Vampires of the Transvaal

By: Gorg Huff

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

This, the 3rd book in the Steampunk Vampires series, is also the 5th book in the Game of Freedom series. The WarSpell multiverse is a large and varied multiverse full of mostly earthlike worlds connected by the Merge World. In this book the first cross connection between game worlds is shown. As John Graham is contacted by the recovering Vampire Missy Blackwell to open a route from Twir’s World to the Steampunk world of Missy’s birth.
The Steampunk world is a world of vampires and werewolves where magic is used to make steam technology work better. It is also a world of the late nineteenth century but a nineteenth century with steam cars and dirigibles, and since the Merge, a world with magically enhanced airplanes and other devices.
Twir’s world is, in terms of technology, more in line with the age of discovery and the time of the conquistadors. It is also a world steeped in war and age-old prejudice.
Hernando Francisco de Montoya y Cortez, who merged with Frank Johnson, and is now better known as Count Southland, needs guns and airplanes and the other tech he can get from the Steampunk world, if he is going to protect his people, orc and human alike, and bring freedom and justice to all of them, in a world where most people think of orcs as monsters.
King Edward of Angland needs raw materials from Twir’s world and tech from the Merge world but more than that he needs unoccupied lands so that the Empire on which the sun never sets can let its colonies go without losing its standing in the world.
Meanwhile the Zulu war has started and the Boers are revolting in more ways than one.
Twir wants a large diamond that has been marinading in magic for millennia and the as yet undiscovered Cullinan diamond is just the thing. Add in add hock rescue missions and the Ark of the Covenant and life for our heroes gets a little complicated, but it all fits together in the end.

Decent story

Mispronounced words make virtual voice quite irritating.
Stilted weird cadence can be ignored but weird inconsistent pronunciation totally blows up immersion in the story.