What if an NPC dismissed with contempt by the players of your role-playing game was to become an adventurer? A LitRPG adventure.
Ninetoes is a wizard, which is unusual for a hobgoblin, and more unusual still, he’s no longer an NPC.
The world of Adrenon is a game world and a twist of fate has made Ninetoes an Adventurer. With this new status comes access to power, magic and skills that his kind can rarely attain, but more, it is a chance to grow and become the centre of his own story.
In his first quest, among the ancient ruins of Kavralach, Ninetoes faces danger and intrigue. Failure will mean the destruction of his home and his people, for whom he now has the potential to become their champion.
Ninetoes must master the magic system of the game, advance as rapidly as he can, and find friends. For a wizard alone is vulnerable.
If he can prevail, the hobgoblin Adventurer might someday become the hero he needs to be.
My Opinion: 219 pages, $3.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
If you like the series NPCs, you may like this LitRPG story. It starts with a group of tabletop players getting ambushed by hobgoblins. One of the team refuses to heal the fallen members and the group breaks up. Another member, his healer dead, asks the DM if he can use the only hobgoblin that survived to roll a new character. The stat rolls aren’t great and the player chooses to roll something else, but the Character Sheet was filled out, even renaming the hobgoblin, our main character (MC), Ninetoes and was slipped back into the DMs paper.
In the hobgoblin’s fantasy world he wakes, weaker but smarter and it's revealed within the first 10% or so that Ninetoes has been transformed into an adventurer, that he has a literal character sheet he must protect and that trouble, fights, and adventures will follow him. But he'll also be able to do all the amazing things the adventurers do: Cast magic, amazing feats of strength, rapid healing. So, Ninetoes goes out into the world to search for answers and adventure.
On the game mechanics side of things, much of the early story is very fantasy since the normal people of this world don’t have access to the RPG stuff. Stats appear briefly at the beginning of the story when a player rolls for Ninetoes stat and you don’t see them again until the 23% mark when someone shows the MC how to read his character sheet and the reader sees it too with his stats, HP, level, skills, abilities, etc. From then on the game mechanics show up regularly as the MC trains, chooses a class, and figures out the limits of the system.
A few character issues kept the story from getting a better score. The MC, a hobgoblin, starts out the story in his own clan with a reasonable cultural background. Once he becomes an adventurer, the MC gains the ability to speak common, has increased intelligence, and interacts with a nearby human village. But it’s the MCs personality change and his knowledge of human behaviors that kinda stuck out as being untrue, with the MC interacting with humans like he’d always known how to do so and knew their customs. Also the towns folks treat the MC as an adventurer, with great respect and fairness, even though he’d done nothing to show that he was one. I just would have expected him, as a monster, to be treated as one. Especially since his clan had been hunting humans and raiding caravans at the start of the story.
Overall, once it gets to the RPG stuff it’s actually an interesting story that transforms a monster NPC into a player. There’s not much of a plot, just adventures he goes on or gets thrown into. But it also explores the skewed perception of the normal people of ‘Adventurers’ that visit their world.
Score: 7.5 out of 10