"D&D Dungeon Club: Roll Call", story by Molly Knox Ostertag, art by Xanthe Bouma

I picked this up off the library shelves because why not? It's not like it's especially long, and the worst-case scenario is... probably what happened with Dungeon Academy: No Humans Allowed, honestly. And the art is by one of the people who worked on Five Worlds, so that always inclines me favorably toward a book.

 

Thankfully, this book was far better than DA:NHA. Admittedly, that's a low bar, but the bar being low doesn't mean you didn't jump high. Does that make sense? No? Maybe?

Anyway, this is your classic "loner gets friends" story. Most of it takes place outside the characters' D&D game, but the loner getting friends is mirrored in the game. The red guy with horns on the cover is the main character's D&D character. His name is Sir Corius, and he has a long-lost sister named Corinth.

Yes.

(The main character is the girl in the lower left corner.)

 

There's Drama! when the guy in the lower right corner gets added to the Dungeons & Dragons group that was formerly inhabited solely by Jess (lower left corner girl) and Olivia (the one in the middle with the yellow shirt). Jess (and by extension, Sir Corius) thinks this is a terrible idea. And so, midway through the book, we have the obligatory "main character decides she doesn't need any of this and accidentally-but-kinda-intentionally ruins something someone else cares about" scene, with Sir Corius letting lower right corner guy's character |fall off a cliff into a river of acid|.

 

They left the possibility of a sequel open, which I appreciated, and not just because I like Xanthe Bouma's art. For most of this book (and Five Worlds, for that matter) the art was just good art, but there were a couple spots that looked a lot like parts of Five Worlds. (Did I mention the art is good?)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A hard T for {T or so an antagonist casually saying "You know he's gay, right?" about lower right corner guy, who I'm pretty sure isn't. It's just in one spot and would be pretty easy to censor out if you had your own copy, but it bugged me}. (That's a content warning tag, by the way; see the "Spoiler tag explanation" page at the top for how those work.)

I'm going to give this... 3 stars. It would be 4, except that the thing I put in the content warning tag automatically drops any book a star or so. (I might get this book myself, in which case I would censor the thing and like the book better.

(Endnote: Somewhere in the middle of the book, the two players in Olivia's campaign [but mostly Jess] dramatically derail the story. I've run games, and I've had that happen, and I responded in pretty much the same way that Olivia did: end the session so I can figure out where to go from here.)