Golem Dungeon

Orb Keeper # 1 LitRPG

De: S P Andrews

Narrado por: Miles Meili

The goblin horde is coming, driven by a dark Sorcerer eager to drive the dwarven race into extinction.

Reborn as a dungeon core inside a fabled gem known as the Brisingstone, Bowen vows to use this new life to protect what is left of his people and avenge those who could not be saved.

With new-found powers, Bowen learns to create golems of stone and clay to act on his behalf. With half-remembered mining skills, Bowen rekindles the forge of his ancestors and, under the guidance of his new Dungeon fairy, teaches his golems to create metal automatons of war.

In a race against time, Bowen and Freya, his new dungeon fairy, must fend off incursion, rescue survivors and defend the dwarfish homeland. Because if they fail...the dwarves will be no more.

©2021 S P Andrews (P)2021 Audible, Ltd

A Great book held back by editing

This is a great dungeon book held back only by the mighty need of a continuity editor. far too often I found myself thinking "Didn't they just say this in the last chapter? Are they repeating themselves just with slightly different language?" at other times things happened slightly out of order the characters reference something that doesn't occur until a little bit later.

Slow and Frustrating

This book has an excellent premise, but is dragged down and beaten by poorly written characters, a vague and ill defined progression system, poor and frequent puns, and the most frustrating part, a complete lack of any sense of scale.

1) The characters:
Let’s get this out of the way immediately, Freya sucks. She’s a terribly written character. We are supposed to like Freya, but she comes off as manipulative, narcissistic, stupid, stubborn, and almost purposefully unhelpful. She’s supposed to guide new dungeons and teach them what they need to know to be effective, but rarely gives Bow info that he desperately needs and often cites that she’s just too tired right now. And then she wakes up mad and shouts at Bow for not knowing things that she didn’t tell him. The most egregious of these events is right when they first meet. She’s tired after running which is acceptable, but wakes up and shouts at Bow for using almost all of his mana to carve out his first few chambers (which she suggested he do) because apparently using all of it would instantly kill both of them. That seems like a very important thing to tell somebody to avoid an accidental murder suicide from doing too much cosmetic work on his cave. Things like this happen constantly with Freya and she is constantly flip-flopping between being showing Bow with praise for doing something and telling him that he’s stupid and reckless for doing something else without offing any helpful tips or criticisms.

2) The progression system
Gaining XP and leveling up is the bread and butter of this genre. But how strong everyone is and should be at any given point in time is totally unknown. The dungeon gains its first few levels by killing rats, which is fair and a good place to start, but outside of that every gain seems random and any actual increases in strength seem basically pointless. At the point where I’m at in the book Bow has already advanced a full tier, but seems just as weak as he was to start. In addition to this, the author sets in place a standardized progression system based on tiers of strength, but using that to judge anyone seems incredibly pointless. A great example of this is when Bow who was still in the Earth Tier was able to kill several adventurers who were nearly all one or more tiers above him, and each tier represents several levels. Even discussing it is difficult and confusing which in and of itself is an excellent argument for throwing it away.

3) Puns
Constant, bad, annoying. Puns are fine, I enjoy puns, but nearly all of them in this book are either forced, don’t make any sense, or break the mood when they’re delivered.

4) Scale
This is easily the most frustrating part of the book outside of the many continuity errors. Let’s start with size, Bow’s first mobs are golems which he calls gingerbreads because of their size and shape. As an adult male, a gingerbread man might come up to my ankle. A really big one might come up to the bottom of my calf. They work well when fighting the rats at the beginning. I imagine even the rats were larger, but that’s exactly why we’re discussing this. The gingerbreads are made of clay and dirt and can’t be more than 6 inches tall. It’s stated in the book that goblin daggers are too heavy for them to carry, so how on earth can they kill anything? Adventurers are slashing at these guys with swords, but it should be literally more effective to stomp on them. They throw rocks at people, but they’re too weak to lift daggers so I can’t see their projectiles being larger or striking with any more force than throwing marbles or golf balls if you want to be really generous. An annoyance maybe, but 0% dangerous. If this is the scale that the world is working on then every dungeon must be absolutely minuscule. It makes no sense! Next is the scale of time. It’s lightly referenced that Bow spend months by himself as a tiny dungeon before Freya came along, but it’s unclear how much time has passed since then. He’s supposed positioned halfway up a mountain in the dead of winter, but people just come and go constantly. At the point I’m at, a person warns Bow that “The Sorcerer’s men are coming and will be here in seven days.” That chapter ended and the next one began with them showing up. I don’t even know if that was a poor sense of time scale or if it was a continuity error. And finally the power scale, which I went into previously. I feel that it’s important to bring back up though because the author puts heavy emphasis on the power of tiers through Freya. There are many limits that Bow has until he tiers up, but yet he is easily and almost accidentally able to kill people who are multiple tiers higher than he is. In fact, at one point it’s said that adventurers are basically all physical fighters until they reach Silver tier. But from what I’ve seen, they must not even gain stats or anything when they level up, everyone at every tier is equally as easy to kill as anyone else and none of them seem to care about their own lives or the lives of others. All of this culminates to the frustrating scale of emotions. Specifically fear. Bow is constantly assuming that people are going to be afraid or put on edge by his tricks and traps, but that’s just unreasonable at the least and totally stupid at the best. The worst part is that he’s always correct, but only because the author says he is. It’s kind of a silly statement to make, but my reasoning makes sense here. Bow devises a Slip Trap, the idea is that adventurers walk near it and blind themselves with their own light reflected back at them and then while blinded slip into a hole. It’s a fine idea, but then a Gold tier adventurer nearly slips into it. Compared to this adventurer Bow’s dungeon is a joke, none of his mobs can even touch this guy, but he drops his sword and gets shaken by a slippery surface? Why? Even if he fell into the hole, he’s a gold tier adventurer, he should be able to easily take care of whatever is at the bottom and then just climb back out. Regardless, this man should not be afraid of a slippery surface.

good for the price

over all a good story. the fairy character was annoying as she seemed to me to be abusive/manipulative and often changed her position after the fact. so yes buy, just enjoy the good parts.

meh.

Slow, boring. The scene where 6 finger shows up is especially annoying. His whiny voice is awful. The other goblin voices are nails on a chalk board. Freya is an idiot. They didn't learn anything.
And you can't make the reader suffer through characters being bullied or tortured, and make the bad guys that easy to hate, unless you're Protagonist is going to make them pay and deliver some kind of vengeance.

decent story but dumb characters

characters are just too stupid to live. the amount of times they go oh no I don't know what to do is ridiculous.

great story keep up the amazing work.

the reader was fantastic and the story had its good turns that made you want to keep going on and sometimes on the edge of your seat

Protagonist has self confidence of Eor

Every action and dialogue of the protagonist starts with "I guess", "I suppose", "Oh well", "As you say". The plot is the most miserable, pessimist, unskilled, cowardly dwarf flees the genocide of his people and is rewarded with the opportunity to be a dungeon core and then is dominated by a dungeon fairy.

Good book but needs warning. Other issues too.

I've liked the book and the genre it's in. however it needs a very dire warning

"Captain, quickly raise pun shields! Massive punpedos inbound!"
Other reviews are correct too. It needed a better editor. way to many contradictions every few chapters.

Soooooo Slooowww

I was 4 hours in before the dungeon even made his first mob... like what? The characters acr like idiots having to go over the same stuff more than once and then say it a different way and then at the end summarize what they just went over....

The narrator was pretty good though.

ya

world building was good narration was good just took forever to get anywhere in the story there were a lot of side conversations and silliness that became boring