Craft Dungeons ...
Cultivate Monster Girls ...
... Become A King?
Osman Spar just made a very dangerous bargain ...
To try and cheat death, he agrees to play a new VR-based fantasy roleplaying game. However, Osman won't be playing as a warrior or a wizard, but as a dungeon core.
Now he must build an underground labyrinth of tunnels and chambers formidable enough to withstand any and all attacks.
But, in order to do that, Osman needs to learn dark magic, summon powerful minions, and cultivate gorgeous monster girls to be his loyal level bosses.
WARNING: This story contains dungeon building, harem building, lewd content, foul language, and explicit scenes ... plus: epic brawls, video game violence, mana cultivation, LitRPG stats and level progression, and a little corgi dog who thinks that he is a dragon!
My Opinion: 150 pages, $2.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
Full disclosure, I got an advanced copy for review. I purchased a copy when it became available.
The opening first pages almost made me put the novel down. It's a quick jump into the game world, which is good, but the main character (MC) comes off as a bit whiny and the start is on a storytelling level a bit confusing.
After a sort of whiny freak out by the MC over finding himself a dungeon core, you get a bit of rushed character backstory identifying a rival, a love interest, and a semi-plausible reason why he may be stuck in game if not why he's suddenly a dungeon core and not the paladin character he had been playing. Also, why he'd play, so his love interest can find him. Which wasn't a bad summary and hits the major points needed for the story.
Then the story goes backwards in time a few hours to describe two recent events. 1) The last fight the MC had as a paladin. Which felt like it was more about being in the friend zone with the lady he loves. Plus a sex scene. 2) A scene about meeting a dungeon fairy who offered to make him a dungeon core and a fight with a monster. Neither scene was badly written, but they really felt out of place after that good succinct summary which gave all the information needed to proceed with the story. It wasn’t till the end of the story that the scenes made a little more sense, but even then I didn’t see the point of doing flashbacks of events that had only happened a few minutes or hours before the start of the story. It would have made more sense if they were just given chronologically.
The first 36% of the story is the MC just recalling things out of chronological order. Stuff that has nothing to do with being a dungeon core but sets up characters seen later.
It's not really till the 40% mark you get even the barest start to the dungeon core/dungeon master aspect, when the MC gains mana from absorbing one of three mushrooms. But then the second mushroom gives him a weapon and the third gives him the ability to cultivate mana, a spell, and oddly a new level. So, some of the game mechanics just don't make sense.
But then at the 48% mark, when there was a list of possible dungeon minions, I realized the story might be a parody or at least be trying to be humorous. I mean what else could be meant by a minion like: a corgi with a dragon complex? It's a fun character that provides some levity and good dialogue.
Despite the funny Corgi character, on the whole the story just didn't work for me. There are a couple bland sex scenes but they detracted from the story. Also, this wasn't really a Dungeon Core story, maybe the start of a Dungeon Lord one since the MC got two minions and one fight scene but never even started to build a dungeon. But it had such a rough start that it was hard to come back from it.
Score: 6 out of 10
Legendary Dungeon Seed (Book 1): A Dungeon Core Monster Girl Fantasy