Critical Failures VI

Less moments of satire, still fun.

The following contains SPOILERS. It is a not very good summary of the story. I don't want to spend much time writing this.

The party were left jailed in cages floating over the empty air of a many miles high floating island known as the Moon of the Crescent Shadow. They manage to escape, but get separated in the process.

Cooper and Chad fall of the their cells into the desert. Ravenous, Julian's familiar, goes after them to make sure they are alright. They don't die, but are now stranded on their own. Luckily the desert grows food when the sand is stricken with water, and Cooper has the “flask of endless water”. They fight some Orcs, Cooper obtains an intelligent bloodthirsty axe, Naabi, which compels him to go back to her homeland and destroy the one who imprisioned her in the axe. Chad is useless, but he goes along and sometimes helps a little. They find that Naabi is a pixie queen, and the pixies she led them up to help them to defeat the dark lord, who they find after nearly dying in the hands of a group of assassin goblins. The dark lord was actually one of the avatars of Mordred, who nearly kills them as well, but they manage to capture him by putting a bag of shit in his head. See, they can't kill him, or else he will merge back with his other avatars and become even stronger. And the smell encourages him to leave this avatar's conscience, so he cannot use any spells.

The rest of the party is rescued. Dave and Captain Righteous follow up on a lead that a Wizard was selling the magical dice they need to go back home. They “convince” the wizard to help them, but Dave was infected by lycanthropy when he had eaten infected meat he found on the floor (he was 3 days without eating). Out of control, he turns on the Wizard and kill him. Maddened by the disease, he attack the rest of his friends from the Whore's Head Inn and flees when outnumbered. Lycanthropes are pariahs in the city, so he has to hide in the sewers, where he is capture by a group of other wererats.

Stacey and Julian go after the another lead on the dice. They start their search in the floating island, manage to get one after jerking off a dwarf in a flying bathtub. Then when they go for the other in the possession of another wizard, they are scammed of their own die, and ended up empty handed. They even need to flee from the island as guards are after them, so they jump off using an improvised bed sheet as a paraglider.

Tim is dead, and his sister Katheryn gather what is left of him, a pile of shit and some body parts (he was eaten by a baselisk), and asks for those who would follow her into a quest to resurrect him. Randy and Denise join her. That quest is a travel to the nearby temple in order to purchase a resurrect spell. Unfortunately that spell is hella expensive, and now they really do go out on a quest in order to obtain an artifact in the hands of a powerful sorceress, the Ice Queen. They risk their life fighting pirates in the sea, manage to acquire a boat for themselves, no small feat, and then through some disgusting cleverness and a little bit of luck, they kill the Ice Queen. The frozen island's ice now starts to melt and they quickly escape, returning back to the temple. However, the corpse in the pile of shit turns out it wasn't Tim at all.

The story ends when they realize Tim never died. They now need to find him and Dave, who has also gone rogue.

This book is heavily dependent on remembering the previous books, because it jumps right into the story without reminding the reader about how the characters got into the mess they're in. It has been so long between books that I wish the author had included some type of prologue. I think the concept of the books has been explored and nearly exhausted. This book ends abruptly. It's obvious that the author plans another book. I certainly hope the author doesn't try to drag this out to 20 volumes.