Wednesday, August 14, 2024

"Mythical Doorways" anthology

This is getting out of hand, now there are two four of them! Actually there's like 12 of these anthologies, but I've only read four. [EDIT: no, there's actually six.]

"Everwild" by J. M. Hackman: An orphan gets too old for foster care, then discovers both he and the girl he has a crush on are actually fairies. This one's fairly good.

"Well of Fate" by Savannah Jezowski: Y'all remember Ratatosk from the Norse myths? This is him.

"Jericho and the Magician's Daughter" by H. L. Burke: The magic system is imaginative. The story is okay.

"Dragon's Oath" by Katy Huth Jones: Some kid has a terrible crush on a girl whose dad is set against it. He overreacts and leaves the village entirely. Apparently some sort of prequel to some other stuff this author's written.

"The Hallway of Three Doors" by D. G. Driver: Feels like it stumbles into allegory territory, takes a long look, and then nopes out of there to go start a village instead.

"Door Number Four" by Bokerah Brumley: No relation to the previous story. This one's about trainee interdimensional animal rescuers.

"Threshold" by Laurie Lucking: A girl has to choose between living in fairyland or the real world. Not as depressing as it sounds.
 
"Idiot's Graveyard" by Arthur Daigle: Dana Illwind and Sorcerer Lord Jayden are baaaaaaaack! My favorite story in this collection.
 
"Cosmic Cravings" by AJ Bakke: A mouse wizard attempts to create a dimensional portal to Earth in order to replenish her supply of chocolate, heedless of the fact that creating dimensional portals is stupidly dangerous.
 
"Dragon Ward" by Jenelle Leanne Schmidt: A girl is being chased by an angry dragon, then they both get isekai'd.
 
"What Lies Ahead" by Laurie Lynch: An ancient Roman escaped slave uses time travel to... change absolutely nothing about the past.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. "Well of Fate", "Door Number Four", "Idiot's Graveyard", and "Cosmic Cravings" could all make fairly good videogames; I think "Well of Fate" would do quite well as an old-school text adventure. The others are either too character-based to have much player agency ("Everwild", "What Lies Ahead", "Dragon's Oath", and "Threshold"), too short ("Dragon Ward"), or too hard to translate effectively into mechanics ("The Hallway of Three Doors"). "Jericho and the Magician's Daughter" could do okay as a videogame, but I just don't like it enough to speculate much.


(Endnote: It appears this is the one where they stopped having objectionable content. Which is good.)

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