Out of Dragold

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

Follow Zia, less-than intrepid adventurer, her friends, and her child as they venture forth from the places they called home to try and find where they really belong. Two completed stories document their exodus from Dragold into Fief and across the continent it’s made of.

Patience, the daughter of two improbably successful career criminals, finds that she is not exactly cut out for school. Fitting in came as naturally as the sorcery that allowed it; studying did not. After making a friend without using her sorcerous manipulation for the first time, she is unceremoniously punted from her university and sets out to use her fire and metal spheres to aid an army entrenched in civil war. In between writing letters to her parents and her school friend, she finds herself barely surviving conflict after conflict. What will happen when she finds out that the side she pledged loyalty to may not exactly align with her own (admittedly complicated) moral compass?

Information

Status: Ongoing
Year: 2025
Author: StudioBunBug

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.8/ 5.0
Followers: 12
Views: 6,481

Reviews

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Community Reviews(4)

D.N. NewynRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Style: This story is an excellent sarcastic stab at the hypocrisy and over-complication of political and social structures, and of the disconnection between the nobility and the rest of society. The style is sharp and witty, and there's just enough absurdity to enhance the tension.
Story: A band of misfits struggling through a world of politics, religion, and magical shenanigans? Sign me up. I think one of the strongest part about this story is the deep and immersive world that the author has managed to craft, and how the author managed to turn religion into a bureaucratic and political nightmare. The church is filled with shady priests and rituals that are, dare I say it, absolutely moronic. The nobility enforces strict social hierarchies, until those hierarchies inconvenience them. This causes people who genuinely believe in their faith (like Zidrist) to be constantly frustrated by being blocked from doing good. There are moments where Zia becomes an actual genius by
outmaneuvering nobles who floundered because they didn't know their own etiquette.
Character: Zia is a work of art. An absolute horrific mess of art, but art nonetheless. She’s self-important, reckless, and completely full of herself, and the dissonance between her inner thoughts and what actually happens makes up the bulk of the humor in this book. I find myself rooting for her failure just to see what the heck is going to happen after that. More often than not, she's bailed out by her crush Drexl, the the kind of person who carries a spare plank of wood specifically for knocking people out. The group of bandit complements each other well in the weirdest way, and their interactions make the story interesting.
Grammar: Grammar is clean, with italics and punctuation at the right places for comedic effect. Better than mine.
Mr Alex666Royal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
So, a career criminal, a pampered wannabe mastermind, a deacon, and a chorist walk into a criminal den. What could possibly go wrong?
Have you ever wondered, how to most famous adventuring parties started out? How legends were born? Well, some of those probably started out this way:
an evil anarchist killing the beloved Dragon-God-King, leaving the realm in utter chaos. THEN a naive, pampered less-than-competent person gets an idea between making out with everything that moves, some grown-ups pat their heads, but the inertia is already moving things along, so why not go for the ride?
Story: see above. It's all about finding the heir to the Dragon Throne. In other stories, some actually competent folks would do that, but we are stuck with the collection for a joke. My only regret is, that the story is so short. Author, please continue!
Style: as easy as it comes. I laughed my a** off multiple times. The antics of the MC carry everything along. Multiple times, I asked myself, can someone be so oblivious, pampered and full of themselves? Well, they can!
Character: As stated above, the MC is a naive, pampered, almost completely useless piece of biomatter, who never worked 5 minutes in their life, and who thinks, socializing and making out with randos somewhere in the underbelly of society is actually cool, and makes them cool. While they are burning the pocket money, their family is forking out despite impoverishment looming on the horizon. Yes, the MC is an utter moron. Yes, they are a waste of - probably - useable biomatter. BUT! For this kind of story the MC just clicks.
Grammar: I'm not a native speaker, but haven't found any obvious mistakes, or typos. Since none were obvious, 5/5.
Cowabunga_BluewriterRoyal Road
★★★★★ 4.5
First, I must say this is a well-written story with barely any glaring grammatical errors, tho I am not great with grammar either, so def have someone else check for those. Well, let's start. The story is gripping and entertaining. It holds up my standards of a great story, so I give it 4.5 to 5 stars overall.
The style in which the story unfolds is favorable, with it having a third-person past pov and in Zia’s POV. Thoughts were italicized and different from narration or speech. The story itself was pretty simple, finding Izkarzon’s heir, but the hijinks that the party falls into time and again make for an entertaining read. However, the serious themes of religion, identity, authority, and even sexuality make for a deeper look at Dragon’s Heir. Characterization was great. Zia, Drexyl, Zidrist, and Darka are all different people with different goals that end up uniting and diversifying in the end.
World Building:
We’ve got two religions vying for power in Zia’s mind. Izkarzon is a cultist and caste regulated sect that believes in much like the Old Testament used to. Structure and Punishment, and Reward System. Then we’ve got the One God and Fief religion, which is more towards the New Testament God, where forgiveness and equality reign more. This is extremely well done. The caste system is another thing that is well done. The hierarchy, and really the world of it all, was made much like medieval times. Or feudal times.
Characterization:
Zia’s transformation was excellently done. She went from a cult obsessed caste obsessed, sexually unsure person to a more open-minded individual with still some room to grow. She found her true moral limits, what she was capable of, and to rely on others. To be more open-minded and to disregard caste. In it all, Zia came into her identity as a trans person and to not be ashamed of it.
I felt, however, that the other characters could have grown just as much, but kinda failed to. For instance, Zidrist could have had as big an awakening
Deus Ex LachinaRoyal Road
★★★★★ 4.5
Story
This story is very unique. It showcases a fantasy culture that's deeply flawed without it being either a complete joke or grimdark. There's a fair bit of depth to the theology, even if there were points I couldn't follow it (see Grammar). There are some good gags, my favourite being that the main character is a fire mage, but that's pretty useless because - realistically - setting things on fire is usually neither a good idea nor even particularly difficult if it was. There was probably more Doing Jobs For Shady Lords than I needed to read - they do a job for one crime lord, who rewards them with the name of another crime lord, and they have to do a job with another crime lord to be introduced to that one...that's just going from memory, but if I got it wrong it's because it does blur together a fair bit. If I were Zia, I would have quit by at most the third dangerous felony I was asked to commit for some rich prick in exchange for some extremely dubious favour that might help me get the help of another rich prick, in the hopes that several rich pricks down the line someone might actually be able to help. This is why I left academia! The first problem with this set of Job Opportunities is that it makes the stakes questionable: I often found myself asking "why should I care if this job 'goes well' if the reward for it going well is obscure and, at best, only tangentially related to their actual goal?" I would have liked to see them having adventures besides various heists, at least to shake things up. Lastly, it ends anticlimactically. The character growth does ameliorate these shortcomings, and the epilogue is quite touching.
Style
Stylistically, there are a lot of long paragraphs, which I generally find hard to read. I don't know how much of it is a disability thing, an attentional thing, or just an aesthetic preference, but I definitely find it much easier to read prose that's more broken up. (You can see this in my own writing - it's for the benefit of read