Dungeons Just Wanna Have Fun: An Isekai LitRPG

Dungeons Just Wanna Have Fun, Book 1

By: Christopher Hall, Maxlex

Narrated by: Rachel Leblang

Length: 14 hrs and 1 min

Publisher's summary

A run-of-the-mill hero meets his match in the form of a dungeon that's not what it seems in this adventurous fantasy romance for fans of isekai LitRPG.

Kelsey never imagined she'd be transported to a different world and reborn as a sentient dungeon. And it's not like her disembodied soul had much choice in the matter . . .

Being a small dungeon on the outskirts of town in the backwaters of an unimportant kingdom isn't easy, but Kelsey's done her best to level up and become the best dungeon she can be: Digging a hole of ever-increasing depth and complexity. Creating an undead atmosphere that would make a necromancer proud. Spawning monsters and treasure. Killing adventurers. But lately, things have gotten a bit stale.

When a hottie of an adventurer staggers into her cave, Kelsey decides to grab life by the throat. With a newly formed avatar and a deal that makes things very difficult for her heroic new companion, this dungeon is going to do exactly what she wants for the first time in, well, forever— and have the best time doing it.

From the author of Phantasm: The first volume of the hit LitRPG fantasy series—originally released on Royal Road—now available on Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and Audible!

©2024 Christopher Hall (P)2024 Podium Audio

Ok with some flaws

First, fair warning, some examples from the story may be used, so spoiler warning.

Second, let's get this out of the way and I'm putting this at the top for readers/listeners who may be swayed by, as of the time that I'm typing this, two of the not-so-positive reviews who called this story a harem. It's not necessarily a harem. While yes, there are multiple (3 in this book) women that have an intimate relationship with one male MC, the relationships and dynamics of this unorthodox relationship don't really fit the HaremLit genre. I suspect that people who will call this a harem story are not readers of haremlit and that's sort of evident by the two reviews considering this a negative thing. But to get into why I don't consider it necessarily a harem story, I have to get more into some other issues with the story.

I'm not sure who the main character is really supposed to be because the story is told primarily from the male MC's perspective, that's Anton. After him, it vacillates between three main female characters. Anton's fiancé, Aris, a girl who has a crush on Anton named Suiliel, and a Fairy named Mel. It's very rarely, if at all told from Kelsey, THE DUNGEON's perspective. Yet, Kelsey is the driving force of everything that happens in the story. This is another reason I'd say this doesn't really fall in the realm of HaremLit and more in the realm of Polyamory. Anton doesn't really have any agency. The story gives the three female characters, more so two of them, far more agency and control over the direction of the story.

The harem also starts because Kelsey makes a deal with Anton to save his life (that much can be deduced in the blurb) but the deal puts sort of a restriction ONLY ON HIM that he cannot be further than 10 yards from Kelsey (or The Dungeon since Kelsey is the Dungeon and most of the action takes place through her avatar). Lots of HaremLit fans will be turned off because Anton is mostly dragged along according to Kelsey's whims and doesn't have any real agency or driving force on the story. He never makes any actual decisions. It's all Kelsey and/or the other two females making decisions for him and then he will agree to them. He does offer some pushback for Kelsey and helps start to humanize her a bit more than she was at the beginning of the story which leads me to my biggest issue with the story.

Characterizations. First, this is a net story that you can find on Royal Road if you type the title into your favorite search engine. For me, a lot of net stories brought over from online platforms that are written as stories forced to update weekly don't receive the attention they need to reformat the whole story into an adequate novel. Character development, in this case, is lacking. While some does happen, I felt certain things were obviously forced to happen because the author wanted them to. My biggest gripe was early on I felt that the author skipped a scene that would've allowed the reader/listener to connect more with Anton. There was a funeral scene for his parents that the author skipped to quickly get back to Kelsey's antics. Also, Aris, comes from a traditionalist conservative family, but the author has her easily manipulated...errr...talked into her first somewhat intimate experience outside of kissing, etc. to be with Kelsey, a female? She's also easily talked into allowing her fiancé to have a harem when that doesn't seem to be a common thing within this society although it's a rarity. About the only two characters that have strong characters are Kelsey and Suliel. Anton, as I said before, isn't even allowed by the author to stand strong on some of his principles since he's just dragged along by Kelsey's whims. It would've been nice to have him stand a bit sterner against her on things like killing haphazardly, manipulating people into deals, etc. Yes, some of that he does, but it's not as impactful as it should be because of the way Kelsey is written to just sort of blow things off even if she's listening to someone and taking in what they're saying. Then there's Kelsey.

My main gripe about her is that Hall/Maxlex commits one of my major pet peeves. When an author creates a character that supposed to be mentally older than they are and then sort of badly writes them as either a pop culture stereotypical old person or a sometimey young minded sometimey old minded person. In this case it's both. Kelsey is said to be decades old as a dungeon on this world, but then you need to add in the amount of time she lived in the modern world which isn't given in this installment. This makes Kelsey somewhere between possibly, at least 50 - 100+ years old mentally. I say this because as I said, the author uses what I consider badly written elderly in pop culture phrases - "Kiddo, You Kids, C'mon Kid, Kid this and that" in a patronizing way and not in a way that's funny or IMHO how actual elderly addresses youth in that way. Yes, they say it, but not as constantly as Kelsey said it. This was contrasted with what I considered her childish behavior and personality. Especially around sex. But mostly around how she very rarely seemed to consider or care about the feelings of those around her outside of the group of people she decided to embrace as her "partners." She'll come off as unlikable to some readers/listeners until a certain point in the story where she suddenly starts to care more about her "partners" most specifically Anton, but she will say that all of this, all of her actions, are ultimately selfish and done for her benefit.

Then there's the deal. At first I was fine with it, but then as the story goes along you come to realize that Kelsey put somewhat a far more restrictive deal on Anton than she did on others. Especially by the end and she makes a deal with two of the original enemies of Anton's town. One could argue that this was because of Anton's (and by the end Suliel's) influence on her, but it came off as callous. And even when the author had a scene where Anton was finally able to express his frustrations with Kelsey's trick, as I said, she pretty much blows it off in her own way and with her own retorts although she's supposed to be doing this confrontation with him to help their 'relationship.' Equally when she's confronted by others for her actions, she does the same thing, but back to the deal. She refuses to call it "enslavement" because Anton has a significant amount of freedom (other than not being able to be apart from her for long periods of time and further than 10 yards away or even with walls or barriers in between them). She also never stipulated a timeline for the deal to end because in her words, she didn't want there to be an end to it when she puts an ending to the deal of the two captured enemy soldiers. I should emphasize here that the word "deal" may make it seem something that's not so serious, but it's more like a magical binding, a supernatural contract that's enforced by some supernatural hidden force that prevents them from breaking their promises and sort of compels them to comply. I should also add that there was some implication that Kelsey had compulsion over Anton in the beginning where she would tell him to do a thing and he just did it, even if he didn't really want to. This was lost overtime in the narrative as I suspect the author decided to go a different direction with their relationship or something. Dunno.

Coming to a close, I should offer a trigger warning for some people. Although Anton in the cover art has somewhat a decent tan, the story itself speaks of the Zamarans (Anton's people) having significant dark skin, but they (mostly their young women) are often enslaved by the kingdom that's their enemy. Suliel herself is said to have extremely dark skin that's considered an exotic beauty among her social class. I suspect the author did this to contrast the nearby town against Kelsey's super white/pale skin. Dunno. While there's no issues of "slavery" discussed in the story outside of Anton considering his bonding with Kelsey to be that, I just thought I'd offer that warning for some people because the upcoming plot in the next book will revolve around that and saving the captives of the aforementioned conflict between Anton's people and the enemy kingdom.

Overall, the story isn't bad. I got through the whole thing. I'd caution against those who aren't fond of situational-slice-of-life stories (action and adventure stories that sort of meander about) then you might not be too interested in this. Or to put it more specifically, I'd caution those who aren't fond of stories that don't have an overarching plot. The plot that starts the story turns out to be a lie from Kelsey, I'll leave that at that. A plot does develop over halfway into the story with Suliel, I'll leave it at that. In between other overarching plots rise up. One is around Aris and one is around something else. By the end, the story is left on the cliffhanger of the Suliel, Aris, and other plot. Again, I remind you that this started as a net story that's pretty much still ongoing.

It was an entertaining story. I just wish that there was more depth to it. Especially Anton and he was written a bit more to be a balance to Kelsey. As it stands now by the end of the story, it seems Suliel will be more of a balance to Kelsey and Anton and Aris are just along for the ride. Perhaps, Hall/Maxlex intnds to explore this more as the story goes further, but the main problem here was the character depth and relationships for me. Most of it was drowned out by Kelsey's antics, dragging Anton and forcing the meandering plot along until the aforementioned plot took hold and at that point that's when the story got far more interesting for me. I get some of these stories aren't meant to be super serious, but I feel when serious elements are inserted into them then the author can't fall back on the excuse of "this is just a light hearted story, don't think too hard about it." So, not a bad story, not great, but your mileage may vary.

Quite a book, nice story.

a very nice book with some good story. There are some smut in it but nothing too bad. can't wait for book 2.

A horny dungeon ensites a civil war

This book had me confused as to what I was actually listening to. There's some good political and action stuff going on but then some badly written porn randomly skatted amongst it. If you like dungeon core I would give it a miss.

A Weird Harem

So this story takes a different path from the usual dungeon core book. MC is the dungeon with a female human Avatar body. She forms a contract with a young man on the brink of death from there she forces him into a weird harem with all the girls in his life. There are several chapters that are just sex scenes. the other story beats play as a political drama and some litrpg proggresion.

Shockingly well written for a morally compromised story

Though the story is very well written and has a lot of fun to it, it is also very detailed about sexual behavior in more than three places. It's not especially vulgar and it could be used as a bit of entertainment and information source for someone just marrying for their wedding night. After all, that is pretty much what the main characters do. They all get married with three (two, by the laws of humans) wives and one man. The dungeon core is the source influence of all promiscuity and the idea of polygamy. Though, it appears that everyone, meaning everyone, has little regard for actual marriage before sex. In this one way it is morally compromised, so any other form of immorality is secondary or less. The characters all care about each other and the story has a bit of intrigue, Adventure, and does feel a little bit fitting to the Epic tag that was given to it.

Despite my warning that the story is morally compromised it is actually very well written and not offensive other than the fact that some will dislike the contents being so detailed about sexual behavior. Since the corruption seems to come mostly from a sunlight amoral dungeon it doesn'tfeel like an attempt to seduce the listener.