Everyone has a character class. The world has rules. The meaning of life is to take on new quests and slay ever more deadly monsters in the pursuit of precious experience points. It has always been like this, and always will be. Fodrish Ablewright is a lowly Level 1 Commoner who knows he will never ascend the heights of the greatest Player Characters. But an attack on his home city not only inflicts a tragedy that shatters his world, but lays bare the strange powers underlying this system of rules, classes and XP. Stripped of even his sole Commoner level, Fodrish’s new status as a non-player character – an NPC – places him outside the rules governing everyone else, and into an adventure alongside mighty heroes and terrifying boss encounters. But Fodrish is surprised to learn what the strongest Player Characters are actually like, and his unusual status brings him to the brink of learning the world’s deepest-buried secrets even as he is forced to struggle for his very existence. NPC is a short fantasy novel with a dash of LitRPG and GameLit which is still accessible to general readers, from a long-established author of game-related fiction and tabletop RPGs.