Inn Keeper's Book Club: Legends and Lattes - A Cozy DnD Fantasy

Finding your place in the world is a daunting feat — setting aside the things you do and making space for the things you are is a challenge the Skalds have been writing poems about for a thousand years. No more is this exemplified than in Travis Baldree’s book, Legends and Lattes, a “book of high fantasy and low stakes” in which Viv, a powerful Orc warrior, sets aside her life of adventure to open a cafe in a city where no one’s ever heard of coffee.

So-called “cozy fantasy” is nothing new. If you’ve ever seen a Studio Ghibli film, you are probably familiar with the trappings: a young heroine departs from home or separates from her old life and supports, and is thrown head-first into adulthood, responsibility, and coping with appropriately sized emotional challenges. She often overcomes her main obstacle by making, and relying, on new friends and, most importantly, believing in herself.

In Ghibli’s Kiki’s Delivery Service, Kiki has to literally learn to fly on her own. She leaves home young, confident, and full of life, only to be knocked down by the difficulties of adult life away from home for the first time. “Flying used to be fun, until I started doing it for a living,” she says. It’s a lesson nearly everyone learns at some point. But eventually, with the help of her friends, she finds joy and hope and love in her new life and remembers the power to fly was always within her. 

“But one mustn’t have played a tabletop role-playing game to enjoy it.”

Legends and Lattes, on the other hand, takes the cozy fantasy milieu and dresses it up as a sort of Dungeons-and-Dragons-themed epilogue — the life after plundering the dungeon and slaying the dragon — and manages to capture the heart of the game perfectly. But one mustn’t have played a tabletop role-playing game to enjoy it. 

Baldree himself says, right on the cover, “low stakes.” But that doesn’t mean a lack of conflict, drama, or driving force to move the book along. Rather, Baldree threads the needle between delivering just the right amount of tension, the right amount of friction, keeping Viv on her toes, while ensuring we know Viv’s greater character and virtues will carry her to success. 

After collecting the prize from her final quest, Viv sets out without so much as a goodbye to her long-time adventuring party. She takes her time to find the perfect place to open shop and is forced to navigate the complexities of shedding a violent past while simultaneously being perceived as violent and brutish.

It takes her life’s savings, but eventually, Viv buys and builds the perfect cafe, hanging her greatsword, Blackblood, above the counter, and quickly assumes the task of not just promoting coffee to people who’ve never heard of it, but running a business for the first time and reckoning with what it means to put down roots after a life on the road.

What follows is a riveting tale filled with mystery, magic, budding friendships, and unlikely romances. It’s something of an origin story for her new adventuring party — not of cunning rogues and dwarven warriors like is tradition, but of hard workers, steady companions, and warm outcasts — filled to the brim with rich, flavorful humor. The juxtaposition of a powerful warrior trading her armor for an apron and her sword for a coffee machine is hilarious every time it’s highlighted. Baldree wields the conventions of tabletop role-playing like a caricaturist, enlarging and magnifying all the tropes and cliches not just for laughs, but to draw on the warmth and familiarity.  

One of the single best comedic encapsulations of Viv’s new struggle is when she attempts to explain coffee to her carpenter, Cal:

Viv: It’s like hot water and beans.

Cal: That… doesn’t sound great.

Viv: Well there’s a version you can do with milk instead. It’s called a latte.

Cal: Why do they call it a latte?

Viv: I think it’s named after the barista who invented it, Latte Diameter. 

Cal: … what the hell is a barista? You can’t explain words with other words that need explaining.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a fantasy book if there’s no magic around. Trouble, drama, and obstacles all seem to be drawn to Viv, almost like a curse. It wouldn’t be a cozy fantasy if those things didn’t come with loveable friends attached to them. Though Viv is a powerful and capable woman, her greatest strengths, like many DnD parties around the table, are the friends she makes and the ways they help her unlock the deeper parts of herself. 

Retiring a Dungeons and Dragons character is almost as much a staple of tabletop role-playing as creating and playing them.

Retiring a Dungeons and Dragons character is almost as much a staple of tabletop role-playing as creating and playing them. Legends and Lattes manages to follow the question mark at the end of a long campaign to a thrilling new place — the adventure after the adventure — the joy of mundane life filled with a little hard work and a lot of happiness. 

It may just inspire you to think about your tabletop games a little differently.

Do you have a book recommendation for the Inn Keeper and their book club? Let us know in the comments!

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Grab your sword and keep on adventuring!

Thanks to our Inn at the End regular, Rett, for writing this week’s communication. You can find more about Rett and his motley interests and wide-ranging talents by visiting HERE

-The Inn Keeper-