Fantasy Novel - 250 pages - 2006 / Paperback a present given to me by Colin
- 1 nod out of 5 -
You’ve all played the game blood bowl, right? You haven’t? Well then, welcome to the world of brutal, unforgiving sports in which two teams try to outscore – and out-kill – one another.
A novel based on a fictional board game might not sound too promising; but it gets worse. The characters are wooden and clichéd, the storyline chaotic and mixed (seemingly a first draft never re-visited for an edit) and errors abound throughout with the author actually mistaking characters! – if he doesn’t know what’s going on, what is the chance for the poor, unsuspecting reader?
The plot, for what it’s worth, details the adventures of Dunk Hoffnung, a down-and-out who is in search of fame and fortune; he is befriended by a halfling (hobbit to those outside the Gameworkshop bubble) who is a blood bowl agent. Before he knows it, Dunk is escorted into the world of carnage and mayhem, becoming a member of the Bad Bay Hackers, in which he plays an entire season of various ups and downs – to the general frustration of the reader.
Yet despite this all, I kept turning the pages. Admittedly, not to see what became of Dunk Hoffnung, but rather to read the landscape of tournaments, teams and cities that appear in the game of Blood Bowl itself. I wanted to hear about the Chaos Cup, the Reikland Reavers and Altdorf…. Okay, so Forbeck does a lousy job of describing all of these things, and he does a worse job at carrying the main character through 250 pages of story; but his output stands alone in attempting to fictionalise in a novel the blood bowl universe.
A novel based on a fictional board game might not sound too promising; but it gets worse. The characters are wooden and clichéd, the storyline chaotic and mixed (seemingly a first draft never re-visited for an edit) and errors abound throughout with the author actually mistaking characters! – if he doesn’t know what’s going on, what is the chance for the poor, unsuspecting reader?
The plot, for what it’s worth, details the adventures of Dunk Hoffnung, a down-and-out who is in search of fame and fortune; he is befriended by a halfling (hobbit to those outside the Gameworkshop bubble) who is a blood bowl agent. Before he knows it, Dunk is escorted into the world of carnage and mayhem, becoming a member of the Bad Bay Hackers, in which he plays an entire season of various ups and downs – to the general frustration of the reader.
Yet despite this all, I kept turning the pages. Admittedly, not to see what became of Dunk Hoffnung, but rather to read the landscape of tournaments, teams and cities that appear in the game of Blood Bowl itself. I wanted to hear about the Chaos Cup, the Reikland Reavers and Altdorf…. Okay, so Forbeck does a lousy job of describing all of these things, and he does a worse job at carrying the main character through 250 pages of story; but his output stands alone in attempting to fictionalise in a novel the blood bowl universe.
Blood Bowl is one in a trilogy (or quad-ilogy now – whilst there is a further addition of a more promising graphic novel) and despite the low nod score I’ve given this book, I will continue forth with Dunk Hoffnung’s adventures. After all, blood bowl is the game I know and love. For it, I would swim an ocean.
