TL;DR Review: Immediately relatable and engaging with a surprising amount of heart. Fun, fresh fantasy in the vein of Kings of the Wyld, The Dungeoneers, and Orconomics.
Synopsis:
A plucky underdog. A powerful necromancer. And the idiot heroes bent on murdering them.
Kobolds are supposed to run away—it’s what they’re best at. But Jack? Born with a club foot, he’s had to adapt. Resilient and clever, he clawed his way to respectability as majordomo of a premiere subterranean estate. He even found a father figure in the famed necromancer who owns the place.
Life was perfect… until a superband of overpowered do-gooders arrived bent on burglary and murder. These mercilessly righteous warriors of light cannot be beaten, or at least that’s how it looks on paper.
Jack must choose between survival and the people he loves… unless he can somehow defy the stats and find an unconventional solution.
If you like Terry Pratchett, J. Zachary Pike, or Nicholas Eames, you’ll love Majordomo. Buy now, before the price goes up or the murderhobos descend.
Full Review:
I’ll be honest: Majordomo had me hooked from the first page.
What’s not to love? A club-footed kobold serves as the majordomo to Nepherous the Necrotic, the most feared necromancer in the (very D&D-flavored) world, and is tasked with the upkeep of his estate—including all the traps, “evil” monsters, obstacles, and henchmen that make an adventuring party’s life challenging.
D&D fans will instantly get on board with this reversal; instead of talking about a company of heroes invading the evil necromancer’s lair, we look at the mid-level manager responsible for keeping that lair sufficiently challenging to those heroes.
Jack the kobold is a simple creature at first. He wants only to do a good job and to keep his necromancer boss from turning him into an undead in punishment for failure.
However, we quickly come to see there are a lot more layers to this little humanoid than we expected.
Like so many of us, he wrestles with a voice of condemnation and self-doubt—in his case, the voice of his father, who wanted to drown his “weakling” offspring at birth. Everything he does at first seems intended to spite that voice.
But when he returns home after a (semi) successful mission to recruit more guards, that’s when we see the real emotionally impactful element. Over his long years of service, Jack has come to regard his necromancer master as a replacement father figure—and, oddly, the necromancer has begun to see Jack as an adoptive, non-human son.
This is where the gut punches really begin to land fast and furious. Because, as with all living beings, time is proving cruel to the wicked necromancer. Age is slowly sapping his mind and strength, stealing his intellect, and leaving him as little more than a broken, confused, and scared husk of a man.
Through their few interactions, we see how much Jack and Nepherous have come to care for each other, and how hard it is for Jack to see the man he’s come to regard as a father slowly wasting away. For anyone who has watched a loved one losing themselves to Alzheimer’s—or even just age and disease—this is going to hit HARD.
Yes, the story has a great deal of sarcastic humor that brings to mind Kings of the Wyld and Orconomics, but it’s the heart behind this story and these characters that really makes it worth reading.
It’s a short, easy read—just 100 or so pages—and you won’t regret the time you spend limping around this world behind the eyes of Jack the murderous-yet-surprisingly-decent kobold.
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