Title: The Necromantic Adventures of Lyra Heartstrings
Author: SaintAbsol
Rating: T
Genre: Comedy/Adventure
Status: WiP
Fandom: MLP: FiM
Pairings: Lyra/Bonbon
Summary: Necromancy gets a bad rep.
Oh, sure, some ponies like the whole cliche of the evil zombie master, pulling his puppet strings to make corpses dance and kill for their amusement. And yeah, you kinda do have to work with dead bodies a lot, and most ponies find that a bit creepy. Oh, and you learn a lot of spells to kill things and gain power from it.
But, come on, that doesn't mean all necromancers are bad... right?
Link: fimfiction.net

Slightly more standard fantasy Equestria than canon, with Bonbon taking on the role of a Paladin of Celestia, Ditzy being a lich, and Roseluck taking too many mushrooms and doing other druid things, this sets out a nice expansion to the MLP story.

The fact that most of this expansion is basically lifted from D&D isn't actually an issue, and is a lot better than what normally happens. As the story isn't a direct crossover, you don't need much knowledge of the other setting for things to make sense... And they do, unlike whatever cobbled together system people often come up with.

Also, there's a decent bit of alternate universe going on, but it's nicely dropped in piecemeal, rather than being dumped on us from the start. It makes the story feel more organic, but it also means that there's more changes than you think.

Now, it is marked as a comedy, but it isn't exactly funny. I didn't laugh out loud, although I might have had a small internal sensible chuckle. The author has the standard MLP like for lesbians, and for every character to make references to mild BDSM activities to which everyone else is grossed out by. Neither's a big issue, as we don't have many male characters at all from the show, and bondage is titilating enough to make readers keep going, without being too out there for the author, but neither adds much, really.

There's quite a few standard tropes, but the writing is pretty good, and the story seems interesting so far.

Which brings me on to the problem... The update rate. We've had 20k words in the last year, and only 3.5 of that in the last five months. The author has cancelled one of their other stories, finished a single oneshot, and everything is unfinished and probably abandoned. They haven't updated anything else since 2013 either, so it isn't that a new story caught them, they just haven't been writing for whatever reason. Every chapter has an author's note along the line of "whoops, sorry it took so long", so the author is aware of it. They've said they aim to finish it this year, but...

Overall, a good story. Not the best, but certainly worth giving a go. 3.5 rounded up to 4/5 from me.