“No killing Goblins.”
So reads the sign outside of The Wandering Inn, a small building run by a young woman named Erin Solstice. She serves pasta with sausage, blue fruit juice, and dead acid flies on request. And she comes from another world. Ours.
It’s a bad day when Erin finds herself transported to a fantastical world and nearly gets eaten by a Dragon. She doesn’t belong in a place where monster attacks are a fact of life, and where Humans are one species among many. But she must adapt to her new life. Or die.
In a dangerous world where magic is real and people can level up and gain classes, Erin Solstice must battle somewhat evil Goblins, deadly Rock Crabs, and hungry [Necromancers]. She is no warrior, no mage. Erin Solstice runs an inn.
She’s an [Innkeeper].
My Opinion: 974 pages, $2.99, Not Available On Kindle Unlimited
The Wandering Inn is a serial story that’s published online and collected together for novels. Because of the format, there isn’t always a cohesive plot throughout. Instead, you get breaks from the main series characters and their adventures for fascinating novella length story arcs with one-off characters that may become more later. This may annoy some readers who prefer the traditional three act structure, but I adore every single chapter as the storytelling is gripping and the short story breaks add so much great world building.
In this volume in particular I really enjoyed the [Doctor] story that imagined what it would be like to be a medical student sent to this fantasy RPG world. The character didn’t have magical healing powers, only her medical knowledge and her own version of the hippocratic oath and more practice on the wounded than she ever imagined. It was a great speculative story that combined the RPG skill gains with a WWI kind of war with streams of wounded and limited resources to save lives.
The other story arcs were well told and interesting, though I’ll admit that they didn’t connect up like I’d expected at the outset, at least not in this volume. But the returning characters, especially Erin, were still delightful reads and the other new characters were fascinating and did much to world build.
Overall, the story telling is great and I enjoyed every minute of my multi-day read.
Score: 8 out of 10
The Wandering Inn: Volume 3 - Part 1