March to Other Worlds Day 9 Critical Failures by Robert Bevan

March to Other Worlds Day 9 Critical Failures by Robert Bevan

For Day 9 of the March, I’d like to turn to the LitRPG subgenre. LitRPG stands for Literary Role Playing Game and it seems to have developed after gamers started writing a bit too exactly about their games. Now let’s face it, a lot of literature out there has been inspired by role playing games. My own short stories in the Miss Pandora Parson series and my fantasy series, Winterhaven, both had inspiration from role playing experiences. The big difference between LitRPGs and those sorts of books is that LitRPGs usually have either people actually playing the game or include the dice roles or computer RPG calculations as part of the narrative.

 

In Critical Failures, we start with a group of friends playing Creatures and Caverns with a guy they’ve just met—Mordred the Cavern Master. Mordred is a super geek who can’t deal with the constant joking and ribbing of this group of friends. (To be fair, they are totally irritating, but Mordred still seriously overreacts.) Unfortunately for the friends (actually, that may be unfair, I have played with people who would have loved for this to happen to them), Mordred has a set of magic dice which he uses to send the players into the gaming world for real. So on the most basic level, this story is typical of the genre—players become their characters. But there are some significant differences that made this one of the most enjoyable LitRPGs I’ve ever read.

 

First, the real-world bad guy continues to be a factor even after he dumps them into his world. He still has the powers of a Dungeon Master (well, technically a Cavern Master, but you know what I mean) and he’s set on making life miserable for those who annoyed him—but really only for those who annoyed him. There’s a first-time player who was civil and trying to keep the peace who he actually helps on occasion, which makes Mordred more complicated than a simple bad guy.

 

Second, even after getting transported into the game world, most of the players can’t stop fooling around and teasing each other. At times this seems crazy, but it really makes the whole book a lot of fun and strangely more realistic. On one level they just can’t take what’s happened to them seriously. Add in that two of the players have chosen races that normally hate each other which causes interesting problems with the NPCs and that Mordred has some problems to deal with in the real world when one of the player’s sister and her boyfriend show up looking for her brother and this just isn’t your typical LitRPG. Finally, the ending was a complete surprise to me. It’s just wonderfully done giving me a lot of hope for the next novel.

 

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