Text Adventure: World of Warcraft: Rise of the Horde by Christie Golden

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It is time for another episode of Text Adventure, our videogame book club, which this week saw Alice, Brendy and myself joined by Alice's previously-foreshadowed friend Tim to judge Rise of the Horde, which answers the question nobody was asking about why the orcs showed up on Azeroth to kill everybody.

In keeping with this season's attempt to focus on halfway readable books it actually arrives with a decent pedigree: Christie Golden has written dozens of books in original and licenced universes, penned the the 2000 novel that first introduced Warcraft regular Thrall, and wrote this book partially in an effort to earn money from her debilitating WoW habit. It nevertheless suffers from two significant and related problems: it has to fit into an existing game narrative, and that game narrative is that the orcs committed unprovoked genocide.