Fable: The Balverine Order

by Peter David

Fable is a first person role-playing game set in the city realm of Albion. The city is full of riches and poverty, magic works but industry is coming. The royal family who run the city have a dark past and its secrets rule the present. Past versions of the game have been set in, loosely, medieval and renaissance times. The new version, launched to coincide with the book, will take the city into the industrial revolution, launching a war between industry and magic. The game is unique for the richness of the created universe and for the way the actions of the character are reflected in its appearance and the responses of NPCs to it: if you eat a lot you become fat, if you get into a lot of fights you get scarred and people become wary of you. The interaction of player and game, the richness of the world, makes the franchise unusually appropriate for a tie-in novel and the novel will include an interactive element.

• ISBN10: 0441020062
• ISBN13: 9780441020065
• Publish Date: 27 January 2011 (first published 7 October 2010)
• Publish Status: Transferred
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Penguin Putnam Inc
• Imprint: Ace Books
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 496
• Language: English

Reviews

[inlibrisveritas]

Well if you are a gamer or more specifically an Xbox 360 player then you may be familiar with the game series called Fable. Which is basically a game based on your choices that you make as a Hero during the main story line to take down whatever evil threatens to topple the balance of the world. For instance even though your a Hero you may choose to do evil stuff like steal, raise taxes, kill people, sacrifice people or sell them to slavery, etc. Or you can choose to be the pure Hero who will do as he is told, give money to people, help everyone, etc. The choices you make don't change the main quest but they change how people react to you and how you look, if you are evil you will look...well evil, the same goes with good. Also you can use three main things Will (magic), Skill, and Strength; but the more you use one the more it reflects upon you. A Will user will glow, Skill users will get taller, and Strength users will appear bulkier.

Now that you have some info on the games I can tell you about the book. I believe this is based around after Fable 2 and sometime before Fable 3, so if you have played the games some thing will seem familer. However the book does not follow any characters with which you have met in the games previously but instead follows a young man named Thomas and his servant and friend James as they go on a quest to find the mythical Balverines, that Thomas has seen kill his brother. Along the way they find out that more than Balverines exist and they have hope that Heros do still exist as well.

Overall for a book based on a video game it was fairly good. My only complaint is the writing, it could have been a bit better than it was. I didn't mind so much until around the last few chapters when the Hero of Will, Skill, and Strentgh take premise in it... it was like a constant reminder of what they were and seemed overly unnecessary. A few things in the book happened so suddenly that I had to reread it a few times to understand what happened, I do understand that when you play the game you get surprised by things a lot but I don't particualrly like that to happen frequently as I read. However as I said the book was pretty good for something so short, and it did deal with the concept of a Hero in a decent manner. If another book like this comes out then I will probably buy.