Review: The Complete Guild of the Eternal Flame Box Set

The Complete Guild of the Eternal Flame Box Set by Talia Beckett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sometimes, a decent D&D-based sword-and-sorcery yarn with a bit of character depth is exactly what I'm in the mood for. This is one.

While it's clearly based on D&D (it's obvious, even if the author didn't outright say so), it makes the excellent choice to go the opposite of the obtrusive LitRPG route; rather than sticking all of the game mechanics into the story, the author has carefully kept them out entirely - no mention of spell slots, characters with non-strength-based and non-intelligence-based classes haven't obviously dumped strength or intelligence (the half-elf rogue is described as "burly"), and combat flows like novel combat rather than game combat. Armour reduces the damage done by a blow at one point, rather than D&D's binary hit/doesn't hit. It's not so much like a D&D game as it is a novel set in a D&D-like world, if the game aspects were ignored and it was treated just as a fantasy setting. Nor does it follow D&D all the time, though the characters' classes and even most of their subclasses are pretty clear; the ranger has no spells, for example, and magic sometimes works a bit differently, though I don't know what edition the author plays.

In terms of the plot and characters, I did expect the characters to start trusting each other with their backstories sooner than they did. The fourth book ends with the first of them confiding in one of the others, and it's only at the end of the fifth book that they all fully confide in each other - which does make a nice ending point, so I can see why the author timed it that way. We only got hints at the backstories prior to that point, which did provide intrigue, but we had to take it on faith that because of unspecified Bad Things that had happened in the past, these five adventurers had all individually decided to help others in order to atone for their previous bad decisions or actions that had hurt other people (and all happened to meet in a tavern in a town with a problem they could solve, but that's a genre trope, and I give it a pass). The characters are, in other words, noblebright, good-hearted people who will do what they can to help others, even risking their lives to do so.

The editing was rough in places, though I've seen much worse lately; there were a surprising number of missing closing quotation marks (and the occasional missing opening quotation mark), a few simple typos, and some homonym or vocabulary errors (refuting/disputing, too/two, knell/knoll, censor/censure, diffuse/defuse, horde/hoard, peaked/peeked, discrete/discreet, even sales/sails). In the first book, characters sometimes "reply" when there isn't a preceding line of dialog to reply to. Pronouns for the ranger's wolf companion and several other creatures, including human enemies, go back and forth between "it" and "he" rather than picking one and sticking with it. In a few places, a sentence degenerates into garble or changes grammatical direction in the middle, or an idiom gets mangled. It oddly uses metric measurements in a fantasy world, and then mixes them with traditional units, and then gets the conversion wrong. The west gate becomes the east gate at one point, and a period between one and two years has, a few pages later, shifted to between one and two months. Confusingly, the same pronoun is sometimes used for two different characters in the same sentence or adjacent ones, leading to a mental stutter and having to go back and parse the sentence again, and some modifiers dangle. It's below average; I generally see at least a couple of dozen errors in the average published book, from trad-pubs as well as indies (though indies sometimes make different mistakes), and this is almost twice that. But the author can write in the past tense, which isn't as widespread a skill as you'd expect, and nearly all the apostrophes and most of the commas are in the right places. It's scruffy, but wouldn't be hard to fix. Some readers won't notice, or care.

I think I know why there are so many issues: the author has a lot of books out, so is going for the reproductive strategy of a lot of offspring with small investment in each one, and probably doesn't spend much time on revision. I know that's economically preferable for some authors, but it does short-change the readers a bit. And it doesn't need to be a straight-up choice between quality and quantity, either; Lindsay Buroker and, even more so, Melissa McShane manage to produce a lot of books and still maintain high quality. (If you like this book, McShane's Company of Strangers series is similar, but with a more original world and much better editing.)

The story would normally place this in the Silver tier of my 2024 Best of the Year list, with the other solid, enjoyable books, but because the editing is distinctly below average I can only put it in Bronze, and I'd hesitate before picking up another book from the same author.

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