Slave of Chu Kutall Review
Going on vacations without any net access and only an aging notebook that is good enough for typing but certainly not for gaming means you have a lot of time to do other things.
That includes vacations things like visiting sights, taking pictures - and of course gobbling down completely unreasonable amounts of food.
But for me it also includes reading. So before going away I got myself several books to consume while away.
So in the coming days and weeks I'll be posting some reviews of the books I have read in the order of my reading.
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Slave of Chu Kutall
by Michael McCloskey
Rated 5 out of 10 hulking orc brutes
I started with this book since the plot sounded rather engaging and I needed something that would thoroughly grab my attention while on the plane. I find flying incredibly boring but for whatever reason never manage to fall asleep.
The setup is this:
An orc slave (Nergal) escapes from a galley of the Nation of Chu Kutall (hence the name I guess) and swims to shore. Here he encounters a group of adventurers on their way to slay an evil monster. Since he doesn't have anything better to do and they offer food he joins them on their quest and proves quite an asset with his brute strength. So he sticks with them.
It is the first novel of the author and I must say it shows. He writes well enough when it comes to style and describing battles he is quite good. His vocabulary is rather limited though. There are only so many times you can read about the same huge orc arms, bulking with muscles before you get bored.
The real problem is that he doesn't have the slightest clue about actually telling a story.
The whole book is nothing more then a parade of single adventures loosely strung together by the overlying quest to slay some evil wizard which is completely blown out of proportion in importance.
Characterisation initially seems well done with character traits, physical descriptions and style of speech but quickly deteriorates since there is now character development at all and character interaction solely consists of them making plans on how to defeat this foe or solve that problem. They stay impersonal and "business like" the whole time.
Actually the whole book to me feels like the author is recounting the adventures of his role playing group - with his character being the orc Nergal.
There are typical archetypes of characters - the brute knight, the shining, intellectual, noble knight, the gentle priestess. There is great emphasize on them casting various spells, doing this or that kind of combat manoeuvre. They always find some kind of interesting loot when they have completed another little adventure.
At some point one of the knights gets critically hurt (I smell a botched roll of dice) and leaves the group and gets replaced by another character with similar abilities (player rolled a new character since the old one was disabled?). For a while the priestess is not with the group and them reappears rather suddenly and in-elegantly (player absent for a few game sessions and then dumped back into the action by the game master?).
There are also lots of loose ends that seem rather pointless but are recounted in detail as if they matter. Like the orc finding a talking mace, then getting rid of it again because it annoys him. But not before the mace has dropped various hints on a deeper background story (plot opening offered by the game master but discarded by the player?).
The ending is rather unsatisfying as well. The quest gets completed but that's it. There is no feeling of accomplishment or closure. And since there has been no character development and next to no relationship building between the characters it feels like the book could just as well continue.
That is not to say it is a bad book on a whole. The individual adventures are fun and diverse, the settings exotic and interesting. It is however quite disappointing that the author didn't do anything more interesting with the set up than "let them have an adventure".
I am sure it made a great role playing campaign and it could be used as a game supplement without having to tweak much again.
As an actual story however it fails.
The only real positive thing that sticks is the fabulous expression of "having the quick smarts" for when someone is really intelligent. Hubby loves that.














