Transcend

Travail Online #3

by Brian Simons

Coral is hungry. She's hungry for players to rise up and demand fair treatment from Travail Online. She's also just hungry, but affording food is tough when Travail's economy is collapsing.

In fact, the whole game is collapsing. The terrain is crumbling, strange mobs are turning innocent people into mutated beasts, and the CEO behind Travail Online keeps taking servers offline – despite the millions of players that still rely on the game for income.

Coral wants to rally players and overthrow the CEO, but there's a catch. He employs her parents. In an offshore facility. And he won't guarantee their safety unless Coral plays nice. Has she picked a boss fight she just can't win?

Meanwhile, Daniel struggles with his mother's gambling addiction, Sybil fights to keep Farah safe from Jack, and Sal keeps eating things he probably shouldn't, all while preparing for their inevitable battle with the elf queen at the helm of the game's most torturous content.

Ogres, drow, spiders, dwarves, elves, orcs, minotaurs, and a dragon with a dubious motivation. It's all in a day's work in Travail, where hard play makes fun work.

386 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 29, 2017

About the author

If Brian Simons were an action figure, he would come pre-equipped with a coffee cup jammed into one hand socket and an e-reader in the other. A former barista, corporate attorney, and health educator, Brian has finally started writing down the stories that have bottled up in his head.

Brian’s LitRPG stories are inspired by the never-too-many books and video games he has consumed his whole life. You may find him in a café near his Philadelphia home writing, reading, and worshiping a cup of sweet, sweet coffee.

Reviews

[Kristin Herzog · Rating 5 out of 5]

Writing the third book in a series can be challenging. Sometimes, series become less and less convincing with every book. Not this one.

I was highly anticipating Brian Simons´ new LitRPG-novel and I was not disappointed. Reading about a world that the reader knows to be hurtful to the characters makes him/her yell inside his/her head: When will they finally do something about it? Transcend is answering the reader´s questions by turning this fictional world into something even the characters, trying to hide from their reality, can hardly stand anymore. This alleged world of safety is threatening its players and the story is as exciting as ever. The characters are faced with serious challenges they have to constantly deliberate about and this gives the reader a chance to get to know them in a way he/she hasn´t before. I now feel like I have Coral all figured out – the way you would have a friend. In the second book of the series, I felt like the characters and I were growing apart but now it seems as if the bond between reader and protagonists could not be stronger. This development is not only astonishing, but a great achievement of the author as well. Brian Simons has – as I have said so repeatedly – a great style of writing. He has the ability to let this fictional world come to live and engage the reader in a way only very few authors can.

This book poses an ending to the series. Nevertheless, I hope the story will continue and Brian Simons will entertain us with a few more stories we will lose our minds in.

Rating

Travail Online: Transcend by Brian Simons is a wonderful third book in the series.

[Cassia · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars
I love this series so much. It's like a guilty pleasure without the guilt. The characters are so likable and distinct in everything. I hope we get to see more of Farah in the next one, and Blat of course. He is all kind of wonderful.
It was a 4 stars for me until the very end. I knew he was coming, I had no idea it was gonna be this way though, so that was a nice surprise!
Anyway I highly recommend it!