With the mighty dragon Estragos slain, Billford and his loyal clan of battle-hardened warriors descend down the rocky hill into the beast’s nest. They’re surrounded by thousands of purple gooey eggs and vents in the craggy ground that spit flame at regular intervals.

Billford looks over the corpse, his hand stroking his ratty dwarven beard as he ponders Estragos’s lifeless eyes. He and his clan had prepared months for this battle; drawing out elaborate diagrams with sticks in the mud, rehearsing routines on the icy terrace in front of Stormwind, even forcing the clan’s most reverent priest to look within himself, to a play of shadow and misery that he will not likely return from.

It was all for this day. A day of victory.

The old dwarf Billford reaches deep beneath Estragos’s outstretched wing and pulls out a small amber ring. He holds it up to the sun, squeezing his left eye shut.

“It will instill fury in your heart,” he grumbles, “and protect thyself from scalding hot flame. It also seems to make your horses run slighty faster.”

Of the thirty-seven warriors that comprise Billford’s army, not one of them doesn’t raise their hand and ask for the ring. Not one of them has a good reason why they need it, and not one of them is willing to back down so someone more deserving can have it.

That was an excerpt from the third act of Ragestorm, a new novelization of World of Warcraft, written by Zack Pitter and Jordana Longswallow. Though the book is a decent, light read for about one hundred and twenty pages – filled with all that Blizzard lore we’ve come to love – the last eighteen pages are endlessly repetitive, with over thirty-two characters who had never before been mentioned all stating their cases for why they deserve the loot more than the others.

As Billford and his crew fight to make their case heard over the din of their fellow clan members, one can practically hear the eyelids drooping with boredom. It’s the most true to the game the novelizations have ever been, with the exception of the third book in the series, Let Me Tell You Why We Should Owe Money to the Tolkein Estate.

Six pages from the end, the debate rages on:

“I haven’t received a ring since Molten Core,” shouts Yeery, the clan’s most brutal rogue. “Look at this thing I’ve been using. You could find it on Hogzilla.”

Billford scratches his long beard and meditates on the issue.

“We had a system, and I’m the next in line with that system,” Goldwaiter says with a gnomish sneer. “If you want to ignore the system, that’s fine, but I’m going to find a clan that has a system that I think is fair.”

Billford rubs his eyebrows and says, “Please don’t threaten to leave the clan.”

“Just give it to someone. Please. I have to put the kids to sleep,” pleads Pooblik, the clan’s resto-druid.

Suffice to say, the issues are eventually resolved, and the entire clan either rushes back up the hill on their slightly faster horses or takes a portal to Dalaran, and while traveling through a labyrinthian bending of space and time, those with the greatest superiority in the clan whisper cruel and jealous messages to one another about their own. It’s as if all comradre vanished the minute the dagger was withdrawn from Estragos’s scaly green neck.

The moral of the story is muddled and lost, thanks in part to Pitter and Longswallows tireless pursuit to make the books as close to the game as possible, but one is actually able to pull something out of the wreckage in the end. The greatest bosses are not those who can destroy the most people the fastest, but those who have the greatest loot to offer, and provide ample opportunity for those who challenge them to destroy themselves from within.

That or just hit Greed and let the random number generator figure it out.