Category: fiction

  • Book Recommendation: Critical Failures (Caverns and Creatures Book 1)

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    Tim and his friends find out the hard way that you shouldn’t question the game master, and you shouldn’t make fun of his cape.

    One minute, they’re drinking away the dreariness of their lives, escaping into a fantasy game and laughing their asses off. The next minute, they’re in a horse-drawn cart surrounded by soldiers pointing crossbows at them.

    Tim now has the voice and physique of a prepubescent girl. Dave finds that while he lost a foot or two in height, he somehow acquired a suit of armor and a badass beard. Julian’s ears have grown ridiculously long and pointy. And Cooper… well Cooper has gotten himself a set of tusks, a pair of clawed hands, and a bad case of the shits. He also finds that he’s carrying a bag with a human head in it – a head that he had chopped off when they were still just playing a game.

    Shit just got real, and if they want to survive, these four friends are going to have to tap into some baser instincts they didn’t even know existed in their fast-food and pizza delivery world.

    It’s fight, flight, or try to convince the people who are trying to kill them that they don’t really exist.

    Meanwhile, a sadistic game master sits back in the real world eating their fried chicken.


    Rude, crude, foul, crass, and course — exactly how I remember sessions of D&D going when I was younger. Not for those who object to profanity or scatological humor, but uproariously funny if you can deal with that. 🙂

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  • What I’m Reading: The Alchemy of Chaos: A Novel of Maradaine (Maradaine Novels)

    Veranix Calbert is The Thorn—the street vigilante-turned-legend—and a danger to Willem Fenmere, the drug kingpin of Dentonhill. Veranix is determined to stop Fenmere and the effitte drug trade, especially when he discovers that Fenmere is planning on using the Red Rabbits gang in his neighborhood. But Veranix is also a magic student at the University of Maradaine, and it’s exam week. With his academic career riding on his performance, there’s no time to go after Fenmere or the Red Rabbits. But when a series of pranks on campus grow deadly, it’s clear that someone has a vendetta against the university, and Veranix may be the only one who can stop them…

    Not indie, but reasonably priced and a good series. Maresca tells an entertaining story and has an ambitious plan for his world, with three series planned in it. I’ve read the first books in two of those series and now the second in the Thorn series and haven’t been disappointed.