“The Eight-Bit Bard” by Aaron Rath
Jun. 12th, 2015 08:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroA fantasy novel set to the tune of classic computer role-playing games.
Endrew Aric, bard extraordinaire, makes a bad call during his adventures with the Phoenix Dragons in their fight against the Ssorceror Ssupreme, and ends up down on his luck and leading a ragtag bunch of misfits. Can they save their city from endless winter?
This is a crpg parody and hurricane of puns and references masquerading as a novel. I’m going to guess that the author is a fan of Peter David’s Sir Apropos series (or if not, he should be). For that matter, Order of the Stick is also clearly a favorite of the author, as the “characters within the system comment on it” style is clearly influenced by that.
I found out about this, incidentally, from the CRPG Addict blog, where the author is a commenter and apparently owed enough of his inspiration to that the Addict’s name (and several other commenters’ handles) appears in the book.
SPOILER WARNING:
I was slightly irritated by the setup and the way it didn’t figure into the ending—it was implied to me that the Brother was playing the misfit party, and that the rivalry between the two parties was an echo of the sibling rivalry between the two players. It seemed the obvious ending, then, that the Player gets the “false ending” of the game by beating the Ssorceror, but then the Brother figures out that you need to teleport to the backstage, and then complete another quest to win the game. To have Endrew and company “really” adventuring within the world of the game seemed…cheap, somehow? And raises a host of other questions about the world-building.
Overall: There are some works which are less inherently good or bad and more dependent on whether they were “for” you. This is specifically for crpg nerds with other generalized nerdy interests. (There are plenty of other video game references, and also movies, cartoons, Monty Python, etc.) If you have fond memories of playing Might & Magic or the Wizardry series, you’ll probably appreciate this. Otherwise, give it a miss. I was generally amused (and I usually enjoy a good game of “spot all the references”), though the only scene that actually made me laugh out loud involved an enchanted monk.
Endrew Aric, bard extraordinaire, makes a bad call during his adventures with the Phoenix Dragons in their fight against the Ssorceror Ssupreme, and ends up down on his luck and leading a ragtag bunch of misfits. Can they save their city from endless winter?
This is a crpg parody and hurricane of puns and references masquerading as a novel. I’m going to guess that the author is a fan of Peter David’s Sir Apropos series (or if not, he should be). For that matter, Order of the Stick is also clearly a favorite of the author, as the “characters within the system comment on it” style is clearly influenced by that.
I found out about this, incidentally, from the CRPG Addict blog, where the author is a commenter and apparently owed enough of his inspiration to that the Addict’s name (and several other commenters’ handles) appears in the book.
SPOILER WARNING:
I was slightly irritated by the setup and the way it didn’t figure into the ending—it was implied to me that the Brother was playing the misfit party, and that the rivalry between the two parties was an echo of the sibling rivalry between the two players. It seemed the obvious ending, then, that the Player gets the “false ending” of the game by beating the Ssorceror, but then the Brother figures out that you need to teleport to the backstage, and then complete another quest to win the game. To have Endrew and company “really” adventuring within the world of the game seemed…cheap, somehow? And raises a host of other questions about the world-building.
Overall: There are some works which are less inherently good or bad and more dependent on whether they were “for” you. This is specifically for crpg nerds with other generalized nerdy interests. (There are plenty of other video game references, and also movies, cartoons, Monty Python, etc.) If you have fond memories of playing Might & Magic or the Wizardry series, you’ll probably appreciate this. Otherwise, give it a miss. I was generally amused (and I usually enjoy a good game of “spot all the references”), though the only scene that actually made me laugh out loud involved an enchanted monk.
