The Questing Stones have come to Nowherested, and Evelia Greene is finally ready to receive her life's quest. Perhaps she'll be a great warrior, or a wealthy merchant, or a brilliant mage. Perhaps her quest is simply to live a quiet life, constantly honing a craft to the heights of perfection.
Or perhaps the Questing Stones will grant her the Legendary mission of popping over to the next village to pick up a loaf of bread.
Wouldn’t that be ridiculous?
Eve can’t even begin to guess how or why she’s come by such an absurd life goal, nor how a level 1 Messenger Girl is supposed to complete anything labeled as Legendary, but at least she can be sure of one thing. No matter how many wolves or goblins attack, no matter how many speeding tickets she racks up, no matter how many bakeries spontaneously combust as she steps into town, one way or another, Eve is going to get that gods-damned bread.
There just might be a few Side Quests along the way.
|This book contains game elements, good jokes, bad jokes, worse jokes, and language strong enough to lift weights. Please enjoy.|
My Opinion: 408 pages, $2.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited
This is a slice of life fantasy RPG story that reminded me of a tabletop D&D campaign. Mostly casual adventures with good RPG progress, a DM that tries to inject a plot, and just gives out cool rewards without worrying strict rules.
On the story side of things, it's pretty good. There’s regular action, good banter between characters, a little world building, and hints of plot. Mostly the story is slice of life, following the characters as they adventure. Nothing groundbreaking or epic, but good general adventuring.
While the story is entertaining, because of the way the game mechanics are built it often feels contrived. I want to be clear, that most of the rules are very well developed and you can tell the author took great care in developing, tracking, and following them. But there are some aspects that just felt like they were being used to push character and story development instead of existing as solid independent rules. The biggest mechanic being the class and quest systems that arbitrarily assign people tasks and classes based on their activities or sometimes not even that. It’s all chalked up to capricious gods or systems with a quirky sense of humor, but it ended up feeling like a DM was running a tabletop campaign and bending or creating rules, quests, and rewards to keep the campaign running and fun.
For example, all the group members eventually get rare or epic classes as part of their arcs. Or that the MC advances her quest (of getting a loaf of bread) while helping out her friend, even though her quest has nothing to do with him or his quest. Or that the characters unlock their classes through very random acts (ie: using a defensive ability offensively, beginning to heal an emotional wound) that felt less like they had earned power and more like the author just wanted to give them a cool class. There are plenty more examples, but it didn't make the story bad, just made me realize the game stuff, though it had lots of numbers, was ultimately more wand wavy than I liked and the powers the characters got felt less earned.
Overall, the slice of life story was still entertaining but I lost some enjoyment knowing that the game mechanics, to a degree, existed to advance the story and not as a hard set of rules I could count on or understand fully.
Score: 7.3 out of 10
This Quest is Broken! (This Trilogy is Broken (A Fantasy Litrpg Adventure) Book 1)