Mage Tank

Blurb

Conquer ancient dungeons. Get rewarded. Grow stronger.

After being killed by a high-velocity tree-hug, Arlo is transported to a new world where those brave and talented enough to conquer ancient Delves are rewarded with incredible power and abilities.

Unfortunately for Arlo, there is no tutorial. He is immediately forced to tackle a Delve set to the highest difficulty with a party of adventurers who are not only strangers to him, but strangers to each other as well.

Arlo has no armor, no weapons, no knowledge of the world at large, and his party is growing increasingly suspicious of his lack of preparation and paper-thin excuses for how he got there.

There’s also the fact that the System in charge seems to be treating Arlo’s situation like a big, cosmic joke.

Determined not to die again, Arlo forgoes putting any points into his highest stat, Intelligence, and instead dumps everything he’s got into Fortitude. After all, who needs equipment or fighting skills when you can eat fireballs for breakfast and still ask for more hot sauce?

Thoughts

As of writing this review, I’ve read the first ebook.

I’ll admit that I picked this one up after seeing the cover. Something about a feathered, flying octpus paired with a vibrant pink feather boa just drew me in. The lil’ flying guy is Grotto, by the way, the dungeon administrator from Arlo’s very first dungeon that sort-of joins the party.

So, what’s the overarching plot line? Something about the system rollout, I guess. I feel like it’s meant to be peeled back a bit over the first few books, and I’ve only read the first. Currently the main motivator is “Let’s do more dungeons so we can try and get stronger and figure out what’s going on.”

Notice the ‘we’ — I know a lot of readers in the genre love a good lone-wolf MC, so let us note that this story is primarily party-based right now, with members you’re introduced to very early with Arlo’s first delve. There’s a lot of variety in personality, culture, and species, to keep all characters well-differentiated, and the world building going on mixes standard power structures (like, this nation is ruled by haughty Nobles) and also more-interesting takes (like the Third Layer (of hell), where the world responds to thoughts and community group-think and agreement on what is and what is not is the only thing keeping a village stable).

Much of the book is spent outside those places though, delving dungeons, which is the classic “anything goes” style of dungeon that is popular in many works. Some stories, like Path of Ascension, call them rifts, but you get the idea.

So I think the character banter and the world-building are done pretty well, so let’s talk about the system. As a caveat, I’m not the biggest stat-head, I don’t love NumbersGoUp unless it ties into something larger. And while the system here does tie into the larger plot itself, I think the non-plot-point implementation actually takes something from the story.

Arlo has a super rare dimensional affinity, and to lean into this, he picks a magical class on initialisation. But, determined not to be a squishy mage, he dumps all his stats into Fortitude. Sure, this makes sense given how recently Arlo was flattened against a tree and died. That was traumatic (oh and a quick tangent here to shout out the authors many puns and witty prose about this death and numerous other comedic things in the book). Butttttt… all these stats are compounding, to the point where the compounding is so significant it makes sense for Arlo to just keep investing over and over and over in Fortitude (which he does). Non-linear stat growth which railroads characters into massively unbalances builds is not fun for me, because it seems to remove character agency. Like, Arlo is trying to be a wizard, dammit, let him be more of a wizard.

Now, it’s not like Arlo never invests stat points outside Fortitude, let’s be clear. And he does progress in his magical ways, but the caveat again with this is that (again, just for me), I want my magic to be… magical! Mysterious and wonderous and full of strange rules and interactions to be investigated and learned. The system in Mage Tank, has given Arlo a skill to effectively insta-learn any magic he sees and use it in a button-press-skill-like-fashion. This is super common in system-heavy books, and I think over time I’ve gotten a bit burned out on magic-as-a-button implementations. They can be fine if someone learns magical principles and spends time crafting an amazing spell that all falls together into a granted skill, but the instant-copy approach takes a lot of the magical exploration and fun away.

For Arlo, it’s obviously about the results, and let’s be real, most of his combat is hitting things with his hammer, throwing his hammer, or adding magical effects to said hammer prior to smacking it on someone’s face. It’s simple, it works, but I think it could have been more. For a popcorn read, Mage Tank is still fun, I think I just had different expectations for how it would go, along the lines of someone digging deep into a magical system to craft perfect barriers like Art of the Adept, or self-interacting magic like in Millennial Mage, or magical exploitation like in Ends of Magic, or magical crafting like in Industrial Strength Magic, instead of just “I’m going to put most of my stat points in Fortitude.”

Enjoyable read, solid technical writing, strong prose and comedy, good character banter, slow-moving overarching plot.