As an old school pen & paper RPG player, mostly D&D and AD&D, the story concept presented here really caught my eye. Basically at the start of the book there is a GM running a D&D style game for a group of greedy and belligerent players. The GM has warned his players that the new game system that he is using attempts to be ultra-realistic and they must be extra careful; however, they do not heed his warnings and they find themselves all dead mere minutes into the game. In the game world a local group of NPCs notices that the adventurers are all dead and they fear being blamed for the deaths. So in an effort to protect their small village from the wrath of the King they decide to attempt to fulfill the adventurer's quest themselves. The story then transitions from our world into theirs.

NPCs are Non-Player Characters, and if you didn't know this already then this book is likely not targeted at you. The NPCs struggle to turn their limited experiences into the skills needed to be successful adventurers and here is where the fun starts. One of the NPCs has a history of being repeatedly kidnapped by goblins and subsequently rescued by adventurers. This made me smile because this concept could be taken from any old school D&D module, or even any modern MMO style game, and it is the life of many an NPC. This particular NPC is able to leverage her knowledge of the goblins to her advantage when the party later finds itself held prisoner in a goblin camp. This is when I knew Drew Hayes had a fun concept on his hands for this book and I expected there to be a lot of this throughout.

Unfortunately for me the RPG tropes were too few and far between and the story itself wound up being middle of the road. It does pick up towards the end when Hayes introduces another unique concept that ties the NPC world and our "real world" back together and that was enough to keep me feeling on the good side of mediocre about this one. This is ultimately an ok book for RPG fans but I would not recommend it for readers beyond that audience. This is the first book of a series and the second book, called Split the Party, explores what happens when a group of adventurers splits up, which is always a challenge for any game GM. I am not rushing into it at this point but I am also not opposed to giving it a go eventually.

For audiobook fans, Roger Wayne does a decent job as the narrator and gives each character a unique voice and personality.