Mogworld



The first novel from Caustic Critic Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, famous for his online Video Game critque series Zero Punctuation, introduces us to the world within a popular Fantasy-themed online MMORPG (basically World of Warcraft in all but name). There, the NPCs go about their daily lives, unaware that some of the people among them - thought to suffer from a strange syndrome - are player characters controlled by beings from another universe: us.

It's the story of Jim, a minor character in the game, who dies when an army attacks his magic school only to be resurrected sixty years later by a "rogue necromancer" named Lord Dreadgrave, and now, all he wants is to find a way to die again, preferably for good this time, which is not an easy thing to do, since death seems only seems to be a temporary state in Mogworld. In his quest, he's accompanied by a pair of other undead (an airheaded girl named Meryl and a self-righteous priest named Thaddeus) and the inept thief Slippery John - whether he likes it or not.

Not only has the flood of preorders meant that the success of the book is even more inevitable than it already has been, but it also kicked off the branch of Dark Horse Comics known as Dark Horse books, who are also publishing books based off Penny Arcade, Mass Effect, and The Guild. As Yahtzee has said in response to a question on Twitter, Mogworld is the first book published by Dark Horse Books.

""Knocking on your door at all hours of the day and night, wanting to rummage through your drawers for potions and loose change.""
 * Aerith and Bob
 * Affably Evil: Baron Civious has been cultivating a image of being a cool Evil Overlord with a booming voice, but behind the scenes, he is more of a Dark Is Not Evil guy who spends most of his time bickering with his wife.
 * Lord Dreadgrave also falls under this trope. He ressurects the dead as sentient zombies to serve as his minions in his evil doom fortress. However, he pays them fairly, listens to their feedback, and strives to make their working conditions more comfortable. In short, he is a model employer. Even the residents of the nearby villages welcome his weekly plundering raids because it keeps their construction industries in business, and seem to get along well with Dreadgrave's minions.
 * A God Am I:
 * And I Must Scream: Jim is afraid having his body destroyed will lead to this, as he would be a sentient pile of ash unable to move or communicate with the world.
 * Awesome McCoolname: Lord Brutus Dreadgrave, Baron Carnax Winchester Civious
 * Badass Preacher: Thaddeus. Partially subverted
 * Big Bad:
 * Book Ends: The book starts with Jim being killed in front on his magic school.
 * Brand X: the Mogworld game is basically World of Warcraft with the name changed.
 * Brawn Hilda: Cap'n Scar has shades of this.
 * Capital City: Lolede City
 * Completely Missing the Point: For comical effect, a lot of reviews of the book treat the book with the expectations of a game, completely misunderstanding how it isn't interactive..
 * Chekhov's Gun: Jim describes climbing the stairs as a newly-risen zombie as being akin to climbing Mount Murdercruel. Guess where Jim has to go in the final act of the story?
 * Crapsack World: Already has shades of this following The Infusion, due to stagnation.
 * Crazy Prepared: Slippery John
 * Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass:
 * Also
 * Dark Is Not Evil: Odd case. Baron Civious seemed to be evil in the past and possibly still is now (I think the legion of tortured souls of the damned in his battle aura gives it away), but at the time of the story
 * Deadpan Snarker: Jim, who at one point claims in narration that actually being dead makes you even better at it. Also Don, the programmer overseeing the Mogworld project and Mr. Bowg, who is also The Stoic.
 * Death Is Cheap: And how cheap it is! Anyone who dies, for any reason, finds themselves instantly brought back to life at the nearest church, where they are provided with a bathrobe and must run back to their corpse to get back whatever items they were wearing. Incidentally, this has the side effect of various churches vying with each other for the best (read: most deadly) locations.
 * Death Seeker: Jim, although he's more a deletion seeker.
 * Deconstruction: Of the conventions of MMORPGs.
 * The Ditz: Meryl
 * The Dragon: Barry
 * Earn Your Happy Ending:
 * Easter Egg: At one point the book contains a fragment of a YouTube URL. The link works, and it's part of Yahtzee's Let's Play for Flashback.
 * Appropriately, it's a clip of two NPCs killing one another.
 * Elves vs. Dwarves: Averted, as Mr. Wonderful (an Elf) and Bowg (a Dwarf) are partners.
 * Embarrassing Last Name: Jim's full name,.
 * Everyone Is Satan in Hell: In-Universe: The priest, Thaddeus, to the point where Jim gets...irritated.
 * Everythings Better With Bunnies: As a consequence of Jim's Bunnymorph spell.
 * Evilly Affable: Mr. Wonderful. It's when that he really starts to grow on you.
 * Evil Overlord: Baron Civious is supposed be one, but is it just in a theatrical sense. Also  and
 * Also Lord Dreadgrave, who seemed to hold a friendly rivalry with Civious.
 * Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Mogworld stands for "Massive Online Game World."
 * Fake Ultimate Hero: Baron Civious, not necessarily because he's weak,
 * Fridge Logic: Jim is missing his nose, and says that because of this he cannot smell. Yet at other times in the story, he describes from first-person the smell of a scene. How does he do that?
 * Gainax Ending:
 * Game Breaker: An In-Universe example:
 * Go Mad from the Revelation:
 * Guile Hero: Jim leans this way sometimes.
 * Heel Face Turn:  Although how much of a Heel Face Turn this was will vary when you consider he
 * Hidden Depths: Toward the end of the book
 * Jim lampshades this himself
 * Holier Than Thou: The religious figures who appear in the story all have varying degrees of nastiness. Thaddeus the zombified priest is a delusional prat who constantly insults his fellow zombies, an early Youth Group from a different religion destroys a rival church to steal its business and Barry the Vicar
 * I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: Mount Murdercruel, the Malevolands, Greydoom Valley
 * I Love the Dead: Slippery John's "wife"  Although technically she's still alive, most of the other characters view her as nothing more than a corpse.
 * It straddles a thin line between Dude, She's Like, in a Coma and I Love the Dead, if you want to get technical. Most of the other characters don't seem to care which side  falls on - they see it as creepy and very disturbing.
 * Averted with the zombies themselves. It's pointed out early in the book that they could never have sex with anyone- even prostitutes would have to be totally blind and have some degree of mental illness to try it.
 * I'm Not a Hero, I'm X: Jim would rather be a protagonist.
 * Inept Mage: Jim. Granted it's because he only completed one year of magic training before he died... the first time.
 * Insistent Terminology: It's not a catapult, it's a trebuchet!
 * Instant AI, Just Add Water: The programmers use this to create Mogworld.
 * I Take Offense to That Last One: "Slippery John is a fatheaded, useless berk." "Oh, come on. He's not useless."
 * It's Been Done: Yahtzee received several E-Mails noting the similarity between this book and a webcomic that also featured an undead mage in a World Of Warcraft-like environment. His response to this was that he didn't know of this series while writing it.
 * Jerkass: Simon.
 * Kleptomaniac Hero: Lampshaded. Turns out local villagers are not very fond of adventurers, and among their long list of complaints against them is their tendency to just outright take things that don't belong to them.
 * It's Been Done: Yahtzee received several E-Mails noting the similarity between this book and a webcomic that also featured an undead mage in a World Of Warcraft-like environment. His response to this was that he didn't know of this series while writing it.
 * Jerkass: Simon.
 * Kleptomaniac Hero: Lampshaded. Turns out local villagers are not very fond of adventurers, and among their long list of complaints against them is their tendency to just outright take things that don't belong to them.


 * Kill'Em All: Well, duh. Jim and his friends are zombies.
 * Knight in Sour Armor: Jim.
 * La Résistance: The Magical Resistance.
 * Lick Spittle: The actual term is used to describe Barry
 * Light Is Not Good:
 * Million Mook March: Barry's
 * Mission from God: Barry gets his from . Jim, Thaddeus and Slippery John, gets their own commanded by.
 * Non-Player Character: Jim and his "friends" are these.
 * Nonstandard Game Over:
 * Oh Crap: Happens several times to Jim. By halfway through the novel he stops being surprised at situations just happening to suddenly turn against him.
 * A particularly memorable one was
 * Our Elves Are Better: Averted hard in the case of Mr. Wonderful.
 * Overshadowed by Awesome: I'm sure Baron Civius would have been more useful if he wasn't fighting...well, God...
 * Pirate: The crew of the Black Pudding, every one of which has an eyepatch.
 * Pointy-Haired Boss:From what little we see of Brain Garret, CEO of Loincloth Entertainment, he appears both to be very pompous and quite ignorant of his workers' problems.
 * Completely averted with Lord Dreadgrave. Despite being a necromancer with a doom fortress and an army of undead minions he is shown to be an excellent boss. He follows through on his promises, is attentive to the needs and wishes of his undead minions and most importantly, he remembers your name.
 * Physical God: Barry,
 * Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: A ditz, an Inept Mage, a priest, and a terrible rogue.
 * Running Gag: "OH GOD YOUR EYES HURRAAARRGLAB!"
 * "Actually it's a trebuchet."
 * "My little ducks" and variations thereupon.
 * Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
 * Shout-Out: Both to Zero Punctuation and the obvious.
 * Some of the people who work at  are named Mason, Sunderland, and Townshend.
 * Also, ultimate attack spell, the Level 47 Cunning Argument ("for the rapid conversion of heathens") is apparently a reference to a once-mentioned Omnian character from the Discworld, 'Smite-the-unbeliever-with-cunning-arguments'.
 * Near the beginning of the book, Jim expresses regret about the magic school he attends not being a castle, which was almost certainly a jab at Hogwarts.
 * In one scene, Dub begins to wax philosophical about if the NPCs might really be alive or not. Don berates him for watching too much Star Trek, as it makes him talk like Picard.
 * Sliding Scale of Undead Regeneration: Jim and friends are either type I or II. They can "repair" their bodies, but not heal them.
 * Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Mount Murdercruel
 * Small Name, Big Ego: Simon apparently thinks he's a shit-hot genius programmer who's the only one with a clue. He's an egoistic, narcissist Jerkass who screws up the entire game beyond belief.
 * Smug Snake: Barry,  Also Simon, from what we see of him.
 * Spanner in the Works:
 * Straw Hypocrite: Averted with Thaddeus.
 * The Nothing After Death: Played with.
 * Third Person Person: Slippery John thinks Slippery John is this.
 * Those Two Bad Guys: Mr. Wonderful and Bowg.
 * Took a Level in Badass: Thaddeus, specifically after
 * Trailers Always Spoil: The first major twist, that Jim is a NPC character in a MMORPG, is known to pretty much everyone who followed the news about the book before the launch.
 * It gets worse - The blurb on the back of the book explicitly mentions programmers working out bugs in their AI, so even if one hadn't heard that much about the book before, it's still thoroughly spoiled. It's a real shame, too, as it could have been interesting trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
 * To be fair, it surely wasn't meant to be that huge a twist. Even without reading the news or the back of the book, the truth (broadly speaking) of what's going on is obvious long before any character in the story has a clue.
 * The Undead: Jim, Meryl, and Thaddeus, or  to be more precise.
 * What Measure Is a Non-Human?:.
 * Who Wants to Live Forever?: Not Jim, as it's made pretty clear from the start he's not too pleased being wrenched back from the dead..
 * Wizarding School: Where Jim is studying at the beginning of the story.
 * Your Little Dismissive Diminutive: Mr. Wonderful often calls the group "my little [x]" with x being a word or phrase vaguely appropriate for the situation. Lampshaded within the story, so he switches it up with "my tiny [x]," "my diminutive [x]" and so forth. To the point where in one scene he has an open thesaurus on his desk during an interrogation
 * Wizarding School: Where Jim is studying at the beginning of the story.
 * Your Little Dismissive Diminutive: Mr. Wonderful often calls the group "my little [x]" with x being a word or phrase vaguely appropriate for the situation. Lampshaded within the story, so he switches it up with "my tiny [x]," "my diminutive [x]" and so forth. To the point where in one scene he has an open thesaurus on his desk during an interrogation
 * Your Little Dismissive Diminutive: Mr. Wonderful often calls the group "my little [x]" with x being a word or phrase vaguely appropriate for the situation. Lampshaded within the story, so he switches it up with "my tiny [x]," "my diminutive [x]" and so forth. To the point where in one scene he has an open thesaurus on his desk during an interrogation