The ranking system is based on specific skills in the “magic” they use. Ideas that were presented in passing while explaining the world itself are revisited and some even become plot points (the very ending itself is an example of this). My God, the world building is fantastically well thought out. Ultimately the real star of this story was the world building. Towards the end his story somehow becomes the most interesting part, but it was a mix before that. He buys the land the dungeon was found on, getting lucky because it was effectively worthless before they found it.ĭale grows and fights over time, but his story gets a little repetitive in the middle. His goal is to become skilled and a long-lived guild member. He’s a blue core, meaning he should have an affiliation with the water element, but for some reason he is able to consume other elements just as easily. The story follows Cal, a dungeon core who becomes sentient of his existence. It had the power scaling and leveling I love to see in books like this, with the added bonus of including traps, monster placement, and the layout of dungeons. This is the first book in the Divine Dungeon series. I’m less familiar with that genre though, so I can’t speak too much about it.īut enough about the genre/subgenre at this point. The cultivation elements are present, as in the character actively meditate to grow their powers and are actually called “Cultivators”. The light novel versions often use JRPG mechanics and ideas taken from that to build dungeons, but the western versions are usually either that or the Dungeons and Dragons variant. Usually the main character is either the dungeon master, demon king, or (as is this case) the dungeon itself. What this means, essentially, is that it’s about a dungeon being built up over the course of the story. Yes, because everything in the world must be overly complicated, litRPG divides further into dungeon builders as a subgenre. This second one being a “dungeon builder”.

This is the second of the litRPG books I’ve reviewed this month.

Dungeon Born by Dakota Krout