packbat | review: "Non-Player Character" by Veo Corva

"Non-Player Character" is a portal fantasy about an anxious neurodivergent person who is cajoled into joining their MMO friend's tabletop roleplaying group, and we kind of really love it? It is, like a lot of portal fantasies and adventure stories in general, very much about someone being pulled out of their familiar world, forced to deal with a new and terrifying situation, and discovering and developing new strengths in the course of rising to that challenge...

...and in this case, that actually starts before anyone is sucked into another dimension? Tar joining the Kin game is such a brave moment for them, and that ends up being enormously positive in their life before they and their group are handed a whole lot of magic and another entire world to try to navigate. It's a story about making friends, supporting each other, and saving people along the way.

It's also about disability and neurodivergence. It's about people having struggles because their brains and bodies can't do what needs doing on their own, and it's about people having friends who help them get through anyway. It's about having internalized negative stereotypes and being told how amazing they actually are. It's about finding ways to manage, no matter how weird.

It's about a group of marginalized queer people surviving and thriving. It's a kind of story we personally haven't read enough. We're glad we had a chance to read this one.

(p.s. In the course of writing "Non-Player Character", Corva accidentally wrote a sourcebook for Kin, the tabletop roleplaying game from the book, which we haven't yet played but could imagine ourselves running a game of. The flavor is very good, and we like how effectively it simplifies its mechanics by reusing systems.)