Review: Tavern Rats

Tavern Rats by Matt Youngmark
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Funny" fantasy often fails for me, because it tries much too hard to be funny, and sets out to achieve that using little more than silly names, tired genre tropes with minimal effort put into parodying them, often tedious prose, and occasionally awful verse. I found this book funny because it avoided all of those traps, and gave us the humour of an ill-equipped party of would-be adventurers consistently (but never quite fatally) failing to use their minimal and unreliable spellcasting abilities to quest for treasure. They keep getting into well-described scrapes out of sheer incompetence combined with terrible luck, and barely getting out of them by exerting maximum courage and ingenuity, and as a result the book worked as a story, apart from the humour, as well.

The main narrative is first-person, from a sorcerer who has learned 29 of the 30 known cantrips (deeming the 30th one completely useless), but no spells more powerful than that. She also loses most of her spellcasting supplies and notes early on, so she's even more limited, which serves as a further impetus to creativity. There's a secondary narrative from a bard, whose involvement in the story is unexplained (he's yet to appear in the main narrative), giving a more omniscient view of things, explaining lore and issues of which the main narrator was unaware. This is done in brief notes between the chapters, and I didn't find it intrusive.

The world is a fairly standard sword-and-sorcery world, heavily inspired by but not just copied from D&D. The setting is the Conquered Lands, so called because over a number of centuries they have been conquered by 22 consecutive factions: dragons, turtle mages, lich kings, elves (several times), humans (several times, from different places), a goblin/hobgoblin alliance, harpies... The most recent conquest, a couple of decades back, was by humans, and the main narrator is human, but was raised by orcs, so she can converse with the orc summoner in the party in his own language. This is convenient for them, since his Common isn't great, but inconvenient for the rest of the party, a scary dark elf witch with minimal spells and a probable druid, who's concerningly vague about what he can actually do. The sorcerer narrator has come across what she believes is the location of an ancient, valuable scroll, which she needs to get in order to pay her back tuition at the sorcery school. She attempts to hire a competent party, but they just take the quest and exclude her, so she has to race them to the location with the above party of incompetent misfits.

This doesn't go well.

It's fairly well edited, with few of the common errors I see almost every contemporary author making, though it has a few words missed out of sentences and the like.

Unlike the party it follows, it's much more competent than average, and I look forward to getting hold of the sequel.

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