“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.

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.)

Any recommendations for reading any of these?

Well, I am currently sitting in economy class about an hour away from Melbourne airport, on the final leg of a rather exhausting trek. Even though I have spent most of the last seven hours in some sort of daze while my body clock tries to catch up with Australian Eastern Standard time (and the fact that I have spent the last 28 hours either in an airport, or in the air – though in reality we left London Thursday morning and will arrive in Melbourne Friday evening, which makes it around 36 hours, though eight of those hours are technically missing hours – then again we did gain them on the way over, if it wasn't for the fact that six of those eight hours involved the plane flying up, dumping all of its fuel, flying back down, and then forcing us to change planes).

Anyway, I still had this one graphic novel to read, and fortunately in between snippets of sleep (I am too stingy to pay for anything more than economy class), I did manage to read it, not that it was a huge story. In fact it was just your basic fantasy novel in comic book form – a lone elf comes to the city and stumbles upon a dragon cult, and in the end they fight, and kill, a dragon. Okay, maybe that was a bit of a spoiler, but honesty, what to you expect from a fantasy story? Isn't that what happens in The Hobbit? The difference is that this story is done in comic book form (though I'm sure there is a comic book version of the Hobbit floating around somewhere).

One thing that I noticed though was something that C.S. Lewis touched on in the previous book that I read: Of This and Other Worlds: the idea of why the comic book is loathed so much as a form of literature. His suggestion is that it is loathed simply because it mixes two forms of art, and both of them tend to be pretty bad. Not only do you have what is in effect a play (the comic book artists tend to create a script prior to drawing the pictures), but you also have multiple drawings that go with the story, and act to explain what is happening. Actually, I have seen some comics based on Shakespeare plays, and while the story is basically Shakespeare, the art is anything but, and because the actual art is to bad then the book is dragged down with it (it is short of like a bad performance destroying a great play).

The other interesting thing is that like science-fiction it does take a while for comics to enter into the mainstream. This hasn't always been the case, particularly with the Francophone comics such as Tintin and Asterix. However putting them aside (particularly since I don't view the Francophone comics the same as I do the Anglophone), when many of us think of comics we usually think of superheroes, bad artwork, and things that children read (ignoring the fact that quite a lot of adults still enjoy comics). However, it is interesting that even then I tend look down on the comic book as a lesser form of literature, and while I have read some, I really have no desire to go out and pay money for any more (unless I am reviewing a comic book store).

Oh, and since it is set in Balder's Gate apparently there is a reference to the computer game of the same name in the form of Misnc the ranger and his miniature giant space hamster. The problem is that I played the game so long ago that I barely remember anything about the game, that is until the connection was pointed out to me. I sort of remember Minsc, but since, like books, I tend to only play a game once, an once finished I tend to forget all about it and go and do something else. I do know that the game had something to do with Balder's Gate, but then that is pretty obvious from the title.