Book Report - Battle Mage Farmer by Seth Ring

Originally Published: Oct. 23, 2023, 7:22 p.m. Last updated: Oct. 23, 2023, 8:02 p.m.

Tags: books

One of the big draws of DragonCon is the vendor hall. This year I came with a preset budget and decided to just let myself impulse-buy random stuff, listen to passionate spiels, and just overall indulge in consumerism in a way that supports more independant creators than what I usually encounter day-to-day. An independant book publisher had a big booth, and a bright-eyed individual caught my attention.

I'd been reading a lot of Red's romantasy recommendations at that point, all of which are female-led romance stories from a female author. Those were fantastic, I loved them, but they all hit a similar note to each other and were lacking some kind of emotion that I couldn't put my finger on. I'd also been reading plenty of Japanese-origin harem trash, so I didn't really want that either. The individual asked me what kind of books I was looking for and if I was up for recommendantions. I asked him straight to give me male-led fantasy romance with a male author. He, Seth Ring, recommended me one of his own books, Battle Mage Farmer. I accepted and purchased it immediately, and he kindly signed it for me.

BMF has been sitting on a huge stack of other recently-acquired books in the nearly 2 months since then, but I've finally made my way to picking it up. And then I finished it in 2 days. This was a great, fun read and I'm looking forward to the next entries in the series.

BMF is a LitRPG fantasy story. For those unfamiliar with the term, LitRPG refers to stories that directly incorporate RPG mechanics like stats, skills, attributes and so on into the stories. These are typically presented as game-like interfaces that the characters are able to look at and potentially interact with. I went to a panel at DragonCon with 5 LitRPG authors answering all kinds of questions, and the big takeaway on the defining aspect of the genre is this: there need to be actual numbers shown to us, the audience, and those numbers have to matter for the plot. This isn't the situation of DragonBall Z where the power levels are there just to yell about. This is getting to a locked terminal in Fallout and being unable to hack it because your Science skill needs to be 50 and it's only 48 so you desperately try to level up one more time to get over the threshold. There are gamified numbers that we and the characters can see, and those numbers drive the story to some extent. From what I can tell, Japanese media especially has had these kinds of stories for a long time. Anyone watching fantasy and/or isekai anime should understand what I'm talking about. The West embracing this sort of thing is relatively new though, and BMF was my first experience with a published, Western work in the genre. (I've read plenty of Eastern origin works and a handful of Western origin works that were only serialized online at the time I read them.)

We follow John Sutton, quite likely the most powerful Mage in this world, on his quest to retire. 10 years before the story begins, John and a number of other earthlings were summoned into this fantasy world and forced onto the battlefield by the desperate nations that needed them to defeat other desperate nations. The scale of previous wars has left enormous portions of the world entirely uninhabitable and an overall drop in civilization and technology level has accompanied this. John has a glowing screen of notifications that occassionally reminds him that the apocalypse draws near and his actions can hasten or slow it. We learn bits and pieces of John's time at war in flashbacks and musings as the story progresses, but the bulk of the story is him trying to start a farm on a plot of land he was awarded as part of his retirement. Revealing his full identity is likely to cause him trouble, so he tries, with limited success, to keep the extent of his powers hidden. John acquires some cows and an ox, puts in orders at the blacksmith, makes cheese, unlocks legendary mysteries of mages from previous generations, digs a bigger cess pit, and much more as he tries to settle the rage in his heart and figure out what the notification system wants from him.

I mentioned I was looking for a romance story in particular, and Ring warned me this was a slow burn. As John makes his way to the farm he was granted, he realizes that squatters and bandits are fighting over who gets to have the farm and the cows it was supposed to come with. He makes himself at home despite their squable, but ends up letting the squatters, a young woman, Ellie, and her little brother, Ben, stay on the farm as farmhands. Ellie and John build up mutual respect and appreciation over time, growing closer and closer. John obviously provides strength and protection to Ellie, while she provides comfort and peace to him. By the end of the book, they've gotten no further than blushing at each other looking awkward, but the foundation of the budding relationship has been established. I enjoyed the overall personality dynamic at play between the two. Despite the power level difference at play and the obvious power dynamic issues that could cause, the relationship is being build up in a believable manner. I have some criticism towards some of Ring's choices of tropes to bring in about the damsel in distress needing protection and rescuing, but he does handle the situation with more tact than many other stories, and Ellie does have more agency than we're initially led to believe. I'm looking forward to more.

There's a bit of an issue here for enjoyability, where we're following essentially an end-game character on his "New Game +" playthrough. Most of the restrictions John is under are self-imposed or comfort issues rather than real threats so it's hard to take him seriously at times, but the way he keeps most of his abilities to himself does keep some suspense up for most of the story. I worry that in future stories I'll just be rolling my eyes, "Well of course he could do *that* too!"

Finally, Ring does something I always love in longer fantasy series, where characters lay down plot trails that will be followed up on in later books. We have mysterious magical tomes to look through, other characters to help power up, old acquaintences that are still out there somewhere, and so on. Like I said, I'm looking forward to more.