Evelina | AvalinahsBooks's Reviews > Critical Failures

I'm torn about this book. The adventure was good. But the horrible taste, jokes and general mysogyny and casual homophobia was terrible. So it's annoying, cause I want to give three stars for the adventure itself, but I absolutely don't want to give anything higher than two for the nasty taste it leaves in your mouth. Just as soon as you get into the adventure, one of the shit for brains characters says something like "oh, like how I mounted your mother last night" or "I think I just came" as they're being healed, and you just want to throw your e-reader across the room.

The main characters are a bunch of rude, homophobic and immature incels. And I don't know if they're written to be that way cause that's the author's sense of humor, or what. But most of the book is really disgusting and quite offensive. The author is even specifically trying to appear to be un-racist by having the characters quibble about saying racist stuff, and yet it still comes across pretty much even more racist because of that. Incredible feat right there, didn't even know it could be done. 🤦🏻‍♀️ It's kind of like how people say shit like "but you're not like the others of your kind" and think that makes them look like the good guys, except in reality it's the complete opposite. Dude, making your character "ashamed" of themselves after saying some racist shit about Jews really doesn't make you look any better. Anyway, the rest of it is just narrating them essentially play D&D.

The funniest thing is that it would have been okay if only it stopped with all the dumb yo momma or fart jokes, or stopped making comparisons like "running like a coked up hooker from a crime scene", or how "gay" someone's name or clothes were. Seriously... Maybe it was just written for thirteen year old boys, I don't know.

There were some positive bits to the book. Despite "C&C" not being quite D&D, it still retains a lot of the same ideas and principles. And they're explained well, so if you're a player who's just started playing and is curious, it could be educational about gameplay, roleplay and some other ways the game works. It also explains the concept of meta dialogue pretty well. I even wanted to raise it to two stars because of this, but then it objectified the only woman in the book some more, and I decided that no way is this getting an extra star. And then it said that thing about Jews, so there was no way back.

By the way, I play D&D, and so do a lot of my friends. And this stereotype of "only disgusting male incels who wear silly capes play it" is dumb and pretty outdated. Get a grip, Critical Role are like in the top ten earners on Twitch, and they're pretty damn cool and very decent people.

If you want to read about D&D style adventures, I would rather recommend any of the books by D.H. Willison. The series in question starts with this one: Harpyness is Only Skin Deep, but my personal favorite is this one: Hazelhearth Hires Heroes.