WardenRed reviewed Aching God by Mike Shel (Iconoclasts)
None
4 stars
We all have our failings. Understanding one’s own is the measure of wisdom.
Reading this book was a lot like going on an epic D&D adventure: exciting, compeling, and lore-rich. Unfortunately, in a way the story stuck too close to the medum that inspired it. Tabletop campaigns and novels are both shapes that a story can take, but what works perfectly around the table can't always be perfectly translated on page. When you play a game like D&D, you expect lots of side quests and scenic detours and cool stuff that happens out of the blue, and then later maybe the DM will find a way to tie it into the larger story to make it even more epic, but really, it's not obligatory. A tabletop game is essentially an exercise in improvisation with dice. Yes, we GMs usually do some planning beforehand. We also know that no plan …
We all have our failings. Understanding one’s own is the measure of wisdom.
Reading this book was a lot like going on an epic D&D adventure: exciting, compeling, and lore-rich. Unfortunately, in a way the story stuck too close to the medum that inspired it. Tabletop campaigns and novels are both shapes that a story can take, but what works perfectly around the table can't always be perfectly translated on page. When you play a game like D&D, you expect lots of side quests and scenic detours and cool stuff that happens out of the blue, and then later maybe the DM will find a way to tie it into the larger story to make it even more epic, but really, it's not obligatory. A tabletop game is essentially an exercise in improvisation with dice. Yes, we GMs usually do some planning beforehand. We also know that no plan survives contacts with players and sometimes a random generator is a lot more useful during a session than a carefully laid out scenario. Books are somewhat different beasts. I do believe that a background in running games and desigining adventures can be immensely useful for writing novels, but it pays off to adapt the tools to a task, not use them according to the patterns set around the table.
Aching God inevitably reminded me of Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames. The premise is somewhat similar, after all. A guy who used to be a professional adventurer recieves news that his daughter (who has also taken up adventuring, making him worry for her well-being, and their relationship is tense for this and other reasons) is in danger, and this prompts him to take up his sword again and go on an epic quest. Of course, that's where similarities largely end; Kings of the Wyld is essentially a "bringing the band back together" story, while the MC of Aching God steps up as a leader of a merry band of younger adventurers. In Kings, the main quest involves storming a dangerous place to rescue someone, while God has the party travel to a dungeon of doom to return a cursed relic there in order to solve a problem. God is far more horror-ish than Kings, and so on, so forth. But it's still hard not to compare them, both because of the similarities in the premise and the overall D&D-ish feel.
As a potential campaign, Aching God kinda wins for me. The familiar tropes are given interesting twists. The main quest and the side quests are all fun and blend together in a beautiful landscape of adventure. The lore is wonderful and incredibly rich. There are great character-focused moments where an NPC steps up or an event happens specifcially to develop a PC's personality and character. The descriptions are vivid and nudge the PCs in exactly the right directions to look in so they can later look back at that one thing X sessions ago and go, "Whoa, foreshadowing ." Sometimes, there's absolute randomness in the middle of the page that is then skillfully tied back into the plot—the kind of plot that happens after the cool choices are made and the dice are rolled.
Note how I keep using D&D terminology. That's because it feels so much more natural for this story. When I read Kings of the Wyld, I didn't feel the need to think about it in tabletop terms at all. It was a novel. It worked as a novel. It was structured as a novel, had character and plot development happen in a way that's more fitting for novels than games, and tied several high concepts together using noveling tools. Aching God, for all the incredible excitment it provides, largely fails here. As a novel, it has quirky pacing, too many infodumps and a whole array of other peculiarities that aren't too hard to gloss over when you realize the medium the author is coming from, but they're still there.
It's a highly enjoyable book that has given me plenty of cool ideas for GMing. I thoroughly loved reading it. But I doubt I'll ever recommend it to anyone not coming from a tabletop background.
