Fantasy Sports 1

 
 
Fantasy Sports 1

by Sam Bosma

Nobrow
2015

 
  

Fantasy Sports is a fun little graphic novel by Sam Bosma about a pair of adventurers who must defeat the mummy and win his treasure by ... beating him at basketball?

 

I've been looking for a term to describe fantasy stories like this one, where the worldbuilding is based on conventions derived from Dungeons & Dragons, but where the world doesn't specifically operate on game mechanics. The consensus among my friends is that there is no one standard name, but we might call the genre dungeon fantasy or rpg fantasy. I'm thinking of stories where Adventurers go into Dungeons to find Treasure and defeat Monsters. The adventurers might belong to guilds, and they probably have named sub-types based on their special abilities. These stories are usually a bit humorous rather than serious, and they often incorporate anachronisms and scifi elements - the kinds of things that come up while playing D&D with a group of friends.

 

In my search, a friend introduced me to the idea of litrpg, which is related, but I think different from what I'm talking about. In litrpg, game mechanics like character levels and hit points are literally true and part of the physics of the world, and the characters are aware of them. For dungeon fantasy, I'm thinking of Adventure Time and Delicious in Dungeon, not That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime.

 

In terms of length and humor, Fantasy Sports is kind of like an episode of Adventure Time. Mug and Wiz are uneasy partners in the Mage's Guild, and both would prefer to be paired with someone else. Mug doesn't actually seem to be a mage? He's a huge, muscly rage monster who can punch through stone walls and has no time for a nerdy sidekick. Wiz is a magical teen apprentice who thinks that Mug is too quick-tempered and short-sighted to teach her anything. 

They get sent into an ancient tomb their disparate approaches make quick work of all the traps an obstacles, but the final guardian is an undead pharoah who insists that he'll only give up his treasure if they can beat him at one-on-one basketball. Mug plays first, struggling against the pharoah's inhumanly long reach until Wiz gives him some advice to play to his own strengths. It's a near tie at the end when Mug gets injured and Wiz has to sub in. The pharoah's getting exhauated but convinced he'll win easily against a kid, and ... well, what do you think happens? C'mon. This is not the sort of story that has a sad ending. I think there are a couple more in this series, so I might try to check those out.