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.