Misfits on the Borderlands - Read the Novel
'High' Fantasy that's more tokin' than Tolkien.
A Brief Introduction
Misfits on the Borderlands is a novel inspired by the very first Dungeons & Dragons characters I created when I was about 10 or 11 years old around 1980. Rolled up to play what is now considered a classic D&D module, The Keep on the Borderlands, these characters hung out with me for a few more formative years. In truth, their adventures, their stories, their lives, and successes, and failures, all stuck with me as much as those of any character from fiction or film. I remember the Owl Bear that killed 'Aragel', the first dragon (a young White Dragon) we tangled with, and being terrified - more so than any horror movie had scared me at the time - as we explored our first temple to dark forces and faced the undead. No jump scare like a D&D jump scare.
Yep, mine. I'm old.
The novel was born from a question I asked myself decades later: What happened to those characters? What happened to The Company? To Rocco the Rotten? To Dudley the Dwarf? To our thief, Billy the Bad?
(We were 10 years-old when we named these characters)
Perhaps The Company, after years of campaigning in wild woods, caves of chaos, and dragons’ dens, all the while successfully surviving on a civil war-torn continent, are now semi-retired (you may notice a lot of alliteration in D&D - comic books too, Peter Parker, Clark Kent, Captain America - this trend impacted some stylistic choices made for the novel). What happens to adventurers when they hit middle-age? Master Wizards? Little Lords? Rogues gone (mostly) good? This somewhat adult revisiting (and revising) of my never-forgotten heroes' lives follows their newest adventure. An old tragedy comes back to haunt them (literally) and takes them to the edges of the world in order to lay a long lost friend to rest ... or raise him from the dead ... or does he become their greatest enemy?
Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future ;)
Front Matter &c.
For information on the author, more about the the novel's history, structural and stylistic choices, 'turn-based-narration', a love for alliteration, and other peculiarities about the book, please head here: Front Matter.
Who's Who in Gaearth?
For a partial list and slowly increasing information on PCs, NPC,s BBEGs, BEGs, lilBs, and Deities & Demigods, please click here.
Where's What in Gaearth (and beyond!)?
For maps and details on the many places we'll go to on Gaearth (and maybe some places not exactly 'on' Gaearth), please check out The Atlas.