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    NPCs
    NPCs
    NPCs
    Audiobook7 hours

    NPCs

    Written by Drew Hayes

    Narrated by Roger Wayne

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    What happens when the haggling is done and the shops are closed? When the quest has been given, the steeds saddled, and the adventurers are off to their next encounter? They keep the world running, the food cooked, and the horses shoed, yet what adventurer has ever spared a thought or concern for the Non-Player Characters?

    In the town of Maplebark, four such NPCs settle in for a night of actively ignoring the adventurers drinking in the tavern when things go quickly and fatally awry. Once the dust settles, these four find themselves faced with an impossible choice: pretend to be adventurers undertaking a task of near-certain death or see their town and loved ones destroyed. Armed only with salvaged equipment, secondhand knowledge, and a secret that could get them killed, it will take all manner of miracles if they hope to pull off their charade. And even if they succeed, the deadliest part of their journey may well be what awaits them at its end.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 23, 2014
    ISBN9781494575281
    NPCs

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    Reviews for NPCs

    4.5/5

    411 ratings25 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Surprisingly good book from an author I hadn't heard of. well narrated as well.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Came here after listening to forging hephaestus and it looks like I have a new favorite author!

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This got me hooked,and I want more! Next book please!

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Wasn't sure what to expect from the description. But I found this well worth a listen. Concept is one I've not seen done quite this way before!

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      For and old gamer of AD&D they will love it

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Best... Paladin... EVER, I absolutely loved how the characters were portrayed and each one is interesting in their own ways. Hope there are more of these books out there.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Never played a tabletop Rpg before, but I still was 100% drawn in to this book. There wasn't a moment of disinterest. Very well written and a fun story. On to the next one!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Pretty good story and nice and uncommon setup to tell the story from the view of NPCs. Also to combine it to a table top rpg and „real players“ is just wonderful. I listend to all available parts and can recommend it to all that once in a lifetime played a table top rpg and if not I am sure you may give it a shoot! Enjoy the books as I did. Thanks for writing and publishing it. I am looking forward to read / listen more from Drew!
    • 4/5
      This was a delightful take on what the NPC's do when we're not looking. I love the twist near the beginning and what happened to the actual player characters.
    • 5/5
      This is my second time listening to the series. I think I enjoyed it even more than the first time. The characters are so alive! I love the humor and the storyline.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely the best audio book I have ever listened to. I have never enjoyed such fun, creative and likeable characters in a novel, much less one about DnD, or rather S, S and S. What could I possibly say? It's funny, smart, intense, and absolutely dripping with a living world in which the events take place in. Not to mention how the skilled reader helps the story come alive through his dramatic and humbly fitting voice acting. For your own sake, you should give this audio book a shot.
    • 4/5
      Loved character building and concept. Could be fleshed out.

      :)
    • 5/5
      I've listened to this book series multiple times, and no matter how many times i listen to it, I still find myself not only dying of laughter, but drawn into the story. Drew Hayes does such a great job juggling the plot, characters, and humor that I find myself coming back time and time again.
    • 5/5
      Pretty good. I was pleasantly surprised. Don't judge the cover. Nice story development, cool characters decent narration. Thanks
    • 3/5
      I'm not as big of a fan of this series so far as I was the vampire accountant but it's pretty entertaining at least. I'm going to continue on to book two for sure.
    • 5/5
      Fun listen, and a great idea for what could happening in the background of an actual campaign.
    • 3/5
      A nice diversion. Not great fiction, but a fun break from reality.
    • 5/5
      The start, the twist, the reversed troupes and the ending was crisps!.
    • 4/5
      Such fun! And slightly irreverent which is great. Nice narrator.
    • 5/5
      What does happen to game worlds when you have bad players? Usually not this, but it's a cool idea. I doubt the book would be as fun for someone who hasn't played a table-top rpg, but for someone who's played and enjoyed at least a few campaigns it was great. I listened to the audio and may be purchasing the sequels.
    • 5/5
      This was really great! It needed a bit of polish and could have stood to be longer to fill in some gaps in the story and to have a bit more occur. But the adventures of Thistle, Eric, Gabrielle & Grumph are great and I'm looking forward to reading the next one.
    • 3/5
      This is the first book in the Spells, Swords, and Stealth series, Right now there are four books out in this series. I was really excited to read this and ended up being somewhat disappointed in it. Everything about this is "fine" but not really the awesome satire I was expecting. I listened to this on audiobook and the audiobook was decent. The narration was pretty typical, I didn’t love it or hate it.This is a very basic swords and sorcery adventuring story. The twist of having NPCs be the adventurers looked like it was going to be fun initially but it ended up being kind of bland. The book bounces between our world (where people are playing the RPG) and the other world (where the RPG is real life for the NPCs). The bulk of the time is spent in the RPG world. I thought the transitions between the two were a bit jerky and hard to follow.The characters are fine. There is an initial mix-up where the NPCs try to take on stereotypical adventuring roles but then find out they are better suited to other roles, this was cute but predictable. The story is fine, our NPCs go on an adventure to save their town and end up dungeon delving for a rare magical artifact. Pretty much everything about this series was fine.Overall this was okay, but not great. Pretty much everything about this story was typical fantasy adventure, it was pretty underwhelming. I guess if you are interested in a straight-forward dungeon delving type of fantasy adventure you might like this. I personally don't plan on continuing with this series, everything about it was “eh” for me.
    • 5/5
      Completely spellbinding. I could not stop listening to this audiobook. This takes chiding D&D gamers who ignores the story to a whole new level.
    • 4/5
      One thing I learn going in to any new author, new series, or just new book, go in with no expectations. That way you can be either surprised or disappointed based on what you read. This book, definitely on the pleasantly surprised spectrum. The humor is great. The newbie player makes for an extra twist to the early introduction. I also enjoyed the shift in the expectations for what the characters are, instead of the expected. It definitely adds some interesting twists to the book. A Gnome paladin? Who's a former Minion? Sweet! Not sure I like the interruptions of the actual live action game with the NPC stories, though I hear former fellow players in each character there. And of course the power hungry nitwits ignoring the voice of reason. Once we've entered the final dungeon, we see the first CRITICAL failure. I won't even write what the epic D'oh! was. Oh yeah, that author and GM knows. This is a trope I've seen before, but the author seems to have handled it well. The actions of the NPCs are creating interesting twists and turns because of what these NPCs chose to do. And how the author is poking fun at the GM and other players. In a way, this feels a little like a sweet revenge against power twinks by the writer.This has been so fun, I'm half tempted to grab the next book in the series and just read them all back to back.
    • 2/5
      So this was a recommendation from a friend but unfortunately it didn't work for me. The book is obviously aimed at rpg gamers like myself, but bringing in the standard tropes of rpg games into a novel form just made it kind of lame. Throughout my life as a gamer and aspiring writer I have often said, "you can't just take a D&D game and make it into a novel", and I still stand by this. D&D games are made to be entertaining in a certain way and therefore often have to break the rules of good storytelling. From the other direction the pacing of a novel is a lot different than the pacing of a D&D game. This book had me very confused. There's a short chapter in the modern day real world with players and I was hoping it was going to be some kind of "different" setup that jumped back and forth between fantasy and real world games. Unfortunately the gamers were the worst kind of role-players. I was very worried that they would be the main characters of the story. Then they disappeared for more than half the book and I was SURE they wouldn't make a reappearance but they did. I just kept saying to myself "oh I guess it's going to be a normal fantasy novel" and "there's no way he's going to bring them back after half the book without them." He did. And it just made things really cheesy for me.One of the things I've always hated about MMO's is that it's totally unrealistic to me that there are a gazillion adventures running around casting spells and and fighting monsters around every corner.This book used that as a premise. So obviously I was not happy.I will say something nice about the book and it's really pretty huge. The characters were the most memorable characters I have read in a fantasy book in a VERY long time. They were fun, likable and unique. That is a feat in itself. If they just would have been put in a "normal" fantasy story I would have probably LOVED the book. That would give 1.5 stars but I'm not willing to give it 2 because the words connected with that are "it was ok" and for me it wasn't.