The Eight-Bit Bard: A Retro LitRPG Adventure

by Aaron Rath

The evil sorcerer Ssor Ssorensen must have attended the "freeze them with perpetual winter" school of villainy, because when he and his minions conquered the town of Noresha, the first thing he did (after taking a nice, hot bath) was encase the city in ice. Then he laid out a thirteen-dungeon obstacle course challenge, filled with mind-twisting riddles, fiendish traps, and a bevy of the most monstrous guardians a conqueror's shoestring budget can afford, because that's what the best of the bad guys do.

Strife inevitably brings resistance. A band of heroes led by Yorel the paladin, calling themselves the Phoenix Dragons, are the front runners to challenge the sorcerer and put an end to his menace.

This is not their story. This is the story of Endrew the bard, a fallen hero and humiliated former Phoenix Dragon, who has to team up with a pack of misfits just to make it through the week. His companions include an untrained rogue, an unusually sophisticated half-orc mage, a misplaced pixie, a dwarven monk full of unlikely theories, and a halfling warrior who wants more than anything just to be tough. Endrew and his unlikely crew set their sights on surpassing the champions and saving the city from evil, but before they can do that they must surmount their shortcomings just to survive. For a mismatched group that can't even settle on a party name, that may be a tall order indeed.

Genres: Fantasy

264 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 23, 2015

About the author

Aaron has a degree in physics from Oberlin College but has spent most of his adult life playing with computers one way or another as a web developer, coder, graphic artist, tech support agent, and server admin. Over the years he has dabbled in more than thirty different jobs, including farm hand, dot-com vice president, carpenter's assistant, band manager, book editor, book store clerk, nuclear physicist, and video editor. Aaron has sold frisbees to dogs on the Internet, sold toys out of a guy's basement, and co-written a book about darts that he's pretty sure not a single person ever purchased or read.

He has moved more than thirty times, once threw a dart so that it pierced the tail end of another dart like Robin Hood, can hold his breath longer than four minutes, and one time dropped a penny that landed on edge and just stuck there without any apparent alien intervention.

Aaron enjoys disc golf and brewing his own beer. He lives on a mountainside near scenic Durango, Colorado, with his wife and two children. "Chicagoland" is his first published novel.

Reviews

[Chris Moyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clever wordplay, a fun story, and nostalgic dopamine hits make this a real page turner.

In the grand tradition of fantasy novels written out of games, this reminded me of several parts Ready Player One and several parts Gord the Rogue or Forgotten Realms. Unlike many of those, this tackles the game head-on, putting the protagonists smack dab in the middle of a computer role-playing game, with a lot of fun puzzles to solve with the characters and tongue in cheek jokes and references.

A+, would read again.

[Kalaivani · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are a gamer or closely related to one, you will know why it deserves the 5 stars and some more....

[Kris Schnee · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can kind of see what the appeal is supposed to be: LitRPG with the assumptions of an oldschool game in the sense of grid-based mazes and strict levels and respawning rules. There's also the unusual element that the main character is basically a former player-character who's been abandoned by the mysterious Player because the game's rules let the Player ditch party members and create new ones out of nowhere. That's interesting. But the style was trying to be clever in a way that repeatedly rubbed me the wrong way. I put it down in annoyance when I reached an early chapter title with a name like "Street Fighters and the Double Dragon". Other readers might appreciate the humor style more.

[Alberto Martín de Hijas · Rating 3 out of 5]

An entertaining book for readers with experience playing old CRPGs (especially The Bard's Tale) but I have my doubts that the reader who is not well versed in them will be just as amused.

[Danae]

Couldn't get into the story - too much clever word plays for my taste.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun gimmick, but it goes on for far too long. If it was half the length I would have absolutely loved it, but it gets rather repetitive and saggy in the middle. Still, I enjoyed it overall, and definitely recommend it to fans of old 80s/90s CRPGs.

[Clump · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was reasonably entertaining. Lots of fun references, and an interesting, on the ground perspective of D&D character life. It kind of bogs down as it goes along, though, and the secondary characters are really poorly developed.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of fun references to miscellaneous games, but could've been slightly shorter.