Monster Core

Dominic Thompson becomes an infernal dungeon core and is given one task: make his dungeon renowned throughout the world by killing adventurers in the most gruesome ways possible.

With this new power, he infuses his soul with a Tainted Elf avatar so he can walk among mortals. To become the greatest, he must make the other dungeon cores submit to him. And that means shattering their jeweled hearts.

Or seducing their avatars.

Lucky for Dom, the dungeon’s avatars are beautiful monster girls. But they’re also the fiercest warriors in the realms, and there’s a fine line between murder and seduction.

This dungeon core story contains light LitRPG and harem elements.


My Opinion: 343 pages, $4.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited

The actual dungeon building portion of the story doesn’t appear until after the 30% mark, but once it does it’s pretty well done. The story is pretty basic: Dungeon builds and designs traps, someone dungeon dives, and repeat. The dungeon grows in complexity and minion variety and the people that come through are harder to kill. Simple, yet good action.

On the game mechanic side things are pretty basic, if intentionally skewed by the author. Collect resources from the mountain, or from killing creatures to fuel the creation of traps and monsters. The variety of traps and monsters isn’t that great, but they do their job. I did like that the dungeon mixed and matched schematic elements as he absorbed new weapons from fallen enemies. However, the dungeon system has an inherent exploit where the dungeon would create monsters then kill them for more essence than he put into their creation. It’s a lazy and intentional game flaw to create infinite resources so that the dungeon doesn’t have to actually take the time to gather them. There are a couple other places where suddenly introduced mechanics boost someone's power, just so they pose a challenge or become more powerful without real work put into it.

Overall, the story has good action and dungeon creation. It’s not a perfect story and is rigged a bit in the dungeon’s favor. But still fun. The only part that dragged down my enjoyment is the harem aspects and the one graphic sex scene. It seemed out of place and only added for advertising purposes.

Score: 7.2 out of 10

Monster Core

https://amzn.to/2Rm9cOt