Occultober Day 12 Black Dawn by Nathan Ameye
Occultober Day 12 Black Dawn by Nathan Ameye
Video games have long experimented with the horror genre, so it’s not surprising that the Literary Role-Playing Game subgenre does the same. I was quite skeptical of the whole LitRPG concept when I first heard of it despite the fact that in college I wrote a novella (unpublished) that fits squarely into the category. Now I read a ton of them and many are very well done. My favorites tend to be those in which the experiences in the game world help the characters face and resolve their problems in the real world. Black Dawn takes that concept to the extreme by making the real world become the game world.
The premise of the story is that aliens screw with earth’s physics to make them follow game mechanics—a process that kills the vast majority of earth’s population. The suggestion is that five or six thousand years ago, this is how the world functioned and for some reason that stopped. Now it’s back and demons have begun to populate the world. Three friends are camping when the event happens and they manage to survive character creation and their first encounter with a demon. Then they set about finding out what’s happened to their town.
Okay, so the premise is definitely weak, but how else are you going to get game mechanics into modern day earth. On the positive side, this is an action-packed, fast-moving adventure which is frankly lots of fun. It mixes the need for the heroes to combine solid real-world tactics with game strategies. It captured and held my interest throughout the novel. The only thing I didn’t like is that dice are actually rolled when the characters try and use their skills. While it’s true that dice are rolled in RPGs, my friends and I always saw that as an approximation of the chance that our characters could perform an action. If we were actually trying to perform said action instead of pretending to while we sat around a table, the dice would be unnecessary. We would succeed or fail. I thought the dice were just a little too much RPG in the LitRPG, but other than that, I loved the book.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08...
