Henchman

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

Ignored. Written-off. Underestimated.

Until a serendipitous accident shows Gus the secret of how supers get their powers.

Will it be enough to help this inexperienced henchman survive?

Marooned on a desert island with a malevolent force trying to thwart him at every turn, Gus must conquer each challenge he faces

Can he prove to himself, along with everyone else, that he's more than anyone thought he could be?

If he succeeds, history will be rewritten. If he fails...

[participant in the Royal Road Writathon challenge]

Information

Status: Hiatus
Year: 2018
Author: Carl Stubblefield

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 3.9/ 5.0
Followers: 1
Views: 2,436

Reviews

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Community Reviews(10)

RafMereCRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Great story.
Slow progress from the beginning, building up to a nice finish.
The idea of using a unique power up such as the Nth is an innovative idea.
The execution of the power up was believable.
The loneliness of being on your own, on a deserted island was a nice setting.
Congratulations on the completion of your book.
It was a fun read.
Raf
Jangofet54Royal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Enjoying this series so far hope it continues.
OwlishRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Not sure how this qualifies for the Fan Fiction tag. Writing this at chapter 16. The story is well crafted, I haven't been pulled out by any weird grammar errors yet. Several different mysteries exist, but for now the main character is just trying to survive. Don't know if this is going to be an amazingly great book, but for now it's decent.
HalfetiRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Wasn't sure what to expect from this and the genre if a bit fuzzy. LitRPG like, but then there are supers... still, it seems like its at least Gamelit and I'm not the type to endless argue the intricacies between the two.
Super fast action start to this. A lot of fun. I particularly liked how exposition was weaved between action! Take note, this is how its done, haha. Already 4 chapters in and loving the world building that's happening.
The bounce back in time through me off, but I'm sure it will take me somewhere good.
gary0044187Royal Road
★★★★ 3.5
Concept is quite interesting. the follow through is also quite good. looking forward to seeing where this goes.
PaulTBRoyal Road
★★★★ 3.5
This is readable, although I decided to drop it at chapter 29. The setup and many of the events are highly implausible. For example just a couple of chapters after suddenly talking to his A.I. about what some sentinent metal is and how rare it is, he suddenly gets handed 5.4kg just in time to upgrade his weapon. Also having just one and a half characters for so long means there is little character development. As other reviews have pointed out, a whole lot of it is one long training / base-building sequence.
The antagonist's flashbacks are probably the most interesting story-wise of the book so far. Which is a pity, because my first impulse is to skip flashbacks.
naralianRoyal Road
★★★ 3.0
Game mechanics are fun, story is incredibly cliched but reasonably well executed, the puns are so offensive they circle back around to being awesome.
... then, after creating an intentionally absurd character, putting him in an aggressively senseless, fairly surrealist actually, game system and going full Douglas Adams and making the actual physics of the setting run on wordplay... author decides that all this enjoyable, willful nonsense needs a diegetic explanation because for some reason he's under the terrible misapprehension that superheroes fall under science fiction instead of fantasy, and it all collapses into chapter after chapter of Deepak Chopra level snake oil pseudoscience that drains all of the joy and momentum from the story until you're just kinda bored.
HegelundRoyal Road
★★★ 3.0
not really sure how to formulate my feelings on this, but here goes.
book one was okay I guess, feels like it got more editing than future books, but then the issues just keep piling on.
the pacing is really weird at times, like one chapter ends on a cliffhanger of a character running into certain death thinking "this is the end" and then the next chapter COMPLETELY skips what happens and never mentions it. I wouldn't have as big a problem with this if I could actually have thought of a way out of that situation.
sometimes the story will suddenly take a break from the plot to do several chapters of "hacking" written by someone who very obviously has no idea what hacking actually is.
I think at the point I'm at a character has learned the same exact lesson like 5 or 6 times, and they will say that they've learned, but then go right back to not having learned anything after all.
sometimes the POV will flipflop between characters mid-sentence and it's pretty confusing in places.
weird continuity errors
Spoiler: Spoiler
like one chapter a character reveals they are actually 73 years old, then like 10 chapters later they again reveal that they are in fact 53 years old, the author just forgot.
and in that same scene a character will go from fast asleep, to be in the middle of doing something, to being fast asleep again. just an editing mistake but confusing nonetheless
needs more editing, I feel like most of the problems I have with it could be fixed with an extra edit pass.
as for the story, I think it has loads of potential. one thing that kinda bugged me about the story throughout is how often I internally screamed "JUST TALK" I get that literally all the characters have serious mental issues to overcome but just fucking talk things out more, there is loads of down and travel time to talk about anything, and I don't mean personal stuff, but technical stuff, and a lot of stuff that everyone but the mc knows about.
I'm so frustrated I think I'm done with the story, for n
RAGRoyal Road
★★ 2.0
I liked the first chapter, seemed like decent set up for a world of haves and have-nots with a superhero theme, some distinct cast and social interactions due to said societal split, and potentially gamechanging macguffin falling to a nobody MC.
From there things mostly degenerated.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The System
-The system was very clumsily added.
Gus gets via something pretty much entirely divorced from our starting scene. Worse the manner via which the system exists brings up several questions.
Why are they here, sent by aliens? Is space full of people like this? How is it that the information that "nanites can make people supers" is not more well known? Especially by someone in a family with two supers? Due to being mechanically made what are their limits, and if they're limitless how capable are their creators? Why do the nanatives even care about XP rather than limitations coming down to just materials? If they're meant to help humanity, given the capabilities they have shouldn't they self-spread around the world? etc.
In making the system something tangible rather than a force of nature one creates a lot of possible issues with the setting.
-The system was entirely too knowledgeable for supposedly gen1 nanites that were presumably stored for decades in an escape pod.
A lot of what it knows isn't stuff that should be inherent (like biological monitoring, how a power might work) but stuff you would pick up over time (like history of the world, or how one might train for a specific power, how many generations of nanites it has been, etc.).
-Arguably the system is also too sapient, acting much more as an onhand servant/companion than anything mechanical/alien that one might expect from an AI
It's not a toolkit or an ergonomic help system, it's someone riding in the backseat, popping in and out, with an easy answer to everything. It feels goofy at best, cringe-inducing at worst, especially with changes in its personality. Why is this an issue? Gu
The ValeRoyal Road
★ 0.5
Two characters in an isolated location. One character only exists in the mind of the other (effectively). World building is all done through infodump, character building is done by anecdotal recollections and both seem irrelevant because the characters aren't interacting with other characters or moving through the wider world, they are operating inside a box and only interacting with themselves. As of chapter 35 the isolation seemingly continues (it should be noted that I started skipping and skimming over parts simply to check how the story would develop after chapter 12 as I noticed certain trends. I saw little to contradict anything in this review other than mention of a single antagonist character)
On the rpg elements - I feel it's poorly constructed, high tech plus magic solution that is overexplained to its detriment, leaving holes in the mechanics and making it feel slapdash.
Motivationally the MC seems to solely be a vessel to progress within the system of the rpg elements with no other goal, with a side of base building.