Derelict

Book 1, Repel Boarders (A LitRPG, Dungeon Core Adventure)

By: Dean Henegar

Narrated by: Jack Voraces

Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins

Publisher's Summary

One captain’s death might turn out to be humanity’s best chance at survival.

As humanity expands into the stars, it discovers the universe is a hostile place.

When Captain Slater of the USS Franklin is assigned to a deep-space reconnaissance mission, his ship is destroyed by an unknown alien race.

Much to his surprise, Slater isn’t killed - he’s transformed. He is now a “derelict” - a consciousness bound to his old vessel. 

Slater must quickly adapt to his new existence before raiders, alien armies, and mysterious forces seek to destroy him for a second and final time.

©2020 Dean Henegar (P)2020 Dean Henegar

GAMER BOOK / CROSS COUNTRY

All in all this is a decent story. It would be great if you're a gamer because lots of the dialog sounds like someone in a video game.
Next odd thing is, what were the sound engineers thinking??? Okay, the whole book is about US Navy and US Army and USA stuff but they have a British guy reading it, putting various Great Britain accents on US military personnel. Very weird. Casting guys need to read the book or do a better job.
Caught myself ff thru the high pitch annoying gamer dialog of statistics for the derelict. Other than that it's a decent book but one of the few I'd recommend reading over listening to.

Disappointing but not Intolerable

I checked this series out because I liked the Limitless Lands series, but I didnt really appreciate that in this series the RPG elements of Limitless Lands had to be grafted onto reality, a task Dean fails at pretty miserably in a lot of spots. Plot holes are deliberately questioned by Slater (MC) and then deliberately given very unsatisfying answers by an entity (PIXIE) that itself is a plot hole. Particularly, any explanation involving the "Council" felt like Dean saying "because I want to tell it this way shut the heck up." Eventually I tuned out all explanations and this made the story shallow but tolerable.

Be ready to suspend every last scrap of your disbelief to make it through this.

Also Jack uses the same voices in all his books and they're getting grating. His "Imp" voice in particular needs some shades of variety.

no stupid mc

I have listen to alot of litrpg audiobooks and both the story + narration is really good.

I was first a little sceptical about the space genre and dungeon core mash-up but Dean Henegar really delivered!

Author is lazy and ignorant

The “Admiral” leading our manned fleet into the unknown is a pacifistist and a civilian JUST to show the contrast in the MC and him. It’s straight up ridiculous and pathetically lazy.

Original and Great Lit-RPG

When I was a teenager I played table top war games at my local comic book shop. One of my favorite was one that involved having a 4 man squad clear a space ship of xenos. Listening to this gave me pleasant flashback of playing in that comic book shop and all the fun I had. Definitely an original take on the dungeon core lit/rpg genre that is enjoyable and evolves into a very entertaining story. Jack Voraces, an amazing narrator, does an exceeding great job of putting you into the story and portrays each character distinctly with a great range of voices. This is one of my favorite lit/rpg of this year, worth a listen.

I received a free copy of this book for review purposes at my request, my review is voluntary and unbiased.

Painfully bad accents

I saw another review complain about the accents. I hoped once the captain had been transformed into the Derelict there wouldn’t be any other characters and I would saved from the painful narrator. Alas, no luck. Had to return this. I was curious to learn how this became LitRPG but the performance was impossible.

Fantastic

I enjoyed Dean Henegar's Limitless Land books, so I was excited to see a new series from him, and I wasn't disappointed!
This is a fun different take on dungeon core series, I'm very excited for the next book.

The narration is excellent as Jack just continues to improve, each performance is better than the last.

A total must have

This is a must have, it’s quite enjoyable, really a pleasure to listen to on a drive, though I found myself driving slower than I normally would simply to have more listening time for this, all in all 10/10 recommended for anyone interested in the LitRPG genre and anyone even remotely familiar to the Dungeon Core genre

Fun Story

I never thought of taking a video game and putting it to story!
Twas a great surprise to find it worked so well.

Great book!

Hated for it to end. Nice beginning for a dungeon litrpg. Please get the next out soon.

Interesting take on a dungeon core book

The typical dungeon core happens on a planet BUT this book takes that idea one step further. This book is about a dunegon core in space! It brings both fantasy, litrpg and sci-fi together seemelessy!

This book is fun and engaging and the MC makes some interesting decisions. Its always a bonus when the MC has a brain! I really enjoyed this take of a dungeon core book and look forward to book 2!

Final note the narrator did a fantastic job with his character voices, he really brings the story alive!

Absolutely awful.

Within 2 minutes I junked this for a refund. Generic, amateur writing and the worst narration I have heard on Audible - a disgrace.

cool concept marred by poor writing

I enjoy and I am familiar with the LitRPG genre and Dungeon core adventures but I am afraid I could not enjoy this book.

The writing is very simple (which is fine on its own) but so are the characters and their motivations. The characters hardly wonder what is going on, why they are doing what they are doing. The MC is supposed to be an honorable and moral space captain, is attacked by an unknown (alien?!) enemy but has no inclination to find out what happened to his crew, his fleet, his navy or even just any human beings.

The author often writes lines where the characters appear to 'reason' as if they were a 10 year old.
Example from chapter 8: 'The main character thought this made sense.' 'This makes sense' said the MC.

The author seems so enthralled by his idea of what a dungeon core is, that he has forgotten to build a world around it.
This enthrallment might be the reason the author seems to list the 'stats' of the dungeon after every small bit of progression.
'The MC found scrap! better list off all lvls, mobs, health, weapons of every item in the dungeon!'

The entire first three hours of the book feel like an mandatory unskipable tutorial cutscene in a dungeon keeper video game,
while the reader/listener is just waiting for something to happen. Then just as the MC is betrayed you hope this will propel the story into some kind of new direction, but NOPE, nothing even happens to the betrayer.

I just kept wanting the MC to explore, wonder about something, think about its situation or even display any real emotion.
The writing is not up to the task.

The narration is not great, but not what holds this title back.

I kind of want a refund of my credit point for this :\

Surprisingly Addictive

Well I love my Sci Fi space opera’s. This is one to enjoy. The plot is uniquely fun, and very enjoyable. It feels open enough to get a good 7 books after. Let’s hope so. 😊

Good entry for the series

I should preface this by saying it was a gifted book from the narrator however the opinions are my own. Also possible spoilers.

I really enjoyed the book itself. It's a different take on the fantasy races as well as another LITRPG book that I can zone out to as I work. It's not to wordy and very easy to follow. If you enjoyed The Gam3 or System Apocalypse then chances are you will enjoy this.

For the narration I have super high standards and I think Jack Voraces does a good job. No one is going to be RC Bray however he is not boring and monotone like many audiobook narrators and I would check out both more of this series as well as anything else he does.

Strategic game review?

As the story passed by it turned out to be a story, your annoying friend would tell about his progress in Dungeons and Dragons.
Not the fast way you would share with your other friends, it's the nerdy, painstaking and 'too much details' way, where you kinda loose track with the story, just to, occasionally be drawn back to listen to him, because some of the events he is describing is actually interesting.
But mostly he's just blabbering about the way he upgrades his character by researching this and that, and sometimes even by using a cheat code.
You really gotta be a HUGE fan of D&D, if not, don't start to listen.
I never played D&D but I could recognize the slow progress for our main character in the story, to be very similar to the slow progress you gain in other strategic games, to first gather resources, then use them to research progress in the lab.
Only in the end of this book, in the credits, you will learn the motivation for the author, why he finds it amusing to mix Dungeons and Dragons with scifi.
It's unnatural and shouldn't have been done. It's like putting nutella on your steak. Leaves you with a bad taste of wasting a good steak and a good portion of nutella.
I'm outa here!

Didn’t return it but..

Was tempted to return. It’s almost as watching commentary of rpg game. Character development and story arc are not up to the potential. End was bit more interesting, but I will not buy the sequel:(

Well that happened

Basically written, poorly performed.

Not a bad idea but the most I can say is “meh”

A brilliant narration!

This book had a brilliant narration with Jack Voraces but I still found the book to be lacking in places and although I liked the concept of it the execution could have been a bit better. I would recommend it to anyone who knows they really liked dungeon core LitRPGs.

A recommendation by a LitRPG noob

For starters, this was my first LitRPG novel, meaning I did not know exactly what I was getting myself into. I came across it purely because there was a bigger than usual interest for the next book in this series at Reddit.
Without having any experience with this genre or even with role-playing games in general, I really enjoyed the book! So I would recommend not being too hung upon the LitRPG tag and giving it a go. It was fun and easy listening and I went through it very fast. In fact, I pressed play for the second book, the minute this one ended!
There were some parts that became a bit repetitious, but as can be read from above they did not bother me too much. The narration by Jack Voraces was nicely done and balanced out the repetitious parts as I actually enjoyed the voice acting for these portions even though I did not enjoy the content. Some of the accents took some getting used to in the beginning and I needed some time getting the hang of them so they would not be too distracting (this often happens to me at the start of new books as English is not my native language).
Overall, I enjoyed the content and narration. Would recommend!