In Arth, corporate interests claim a monster’s hoard and sell it off to plunder funds long before the Heroes’ Guild gets round to killing the beast. That’s the premise of Orconomics, the first book of J. Zachary Pike’s Dark Profit Saga. It’s a well-executed satire of capitalism running amok, worth every word. I read it in July and went straight on to Son of a Liche. I’d tell you to do the same.
The book gives each fantasy convention a financial counterpart. Heroes need a licence from the guild, which ranks them by points. Firms like Goldson Baggs run the funds. Orcs, goblins, and kobolds have to apply to become Noncombatant Paper Carriers so that heroes won’t kill and loot them. NPC is a role-playing pun that also names the paperwork deciding who heroes may hunt.
Gorm Ingerson has fallen about as far as a hero can and kept his sense of honour. He’s a dwarf who lost his licence and his clan twenty years before the book opens. He gets by robbing adventurers. He still sticks up for an undocumented goblin. The goblin becomes his squire. Gorm stays loyal to him, and to the party of misfits around them, which is a lot of why he’s so lovable.
I read it as the 2008 housing crisis. Pike told Fantasy Hive that after losing his job that year he spent a lot of time reading and listening to coverage of the financial crisis. He doubts many publishers would have looked at a book about orcs and goblins “lampooning a housing crisis” before it had an audience. So the reading isn’t only mine. I don’t know whether the satire is generic enough to always be true.