THE LUNEFABLE REVIEW
My Players Are So Fierce – Handsome dog Frank
My Players Are So Fierce: The NPC Who Cannot Afford to Die
A broke vampire gets his first testers just as his clan sends him into danger. Their idea of a good game becomes his precarious survival plan.
THE SHORT TAKE
An energetic player-summoning opening whose best joke is also its strongest source of tension: Murphy must survive the adventure he is pretending to administer.
An aristocrat in the relief queue
Murphy starts with the appearance of privilege and almost none of its comforts. He is a vampire in a city ruled by vampires, but he still queues for relief food while the neighbors gossip about his disgrace. Even walking home requires sheltering in the shadows because he cannot afford protection from the sun. My Players Are So Fierce makes supernatural status feel embarrassingly practical before it offers any promise of conquest. Elegance is something Murphy performs while trying to get breakfast home.
The clan then gives him a dangerous delivery assignment with little room to refuse. His poor equipment and reputation make the honor sound like a polite disposal arrangement. The joke has teeth because he has obligations at home, and because the powers he has spent a month anticipating have not finished installing. This is an appealingly awkward entrance for a would-be mastermind: someone else controls the timetable, and his spectacular advantage is still a progress bar.
Someone is waiting at home
Cui Si, his injured vampire elder, initially looks like another burden the story can make fun of. She drinks, sleeps, and occupies a dilapidated manor whose rats have an unpleasant practical purpose. Murphy cooks for her and clears away the bottles. Their exchanges are teasing and often ungenerous, but the ordinary work establishes a relationship that matters before the larger adventure begins. His desire to return has a specific address and a person attached to it.
A particularly effective pause comes when he finds her standing at a window, sunlight burning her fingers. Helping with the injury briefly replaces his commentary with attention. Later, the food and cooking instructions he leaves behind give his departure an unexpectedly domestic weight. Cui Si also understands the clan better than he does. Her warnings allow a sense of history and danger to enter through a familiar voice rather than through another list of factions.
The first customers are loose in the basement
The long-awaited summoning produces ordinary humans who immediately praise the graphics and test what their bodies can do. Murphy understands their language and realizes that they believe they are playing a game. His new power therefore comes with an acting job. He needs to become a convincing guide, invent a suitably grand mission, and conceal how little he knows. The resulting comedy depends on timing: his intimidating presentation repeatedly runs ahead of his actual resources.
Sending the first two players to explore the basement is an especially good introduction to their usefulness. What he considers an exhausted, familiar space becomes a place worth searching with obsessive attention. Their discoveries supply a small, tangible change in his circumstances. This is more satisfying than simply declaring players an unbeatable force. The opening demonstrates a different way of seeing the same environment, then lets Murphy recognize that their curiosity might become an asset.
A summon is not a staffing guarantee
The journey forces that optimism into contact with other people's schedules. Murphy expects a full group when danger arrives; some of his recruits are busy in their own world. The revelation is funny because it turns an extraordinary summoning ability into a mundane coordination problem. These people still have work and responsibilities. A supernatural invitation does not make them permanently available, and a plan based on treating them that way is immediately fragile.
Even those who arrive need instruction. Their courage exceeds their competence, and scavenged equipment must actually be put on correctly. Maxim, the human servant accompanying Murphy, can help with such tasks while struggling to understand these strangely fearless warriors. His perspective adds another layer to the joke: behavior that players consider normal can look heroic or incomprehensible to a local. Language barriers keep that misunderstanding active instead of allowing the group to operate as an instantly fluent team.
The game has bodies in it
The opening becomes much harsher around Morlan village. Combat is messy, and the players' excitement encounters suffering that feels disturbingly real even to them. The burning village is a substantial tonal turn after the basement comedy. Murphy knows this world is real, so his public speeches to the players carry an uncomfortable mixture of genuine feeling and calculated presentation. The story gives him a persuasive cause while leaving visible the machinery he uses to sell it.
That ambiguity extends to his own behavior. Caring for Cui Si does not make him consistently compassionate: he can treat already depleted servants as expendable, and his vampire hunger is dangerous. His refusal to become a monster involves both self-restraint and concern about the image his players will carry away. Readers interested in a shrewd, compromised leader have something to follow here. Readers seeking an uncomplicated protector may find the gap between his gestures of care and his calculations harder to accept.
A promising production with rough edges
The reading experience is lively but uneven. Internal complaints, game references, tutorial notes, and explanations of the world's politics compete for attention. The English sometimes shifts names or produces awkward phrases, particularly around ranks and vampire terminology. Repeated pants jokes and dormitory banter also occupy space that could have sharpened an already effective premise. These issues matter most when the story asks comedy and atrocity to share the same stretch of action; the emotional transition can be abrupt.
Yet the central arrangement remains unusually productive. Murphy must persuade players, negotiate local loyalties, understand his own system, and keep himself alive long enough to discover what any of it can become. Eight story chapters establish those pressures without making him their master. Try the opening if the idea of an NPC improvising his authority appeals to you: the invitation is to watch him build a convincing adventure while desperately needing its participants to take the next quest.
Based on chapters 1–8 of the English edition. This is an opening impression, not a full-series verdict. No later plot developments are discussed.
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My Players Are So Fierce
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Opening story chapters 1–8 · catalogue entries 1–8
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