Games Based Novels

Like many people I originally started reading fantasy as a kid because of novels based on video games and role playing games. These are a great launching pad for the younger crowd to get introduced to the genre because these books tend to be relatively short, usually around three hundred pages or less, have simplistic story lines that are resolved in a single novel, and generally have themes and lessons that are easy to digest. Unfortunately they tend to lose their appeal as the reader moves on to bigger authors and more serious fantasy series. The previously positive attributes turn to negatives as the mandatory low page counts imposed by the manufacturers of the games mean that characters are not given enough time to be fully fleshed out, leading to ambivalence on the part of the readers. Who cares if a character I've known for a measly hundred pages meets his final demise? I haven't gotten in that character's head enough to know whether I care about them or not. The simple themes and obvious good versus evil dichotomy become monotonous as book after book rehash the same ideas with new names and places.

Despite these problems there are still a few games based novels which manage to hold my attention and hold their own against more mature fantasy books. One such book is "The Gathering Dark" by Jeff Grubb, which is based on the Magic: The Gathering card game. Set long before the main storyline of the game when the world of Dominaria was gripped by a harsh ice age, it features heroes that are consistently fun to read about, villains that are multi-faceted, and writing that is more compelling than the average game based book. While all of these reasons on their own might be enough to give the book a shot, it's the social commentary that really sets The Gathering Dark apart from all the other books in the Magic series. It might be hard to believe that a book based on a fantasy card game could have anything even resembling thought provoking ideas about our society, but Jeff Grubb manages to pull it off by making parallels between several groups in the novel and prominent organizations in the real world, and he does it without being too heavy handed to boot.