I’m jealous that you get to experience Will Wright’s Cradle series for the first time. I can only hope his new series will be just as good.
I was reading Drew Hayes’s Spells, Swords, & Stealth series recently but I’m having trouble getting invested in the fourth book. Actually, my enthusiasm for the series has been waning since the first book ended. The central conceit doesn’t feel as fresh and charming now that there are actual canon explanations for things.
Oh, it’s not the first time through. It’s such a great series. I think this is the third time. I don’t remember books very well, so I have to reread them when a new one comes out to remember the context.
Awe, that’s unfortunate. Was it the mystery that made it interesting for you?
Spells, Swords, & Stealth is a LitRPG where the main characters are actually NPCs who randomly pick up some adventurer gear. Their adventure is actually pretty entertaining, and (spoilers):
hidden stuff
at the very end of the first book it reaches out and touches the “real world”, kind of like an in-universe fourth wall break.
The B plot is a group of people in the “real world” who are actually playing the TTRPG (as their own characters, not as the NPCs mentioned above). This, to me, is far less interesting, in the same way that the Abaddon stuff was way less interesting than Lindon’s story in
Cradle. But whereas Suriel, Makiel, et al were still somewhat compelling, especially now that the series has concluded and its possible to see the full arc of their story, I found the “real world” in Spells, Swords, & Stealth to be kind of cringy to read because a lot of the human characters are overly-stereotyped “nerds”. It doesn’t help that the series doesn’t have the best writing to begin with.
Unfortunately as the series has gone on the “real world” stuff has begun to take up a larger share of the page count. Also, the plot has stopped basically dead in its tracks where I’m at in the fourth book to explain some of the mechanics of the fictional TTRPG, which is probably the worst thing an author can do in a LitRPG.
I’m jealous that you get to experience Will Wright’s Cradle series for the first time. I can only hope his new series will be just as good.
I was reading Drew Hayes’s Spells, Swords, & Stealth series recently but I’m having trouble getting invested in the fourth book. Actually, my enthusiasm for the series has been waning since the first book ended. The central conceit doesn’t feel as fresh and charming now that there are actual canon explanations for things.
Oh, it’s not the first time through. It’s such a great series. I think this is the third time. I don’t remember books very well, so I have to reread them when a new one comes out to remember the context.
Awe, that’s unfortunate. Was it the mystery that made it interesting for you?
Spells, Swords, & Stealth is a LitRPG where the main characters are actually NPCs who randomly pick up some adventurer gear. Their adventure is actually pretty entertaining, and (spoilers):
hidden stuff
at the very end of the first book it reaches out and touches the “real world”, kind of like an in-universe fourth wall break.
The B plot is a group of people in the “real world” who are actually playing the TTRPG (as their own characters, not as the NPCs mentioned above). This, to me, is far less interesting, in the same way that the Abaddon stuff was way less interesting than Lindon’s story in Cradle. But whereas Suriel, Makiel, et al were still somewhat compelling, especially now that the series has concluded and its possible to see the full arc of their story, I found the “real world” in Spells, Swords, & Stealth to be kind of cringy to read because a lot of the human characters are overly-stereotyped “nerds”. It doesn’t help that the series doesn’t have the best writing to begin with.
Unfortunately as the series has gone on the “real world” stuff has begun to take up a larger share of the page count. Also, the plot has stopped basically dead in its tracks where I’m at in the fourth book to explain some of the mechanics of the fictional TTRPG, which is probably the worst thing an author can do in a LitRPG.