imparted into people’s brains. There’s only plenty of monsters—each capable of killing people—and a world that thinks this is normal and needs help cleaning out the deadly beasts.

To make matters even more difficult, Moody’s heroes aren’t heroes. They aren’t jocks. They aren’t special forces soldiers with useful training for surviving in this new world. They aren’t even successful geeks—they’re the unsuccessful outcasts with no real athletic ability who also lack (as most of us would) a mindset that would help them survive in this environment.

Yet if they can’t adapt they will be killed—and therein lies the key to a very engaging adventure. For all the gamers out there who have wondered how they would do if they entered their fantasy world, this book gives you a much more realistic look than you ever imagined—and still manages to be quite entertaining.

The Last Physicist by Dominc Stal

I have mixed feeling regarding this novel. On the one hand it’s a fairly standard adventure story in which our hero, Will, has to learn to master his power to save a world. On this level, it’s a bit slow moving, but is still entertaining. It’s also a LitRPG in which Will learns to master his powers as if he’s in a game, guided by his AI (more on the AI later). This was quite well done, but isn’t exciting in and of itself. And while on some levels the author tried to make this about truly understanding the way magic works, it kept coming back to how many levels Will accumulated. On yet another level, it’s an interesting story about what AIs will do after the end of the world. I think that’s the tale that future stories in this series will illuminate more fully, but we meet at least three of them in this novel and they are by far the most interesting thing going on.

So why mixed feelings when each thread of the story was by itself entertaining? The novel as a whole never quite came together for me. In the first two chapters, the earth is destroyed and with it every person on it except our hero and it never felt real to me, perhaps because Will’s bouncy personality never really seemed to try to come to grips with what happened. I realize that the destruction of the earth was just a plot device to explain how a physicist got involved in a fantasy world, but if you’re going to include it, it needs to matter, and I never felt like it did. I also had a hard time liking Will. I did, eventually, but it took a while. Mostly he annoyed me for a great many chapters and that’s obviously not a great thing when he’s the hero of the story.

Wolf Mountain by Isaac Stone and Timothy Mayer

I believe that the best LitRPGs connect events in the real world to the game world, and that is one of the things that Stone and Mayer do very well in their novel, Wolf Mountain. The foundation of the story is not particularly original. A game company is testing out new technology and the protagonist, Vince, is hired to help test it. He is immersed in a game world and has to see if he can beat the system.

The game setting is a mountainous area of the U.S. during the 1920s—not a time period I’ve seen before in this type of book. The authors don’t bog the story down with countless repetitions of character sheet stats, but you never forget that this is in fact a game environment. As the action progresses, Vince becomes romantically interested in a well-developed NPC and after completing his employment becomes obsessed with learning how she was developed and whether or not she was based on a real-world individual. The game designers oppose his interest and then things get especially interesting as Vince begins to have problems differentiating between the game environment and the real world even though he is no longer attached to the equipment.

In many ways, Wolf Mountain is a set up for an even deeper mystery surrounding how the game was developed and what the company that owns it is trying to accomplish. That’s a tale worth telling.

I received this book from FreeAudiobookCodes.com in exchange for an honest review.

How to Defeat a Demon King in Ten Easy Steps by Andrew Rowe

I wasn’t too impressed with this novel. I recognize that it’s a parody of a video game, but it still needs to stand on its own as a story and I don’t think it did. As an LitRPG, it’s very weak. As a parody of Zelda, it might be better, but this didn’t make me want to try the Zelda franchise. The hero is clever, but nothing that happened really felt believable to me. I also expected (not sure why) for the book to be humorous and it wasn’t. Perhaps if you are a big Zelda fan you would feel differently.