“Dungeons and Dragons” is a role-playing fantasy play that provides various adventure-based fantasies and military formations. The “Eberron” is back with campaign settings formed in the fifth edition D & D. This campaign setting introduced just after the forgotten realms of the beloved.

I think I've mentioned I play Dungeons and Dragons and it's hard to be in that community without having heard of Critical Role. I'm still listening to campaign one so of course, I had to read Legends of Vox Machina when I saw it was available. 

I absolutely adored this graphic novel. For one thing, I really captured the spirit of Dungeons and Dragons. For example, Scanlan singing Queen even though the band wouldn't - or at least, shouldn't - exist in a mystical fantasy world. Or the quirky humor and problem-solving. Or the way combat worked, how we see everyone's turn. It read like an actual Initiative and that made it more fun to read. 

Additionally, I don't think you'd have to be a D&D player in order to enjoy this. It's a well set up fantasy world. The rules are clear, the characters engaging and realistic, and the problems are worth investing in. 

Final rating: 5/5 Where you're a player or just a curious reader, you'll enjoy this graphic novel.

Okay, not exactly book-related, but what kind of friend would I be if I didn't try?

Some dear friends of mine are working hard to make their dream a reality. Beginning August 12, you will be able to listen to Bard Time Stories: A D&D 5e Podcast. I know there are books based off of the lore of Dungeons and Dragons, so I figured, why not spread the word? If you or someone you know enjoys the time of entertainment Bard Time Stories will offer, be sure to tune in! Link is in the title!

Thank you. As you were. 

I assume this is set somewhere in England, based on the author's bio. It's written from the perspective of Emma, a 13 (or possibly 14?) year old girl who realizes that she was likely the last person to see her former best friend Abby before she disappeared. She reports their encounter to the police and is forced to think about a time in her life that she thought she'd left behind and that she desperately hopes no one at her new school will ever find out about. Although a part of her wants to try to continue with her life as normally as possible, she can't stop thinking and worrying about Abby, Abby's last words, and the events that eventually drove them apart.

This was aimed a bit younger than the YA I normally read, and some of my issues with it stemmed from the fact that I was too old for this book - definitely not the book's fault. Emma was concerned with how others viewed her in a way that made perfect sense for her age and experiences but that I found extremely frustrating. For example, back when she was friends with Abby, Emma loved sci-fi, fantasy, writing stories, and playing make-believe games in which she and Abby were adventurers fighting against an evil witch named Esmerelda. Some horrible bullying eventually led to her cutting herself off from Abby and attempting to completely remake herself, right down to her hobbies and interests (this isn't a spoiler - it comes up pretty early on). It struck me as a huge and emotionally draining amount of work for something that seemed likely to cause a new set of problems later on.

Although Emma's actions and thoughts often frustrated me, I could see where she was coming from. Every time she considered taking the route I wanted her to take - talking to an adult about her plans to find Abby, talking to her friends about the bullying she went through - something came up that made that route seem, to Emma, potentially more dangerous and/or difficult than the alternative.

This was a more realistic take on a "missing persons" mystery than I was expecting. Emma wasn't smarter than the cops, although she had knowledge, through her past connection with Abby, that turned out to be helpful. Also, there were no 13-year-olds battling adults in adrenaline-fueled climactic moments - instead, Emma mostly battled her own emotions and the reactions of some of Abby's friends.

I appreciated the scene between Emma and her friends near the end, and I liked the way the relationship between Emma and Abby's friends progressed, once I got past Emma and Sheila's horrifically awful first encounters. Unfortunately, one sore spot for me was the way Weatherly wrote about counseling. It wasn't so much Emma's reaction to the idea of it - horror and anger that her family thought worrying about Abby was crazy - but rather that her reaction was never really challenged. One character told Emma that she'd been to counseling before and that it wasn't what Emma thought. In the end, however, Emma's dad decided that it'd be better to just talk and listen as a family more. Readers were never shown that Emma's ideas about counseling were false.

All in all, this was pretty good, if occasionally frustrating and exhausting from an adult perspective. I did wonder how dated certain aspects were, though. This was originally published in 2004. The parental controls on Emma's internet seemed to be extremely strict - at one point, she mentioned that there was really only one site that she could go to that at all interested her. And is it still believable for that many parents and teens to be weirded out by teens who play Dungeons & Dragons and like sci-fi and fantasy?

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Imagine an entire manga series based on this idea, and you get Delicious in Dungeon, one of the series I tried out during my vacation.

An adventurer's sister gets eaten by a dragon. He wants to rescue her but has no money to buy food, so he finally has an excuse to try something he's been intrigued about for a long time: cooking and eating the monsters he kills. It's a foodie manga featuring fictional foods. Hopefully I can write up review posts of the first couple volumes soon.