The Land of the Undying

Dark Elf Chronicles, Book 1

Shari is a med student, months away from being a doctor. Mace is a coder on his first day of an exciting new job. When the world comes to a sudden and horrifying end, none would have expected them to be among the few survivors.

Hyper-aggressive undead zombie creatures hunt anything living on the surface, where even the grass and trees can kill you. Hiding underground is safe, but not much of a life. Their only escape is a virtual world of magic and monsters where Shari can use her healing skills, and Mace can focus on something other than his fears.

But Shari is a light elf, and Mace is a drow. Their people are ancient enemies, and neither would be welcome in the other's world. Still they strive to come together in the game, while they scavenge for food and fight to stay alive in the real world.

The odds are against them, and their food will eventually run out. Is their best hope for survival to find a way to upload themselves to the game permanently?

©2018 Dave Willmarth (P)2018 Dave Willmarth

I’m pretty stingy with my 5 star reviews...

And while I’m not sure that this is technically the best LitRPG book I’ve listened to on audible, I can say that I’m experiencing the same feeling I had after listening to The Land for the first time...

...I am feeling bereft that the book has ended, and I’m seconds away from going on Patreon to donate money to this author to get the next book recorded already!

I will breathlessly await the sequel to this book. For those of you out there like me who just can’t trust a highly reviewed LitRPG book on Audible to be well-written, or even edited, this is one where the positive reviews can be believed. It’s definitely made the list of LitRPG series that I comb the “coming soon” list for.

Tops on that list are: Chaos Seeds, The Gam3, The Dark Herbalist, The System Apocalypse, and the first five books of Alterworld, plus a whole bunch of other series that only have one or two books in them so far.

My favorite LITRPG

I'm loving this series. I appreciate that the reason for getting into the game is more of an escape than an accident.

it truly pulled me right in from the get go

I loved every thing about this book the story the charm of the characters the voice acting

Not bad but it had some flaws too

It wasn't a half bad book, I have been through something like 15 litRPG series now and I would say maybe this would be a middle of the pack experience. I think there were things that were done well but I also felt like there were several complaints on my end as well. I am writing this review after having listened to the second book as well so this is sort of my assessment of the series so far:

Flaws:
1) I found the actual gameplay to be lacking which was surprising to me. Normally I hate the IRL moments of litRPG books that have some sort of video game but it was actually the gameplay I found underwhelming. I didn't mind the character building and character interactions but the actual mechanitcs of the game and combat itself felt very generic and boring to me.
2) The IRL situation in these books is actually a little over the top. Its post apocolyptic but the acutal situation of the world leaves me to strongly question how the main character is still alive. It seems a little flawed as it sounds like if you breath air you would just die so I found that a little questionable. I think I would have been a little more generous as to how many people were still alive or maybe scale back the global disaster on how exactly it works because my understanding of it makes it sound like nobody anywhere would ever have even a remote chance of being alive still. It sounds like you would literally need a completely closed system recycling air and water to even maybe still be alive.

Good:
1) IRL situation I found compelling and interesting. I constantly wanted to see and hear more of the real world rather than the game.
2) The NPC to character interactions was quite good. I really enjoyed the feeling of this game being sort of a social lifeline for these people in a super shitty situation.

Overall, it wasn't half bad. The game mechanics seem completely bland to me though. If this was a real video game that we could play the only redeeming elements of it would be the NPCs and the fact that its an immersion game. I really love post apocalyptic content though and I did overall enjoy the IRL happenings of this book quite a bit more than I did the video game parts.

Awesome book

Love this book. Basically two adventures involving in game and in real world and both are interesting. Very well written and the narration is as always incredible.