{"id":12005,"date":"2024-12-17T11:10:40","date_gmt":"2024-12-17T11:10:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/?p=12005"},"modified":"2025-01-02T09:44:45","modified_gmt":"2025-01-02T09:44:45","slug":"reborn-as-the-first-boss-5-winterborn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/reborn-as-the-first-boss-5-winterborn\/","title":{"rendered":"REBORN as the FIRST BOSS #5 & Winterborn"},"content":{"rendered":"

The fifth<\/a> of Stuart Grosse<\/a>‘s Reborn as the First Boss<\/a> novellas is almost stand-alone, focusing as it does on the elimination of an inquisitor squad. In a way it comes across as filler… despite not being any worse than the earlier entries.<\/p>\n

Another series by the same author, albeit one of full-length novels, Winterborn<\/a> resembles the above series. The key distinction is that while that is a story with RPG elements, this is more a novelized Icewind Dale<\/a> campaign complete with positioning grids, fully transcribed dice rolls, and (in the later novels) hundreds of pages of character sheet.<\/p>\n

The first three books cover a relatively low-level scenario focused on werewolves with the evil protagonist being of the ‘self-centered’ variety rather than the ‘slaughtering innocents’ variety. Of particular note is that while sexual topics\/encounters come up from time to time, they don’t go into any detail. The second three then cover an epic-level campaign (following a time skip) and are much more like First Boss<\/em>, with explicit sex scenes and a shift toward conquest on a societal level.<\/p>\n

Overall I enjoyed the series quite a bit, with only two things in particular being annoying. The first is that the fifth book (Invader<\/em>) in general is by far the weakest. Both because that’s where the explicit sex starts spontaneously popping up and because there’s an entire chapter devoted to, of all things, FFXIV<\/a> fanfiction. The second annoyance is far more minor: We never see the reactions of the Dale tribes to any of her actions. While it’s fairly fitting for a D&D<\/a> campaign to kind of ignore the PC’s backstory… it feels like a loose end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The fifth of Stuart Grosse‘s Reborn as the First Boss novellas is almost stand-alone, focusing as it does on the elimination of an inquisitor squad. In a way it comes across as filler… despite not being any worse than the earlier entries. Another series by the same author, albeit one of full-length novels, Winterborn resembles the above series. The key distinction is that while that is a story with RPG elements, this is more a novelized Icewind Dale campaign complete with positioning grids, fully transcribed dice rolls, and (in the later novels) hundreds of pages of character sheet. The first three books cover a relatively low-level scenario focused on werewolves with the evil protagonist being of the ‘self-centered’ variety rather than the ‘slaughtering innocents’ variety. Of particular note is that while sexual topics\/encounters come up from time to time, they don’t go into any detail. The second three then cover an epic-level campaign (following a time skip) and are much more like First Boss, with explicit sex scenes and a shift toward conquest on a societal level. Overall I enjoyed the series quite a bit, with only two things in particular being annoying. The first is that the fifth book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[24,28,841,29,839,813,1022],"class_list":["post-12005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-related","tag-dungeons-dragons","tag-fantasy","tag-novella","tag-paranormal-romance","tag-reborn-as-the-first-boss","tag-stuart-grosse","tag-winterborn"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12005\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}