Harald's Adventure Wares (Redd)

Harald's Adventure Wares
A story of one man's greed, and a goblin
by D. G. Redd (2022)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was a book from Free Ebooks on Reddit. It's a short novella, which Goodreads says is part of some other world. The plot is pretty much summed up in the subtitle, which is why I included it even though it doesn't appear to be on the image of the book cover.

So Harald runs a shop selling stuff to adventurers, generally the dumber kind who are easier to swindle. Occasionally, a real hero will come to town, and he'll still try to get the best deal he can. It's amazing his lived as long as he has.

There's a problme in that there's a goblin outside of town that's making it difficult to gather up the mushrooms needed for making potions and magic items, but a single goblin is beneath the notice of a real hero and yet proves to challenging for wannabes.

Harald finally teams up with the potion maker and the innkeeper to find the goblin themselves. He worries the entire time that the other two are damaging the weapons and armor he loaned them. They capture a goblin and are about to kill it when it pleads for its life and promises gold. No tricks, it produces a lot of gold. Rather than take it, Harald wants to go into business with the goblins.

They reinforce the goblins' lair so it will be a challenge to adventurers, who will attack the goblins, and then the goblins will take all their money. (Oh, and they might die, but adventurers die, right.)

So here we know that Harald is not just a bad person but a little bit evil as well. You can imagine how things will turn out when you're in business with goblins. It doesn't turn out well for two of the three, but Harald, like Thenardier of Les Miz, lives to see another day. And it's business as usual.

I Almost gave up on this early because it wasn't exactly well-written, but there was a sense of a story to come, so I stuck with it. It did read more for people who play fantasy games than read fantasy books. Not the worst free book I read, but I'm glad it was only a novella.