Mini Review: The Dark Profit Saga by J. Zachary Pike (books 1-3)

I recently read the third book in The Dark Profit Saga series of books. I was sure I wrote reviews of the first two, but apparently I didn’t. So here’s an aggregate one. This series of books started out as a kind of comedic fantasy take on the Great Financial Crisis, with the book Orconomics. The books stick to a standard cliché D&D fantasy world (orcs, goblins, halflings, nagas, gnolls etc) but inject our world’s financial system and society into it. So, for example, quest runs are financed by investors in exchange for portions of the loot. This in turns means there is a market for stuff like dragon hoard futures, insurance, derivatives (CTO are “collateralized threat obligations“) etc etc. The first book’s subtitle is “a satire” and it’s a pretty harsh one. The criticism of our economic reality is hard and transparent. The criticism of our society is just as bad: there’s a downtrodden population, the shadowkin, which can be killed and looted, unless they have special papers to be…