If you ever played Dungeons and Dragons or any other type of roleplaying game this book will have particular appeal for you. When I played these games in my youth I often fantasized about becoming my character. Joel Rosenberg makes this fantasy come true with brilliant effect. This fantasy come to life is not all sunshine and roses. The characters in the story become their game characters through the machinations of their gamemaster who has found a way to cross people over to the "other world". One minute they are playing the game and the next they are sucked into the fantasy world. This world is brutal. Life and death are by the sword. Wizards do not hesitate to wield their power and oppress the masses. This is no longer a game anymore, it's a deadly reality. Rosenberg does an admirable job of making the reader aware of the internal conflict of the characters. They possess the memory and identity of two people. They are from both worlds at the same time. Rosenberg manages the story well, it's only 250 pages, a quick read, but you don't feel you've missed anything. The combat scenes in the book are brutal and excellent. A five star book all around.

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Not only are the characters compelling and the story exciting and fun, but I'm forever madly in love with one of the characters in this book, and he is the standard against which potential suitors are measured. Since Walter is fictional, of course none ever measure up. More's the pity.

I keep extra copies of this series around to loan out. I love it that much.

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Good science fiction.

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Amongst the best of the "People from our world cross over into a fantasy setting" books out there. Significantly more depth than you'd expect, both emotionally and mentally. The first book stands very well on its own, but the series does a better job than I've ever seen of continuing naturally and believably.

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The start of a good trilogy written in the late 80's when D & D was at it's height.a good mix of action, humor and imagination. A group of people begin a role playing game and are magically transported to a magical land where they have become their characters, but unlike playing a game, the players find that their enemies play for keeps...and they face some brutal violence during the course of the book. The first couple of books balance this with humor-mainly due to the characters importing 1980's pop culture references,manners,slang,knowledge, ect into the mideval, fantasy world in which they are now trapped. The first four or five books deal with the original characters fighting slavers...the later books deal with their son/daughters taking over the crusade and since they never lived in "the real world" the humor of the earlier books is gone and the overall tone becomes darker and dull. The main hero, Carl Cullance was the heart and soul of the series...once his son takes over, it just wasn't fun anymore.

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An EXCELLENT series. While the idea of dragons and magic, dwarves and D&D are all nothing new, the premise of this series is that present day people like you and me, fans of role-playing, find themselves trapped in the world they once played in, as the people they played. Now they CAN die, (some do in the series), and sword slinging and magic casting will get no help from rolling dice! It almost hurts me to give up these books.

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Although the Gamer's who are magically transported into the world of their game has perhaps been somewhat overused, Rosenberg, for one, does it well enough to be worth the read. This is the first book of the series and the individual books need to be read in order. They are not all that self-contained.

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