288 pages
Published April 29, 2014 by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
NPCs is an interesting twist on the somewhat tired litrpg genre. The characters and settings are fun.
I started this just looking for something kind of amusing.
I'll be completely transparent here: I was not looking for much. A few cheap laughs, maybe, and a couple of hours of very light entertainment.
I did not expect it to become more than that.
It starts very slowly, and I did set it down early on because it seemed like it was going the obvious way with all the characters. I wasn't expecting the characters to actually realize that, though, and once they do it starts moving forward quickly.
Avoiding spoilers while writing this is tricky, because a lot of the things I like are straight spoilers and best enjoyed without knowing they are coming. Suffice it to say that the characters ended up a lot deeper than I was expecting, both the titular NPCs and a few of the players. The alternating between the two lead to some …
I started this just looking for something kind of amusing.
I'll be completely transparent here: I was not looking for much. A few cheap laughs, maybe, and a couple of hours of very light entertainment.
I did not expect it to become more than that.
It starts very slowly, and I did set it down early on because it seemed like it was going the obvious way with all the characters. I wasn't expecting the characters to actually realize that, though, and once they do it starts moving forward quickly.
Avoiding spoilers while writing this is tricky, because a lot of the things I like are straight spoilers and best enjoyed without knowing they are coming. Suffice it to say that the characters ended up a lot deeper than I was expecting, both the titular NPCs and a few of the players. The alternating between the two lead to some interesting concepts, and I was not expecting things to end the way they did or for certain connections to be formed.
This is extremely vague, ugh, and I hate that. Listen, if you like D&D at all, give this a shot. Push past the point where everyone chooses their classes and see if you like it then. I am going to be picking up the next one (thank you, Audible, for that horrifically money-intense sale you ran recently where I snagged the first three books all together on the cheap) and seeing where it goes, because despite the ending being a real ending (there is closure), there are a lot more questions I have about this world and I'm ready to see where our characters (on both sides of the table) go.
Very light read.
A rather simple D&D breaking the fourth wall trope.
I did like the way he payed against the stereotypes as the party members find their character types.
Entertaining fluff, with some interesting variations on a theme.
Amusing idea, reasonably executed. I've met many of these "adventurer"-types -- we called em "hack & slashers". I especially liked how the group tried to sort itself into character classes, but then found out during the first battle who really belonged to which class.
This was an interesting concept and well done. The combination of the characters in the other world and those in our world playing an RPG was different, and we (my younger son and I) could really get carried away by it. It was masterful the way the two worlds were combined, and the characters could be in both worlds – well, the ones from the RPG were – the main characters from the other world were NPC's who had converted themselves into real adventurers, much to their surprise and disbelief.
It was an interesting and amusing combination. Thumbs up!
I love how this book mixed the real world and the RPG worlds. It was really fun and well done. A quick read that I would highly recommend to anyone who spent any time playing D&D.
Meh
Fun, well-executed, witty, and thoroughly enjoyable. I've read a number of books in this new sub-genre, and this is the first one I would consider to be 5 stars.
If you haven't explored this interesting gamer-focused sub-genre yet, this would be a good place to start.
Put your Geek on.
Fun Fantasy book without the heavy character or landscape building.
Such a cool, geeky premise! However, the level of detail in the interactions got very boring. Gave up at 40%.
