2.5 stars

My friends are all reading other Mark Lawrence stuff and I was like "I know! I'll read this short thing!"

It was fine. I'll admit that I've never played D&D and I think there is some amount of being in on the joke and the culture and the love that informs this story. I was missing that piece and it made it so that the repeated references became too much for me. I was invested enough in finding out what was happening and how it would end, but I wasn't overly invested in the characters. There was no emotional connection for me.

It was interesting to me that in a story that requires a certain suspension of disbelief, it was some of the characters that felt the most unreal to me. The villain specifically felt dropped into this story from a different story. He didn't match with the rest of the characters.

The beginning of this story has some detailed scenes about a cancer diagnosis and chemotherapy. That kind of gets pushed to the background as the rest of the plot develops, but definite content warning for anyone who struggles with depictions of cancer in fiction.