God of Gnomes

God of Gnomes, Book 1

De: Demi Harper

Narrado por: Adam Sims

What kind of god would you be? Deep beneath the earth, Corey finds himself reborn as a God Core - a sentient crystal with unusual powers. His new worshippers? A colony of incompetent gnomes, scratching out an existence in their underground grotto.

If that wasn’t bad enough, Corey soon realises that his gnome denizens are about to become extinct. They are threatened by groups of blundering adventurers and abducted by raiding kobolds to be sacrificed to their own dark god: an ancient, mysterious foe who does not take kindly to Corey’s arrival.

With the aid of his helper sprite and a menagerie of newly evolved creatures, Corey must protect and guide his gnomes until they can stand on their own two feet. But the kobold army is on the march, led by his new rival’s powerful avatar.

It’s a hard rock life, being a God Core. Inspired by the god sims such as Black & White, dungeon managers like Dungeon Keeper and civ builders like Age of Empires, God of Gnomes is the first in a new generation of LitRPG and Dungeon Core stories - God Core.

©2019 L M Hughes (P)2019 Audible, Ltd

It gets better, but never gets great

The book starts very weak, with an unlikeable main character and constant info dumps. It does get better but never gets to be amazing. I finished it but am not planning on reading book 2.

Be Kind To Yourself, Get this book.

Let me begin this review by saying I'm familiar and a fan of Dungeon Core series, However this is so much more than that.

God of Gnomes rewards you for your previous fantasy knowledge without making you feel left out for not knowing it.

Pros:
Engaging story
Likeable civilization the god core rules over.
Understandable powers.
NO STAT SHEETS! (Even in fantasy Dungeon Core these are far too common)

Pro/Con:
Very few talking characters so the voices for each are very distinct.
Most of the story is the litteral gods eye view of a civilization.
This is a small story never reaching farther than a large cave in a small part of the world. Not much outside lore is told or needed.

Cons:
The reason in the middle of the book for making our two protagonists split up feels a bit... forced to say the least. Dealing with a species I.E. cores, whom many can be evil, simply calling something an "Evil Race" feels a bit out of character for who this scares away.

Seriously, it's engaging and interesting, I was just as on my seat about different villagers possibly dying or being in danger as the titular god of gnomes. If you like the civilization building parts of 4X videogames and have a respect for the little things, you'll be doing yourself a disservice if you do not pick this up.

Good Story.

Honestly I almost stopped listening in the first 10-15 chapters because of the MC’s attitude, but I held out till the end and I am happy to say that the back half of the story made up for the rough start.
I am looking forward to listening to the next book when it comes out.

It was fun

The story was good. it reminded me of playing civilization or sims. the main issue I had with this was lack of characters, it's just the core, the wisp, and the antagonist (for the most part). While I enjoyed the voice of the antagonist, the wisp's voice is grating and can be hard to listen to. The core voice is fine, nothing special. overall it's pretty fun.

Gnomes

I really enjoyed this book. The narrator did an excellent job and really brought a lot of personality to Corey through vocal intonation. The character starts off kind of sulky and uncaring and you hear them evolve over time through the narration.
As a long time fan of Dakota Krout, I loved the reference to Dungeon Born and it reminded me a lot of that book, but less punny and more serious. Like I was seriously saddened by the losses incurred throughout the battles with the other core, Grimrock.
I also thought the limitations on Corey added a lot to the drama throughout. Even though Corey is a God core, he can only create so many monsters and not quickly.
As soon as I finished this one I bought the next book and can't wait to see what happens next. :)

A refreshingly different approach to dungeon core

Dungeon core tends to be repetitive and derivative. This managers to stay true to the genre while bringing something different.

its ok

it's ok and that is the best I can say about it. Much better books out there wouldn't buy it again but not bad enough that I will return it

Couldn’t put it down!

I really enjoyed this book! Author and narrator together made this book a joy to listen to. I finished it in a day and a half and was sorry to reach the end. Hopefully a sequel isn’t too far behind.

The Story was very well played

Looking forward to more with the series. Very well written and the performance was wonderful

As god is my witness

God of gnomes is a step away from the standard dungeon core novels. It does a lot of things to differentiate itself from those books while keeping some of the, no pun intended, core elements of the dungeon genre. This is its strength and biggest weakness.
The book had a few issues which I’ll go into first. My main problem was that I didn’t find the MC very likable. Normally, I would overlook such a thing if there were other characters that could override the characterization of the MC, but there was no one that could do that. Why? Because we were never allowed to get to know the gnomes beyond a superficial “Here is the role they play in the village” glance. Yes, some personality shone through, but it was all thumbnail type stuff. I get that Harper/Hughes didn’t want to overload characters into the book and focus solely on the core, but when your book is basically about town building it would have been nice to see the villagers go about their day to day lives and how they viewed their god. We got more from the rando adventurers than we did Gneil the gnome, Corey’s high priest. This is because Corey cannot directly intereact with his faithful. The only real “character” we get that has any personality is the god’s Avatar, who also does not speak. It was really frustrating and I have to wonder if Harper dislikes dialogue.
Also, the core didn’t really have much going on aside from directing the gnomes in a manner that felt a lot like the original World of Warcraft games where you directed your people to cut trees, explore, and build stuff. In fact, that was exactly the characterization level you get. As a god I would have liked to see Corey affect his environment by building traps, false passages, and mazes to confuse their kobold invaders. All we got were evolutions of various monsters, and even that aspect was limited in both number and evolutions.

In spite of what I just said, I did enjoy the book. It had a lot of good qualities, and did set itself apart in a very familiar genre. The gnomes were a good choice, as they come across as about the most helpless humanoids go, and the dungeon monsters were fun. I just wish we had more. Hell, I should have known the tone of the book would be mild just by the badger on the cover. It’s an English badger, and those are made for tea parties more than anything. American badgers are all attitude and teeth.
Overall, the book does have some flaws, but it is interesting, it kept my interest and I would read the next book in the series when it comes out. Final score 7.4 stars. Thankfully, there is a lot of room for improvement.