Layered on top of all the typical adventuring hijinks is The Bridge: a strange artifact that appears to be capable of influencing events in our world. Hayes does a nice, subtle job, shining the spotlight the weird way people run their RPG characters in these sorts of adventures. And where PC adventurers happily charge into battle (a battle that, at worst, would make them create new characters) the NPCs take a much more cautious approach to a challenge (and, hence, survive). Where they stand agog at it, adventurers/PCs are more than happy to many times that much on a slightly better set of armor. A simple magic item might be worth as much as several decades of wages for a farmer or guard. They are shocked by how much adventuring gear costs. While our heroes have been adventuring for a while, they still haven't gotten used to the adventuring lifestyle. In that way it reminded me of Rogues of the Republic, another fantasy series with a large ensemble cast.Įven though the series has gone beyond its initial conceit of NPCs caught up in a PC world, it has by no means left that behind. Over the course of three books it has been a pretty even split, but within books Hayes highlights a few of his characters and lets them shine. Instead of giving every character an equal amount of space in each book his treatment of page space is very organic. Hayes, thus far, has done a very nice job bring some characters to the front of action and letting others just do their thing in the background. Well, as you can guess from the title of this book, he gets his due this book.
One thing I noticed in the previous book, Split the Party, was that everyone in the NPC group got some degree of advancement in their abilities and skills except for the rogue. We are well beyond the simple "What is NPCs had to pretend to be PCs in a universe that follow RPG rules?" and are now emotionally invested in the characters and now have a fascinating cross-universe conspiracy of some sort. But Hayes has shown quite clearly that this series isn't a one trick pony. It would have been very easy for the the idea behind this book series to run out of steam. Great concept, fantastic characters, compelling plot, excellent character development, and a really fascinating universe. If I didn't know any better I would say that this book series ( Spells, Swords, & Stealth) was written specifically for my sensibilities.
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