Byzantine Wars

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

It’s never been easy being a high schooler, and for four students stuck in detention, it’s about to get a whole lot harder. After opening a magical board game they find in a dark closet during detention, each is teleported to another world—the world of Byzantium.

What’s worse: this place is in trouble. A slave rebellion has overrun entire cities, and barbarians from the east and west are on the march. On top of that, fantastic monsters and mystical warriors called Zhayedan have joined the fray, throwing Byzantium into chaos. Our four high school students find themselves in four different bodies, taking four different sides in the conflict. Each must now fight desperately to survive.

Byzantine Wars is an historical fantasy isekai with LitRPG elements. Enjoy four different main characters with varying strengths and weaknesses, deeply immersive world-building, and endless humor and adventure. And, most importantly: don’t let the farr fade.

Byzantine Wars is a complete three-book series totaling more than 2600 pages. (Proof that the series is completehere.) Read the next chapters on patreonhere. If you'd like to read the first book in the series as an .epub, email me at[email protected]and for $1, I'll send it to you.

Information

Status: Hiatus
Year: 2023
Author: Ian_Schwartz

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.0/ 5.0
Followers: 49
Views: 32,006

Reviews

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Community Reviews(3)

SolipsisRoyal Road
★★★★★ 4.5
A historical take on Jumanji—I like the idea! I am eager to read more of it. Definitely deserves more attention!
Nota bene: While it is technically a litrpg, don’t expect number crunching or blue boxes. Instead, a GM-like voice (personality and sentience included) keeps the player updated of anything relevant that affects their character: stat increase, loss of hp, etc.
The style is ok, unobtrusive. While each chapter follows a character’s POV, the narration is scarce in inner monologue. It results in a factual tone, where the action of the characters speak for themselves. I do like the resulting atmosphere.
A tiny nitpick is that the overall scene is sometimes hard to visualize, causing some disorientation in the reader.
So far the characters have each taken stock of their new bodies and situation—it is just the beginning. The characters seem to be quite endearing—I hope Boucher will find it in himself not to be a jerk once he realizes the stakes!
NimuxRoyal Road
★★★★ 4.0
As a whole, I found it quite enjoyable. The premise is interesting, the characters feel different from each other, and the "main quest" I nicely set up.
The characters do sound strange from time to time, using vocabulary that they normally shouldn't even know. On the same note, sometimes the story's message can a little on the nose. On the contrary, the part where Dyonisos explain the Ferr was done well.
I also felt like Boucher was a little too quick to adapt to his situation and start to commit war crimes. He doesn't know much about the country he's in, its history, and the internal situation. Yet he's willing to to slaughter innocents and talks like he's convinced that it's God's will to keep the empire alive at any cost. Perhaps he's just a bad person, but that doesn't feel in accordance with the message this story is trying to convey.
iridium248Royal Road
★★★★ 3.5
This was an extremely difficult review to write, and I feel your enjoyment of the story might vary quite a bit depending on your political leanings.
Byzantine Wars is the story of four students who end up being pulled into the titular Jumanji-esque boardgame, each with a distinct role to play.
While this is a strongly historical setting, based on the Byzantine era, there are a few notable twists: For one, there's a presence of a (relatively) subtle magic known as the farr, which can be employed for, effectively, supernatural feats.
At the same time, the four players all end up in very different roles, not all of whom are on the same side. This allows for an interesting and effective use of different viewpoints...At first.
Really, I don't want to be too down on this story. The writing is solid, and the use of a System (while peripheral at best) is nice and gives a sense of minor progress without being too intrusive. By themselves, that would put the story at a solid 3.5 to 4 stars: If you're all right with that, I recommend giving the story a read.
I do have significant gripes about the story, but I feel that a lot of them are subjective. As such, I give Byzantine Wars a four-star rating, subject to the spoilers below.
For a start, this story is undeniably extremely woke, in the white-bread, PC, West Coast liberal, social sciences-degree sense.
There's a clear Socialist / Communist-slant to things, and I don't mean this in a derogatory fashion: Rather, this seems to be the author's genuine conviction, and we have a not-insubstantial amount of dialogue from main and secondary characters dedicated to how a proto-Communist society is the moral thing to do.
To be fair, this ahistorical perspective is put forward by people who are from our world (and somewhat out of time), but it sat wrong with me. More, it's made worse by how everything seems to be backing them up as objectively correct. It's especially strange when one considers the inherent sexism, racism and basically