Appendix Nova is me, reviewing stuff that isn’t games. I just thought it might be fun. But, I as with everything I do, I always use these things to give me game ideas, and so I’ll loop it back around to that eventually. So honestly, this is a little bit just me taking notes, so they’ll be brief. Oh, and there’ll be spoilers. I’ll talk about what I want, but I’ll try to be vague.

Paladins Grace is a fantasy novel by TJ Kingfisher that I picked up because it was free on Audible, which is my primary “reading” source these days. It’s a romance, about a pleasant fellow multiclassing as Berserker and Paladin and a perfumer he meets.

So, initially, Paladin’s Grace presents itself as a character study into the main character, Stephen, whose god dies in the initial paragraphs of the novel, leaving him heartbroken and desperate. He and the paladins that survived the god’s death are given refuge by the priests of the Rat, disliked by everyone (but honestly, they seem lovely and essential, I’m not entirely sure why they’re disliked when many of the other religions here seem to be filled with odious people). But it quickly becomes a pure romance, which was a pleasant surprise and then transforms into a courtroom drama, a murder mystery and to an action-packed climax.

I’ve never read anything else by TJ Kingfisher, so I’m not sure if there are clues in her other works, but because of the grounded, Stephen-focused opening, I had little to no idea that this effectively took place in the a faux Forgotten Realms until there was mention of Gnolls being part of the police force in the city it takes place in, who’re better at tracking than the humans on the force. And then a bunch of the descriptions clicked into place and I realised that the author just avoided outright labelling everyone as elves or dwarves or whatever, but that likely the descriptions weren’t as metaphorical as I’d assumed. Which honestly, was a pleasant surprise and made me enjoy the whole thing more.

The very modern, conversational tone is similar to the one I found really obtrusive in Fourth Wing, but here I found it quite charming, probably because it feels like a dime-store romance that takes place in the Forgotten Realms, and this suits it. I always bounced off regency romances because I just don’t dig the dialogue. These two are romantic comedy goofballs, with all the positives and negatives (but mostly positives) it entails.

Things that I’d pull out of this, to put in my games: I enjoy how they just talk about sex (at least in their internal monologues), the same way as we do in modern times. Part of the challenge for me in bringing romance into fantasy TTRPGs is that I always feel some kind of obligation to regency-it-up, which just feels like it takes romance off the table (I’m not Jane Austen, sorry, I can’t write that). But this is bawdy and in modern vernacular, and that’s a lot of fun.

I also like the basic twists on classic classes that make the main characters really compelling, particularly the unique relationship between berserker and paladin it represents. If I were doing some worldbuilding, I’d steal from that, I think, and give my gods the ability to give people with “curses” like rage and lycanthropy control over them, with the threat of betrayal of their god be to have them lose control. It’s lovely, and is such a compelling tension for the paladin, Stephen. Plays write into my classic post on Internal Conflicts, but also mechanises it in a way.

There’s also some neat world-building around the priesthood of the Rat in particular, which starts off as a footnote and becomes increasingly more compelling and important as time goes on. By the time I got to the end, I was of the increasing suspicion that the actual main character of this series (there’s more to come, which I’m interested to pick up) is Beartongue, the Bishop of the Rat in the city they’re in, who is definitely a main character, but initially seems like they’ll be minor. She gets the epilogue, as well.

Speaking of the epilogue, one thing I found both anticlimactic and appropriate thematically, is that our heroes don’t solve the primary problems at all, they just Romance. Beartongue and Zale (the solicitor at the trial) resolve the mystery at the end, and the courtroom drama, while the heroes have their romantic climax (pun intended), and the Evil Monster is never revealed at the end, but rather teased for a future book. This is all well and good, but it meant that 2/3 of the main plot threads weren’t resolved satisfactorily, and I don’t see our heroes returning in the second book, so it’ll probably be Beartongue or some of the other paladins in Stephen’s crew persuing that plot thread, I suspect.

That said, as I alluded to, the romance being the core was appropriate thematically, and that’s a really interesting contrast that I’m not sure how to translate into RPGs. Like, we like satisfying narrative conclusions in TRPGs, but I wonder how much a “stars and wishes” style safety mechanism would really benefit from “which plot lines do you want resolved?” addition.

Anyway, those’re my thoughts on Paladin’s Grace. It’s a good book, especially if you enjoy romance and high fantasy settings.

Idle Cartulary