In a world of sword and sorcery, Breck died and was reborn as a dungeon core, a specialized living gem in charge of creating and managing a dungeon. Unlike most dungeons, he was handicapped with the inability to create bones, the very building blocks that comprise most living creatures. Breck just wants his life back, his humanity, and will do whatever it takes to achieve his goal. Even if that means killing the hordes of adventurers that want to plunder his depths so that he can gain the power to transcend.
Zach, a new adventurer, is given the quest to find the source of new cosmic energy that has made itself known, the same cosmic energy that creates dungeon cores. It’s the lucky break he’s been waiting for his whole life. But he’ll face opposition that will see him dead before they let him complete his quest.
Despite his inability to create monster’s with bones, can Breck gain enough essence to rank up and become human again or will he be forever trapped as a dungeon? Will Zach be able to live long enough to complete his quest while other guild members are hunting him? What happens when Zach’s and Breck’s paths collide? Find all this out and more in this exciting GameLit, The Boneless Dungeon: Rebirth.
My Opinion: 204 pages, $3.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
This story is actually two stories. Split about equally between a dungeon core and an adventurer. The game mechanics are limited to essence ranks and a soft cultivation system.
The dungeon side of things starts slow with a little too much time explaining how the core can extend his essence a few inches. One of the small things that bothered me was how in experimenting with essence and getting patterns, the dungeon would have to be told everything from his assistant. Anytime there was something new to learn, it would repeat. It just felt like the dungeon wasn't growing on his own. Which was a bit annoying since the character had all of his memories from a lifetime on a future earth. It was touted in his human backstory how good he was at analyzing data, which implies more than a basic education.
Also, the dungeon theme is supposed to be anything boneless, but kinda defaults to insects for most of the story, which is one I'd read about before so it didn't feel fresh. You also don’t get your first minor fight till about 20% in, and the dungeon isn’t made till near 30% in. So it has a pretty slow opening. It gets a bit more interesting and diverse later in the story, but even that felt forced to a degree.
The other half of the story is about a newb adventurer and while it's not a bad setup it does feel a bit forced. The adventurers guild detects a burst of magic and puts out a quest for a group to explore it. It's urgent and pays really well. Yet for some reason, instead of requiring an experienced team with scouts or some speed, the quest is left open to anyone and the first person to claim it. Which just happens to fall into the hands of the guild's most inexperienced member.
The guild conflict, where the other more powerful members want to get in on the high paying quest, seems like it could have been resolved easily by actually forming a party with higher level members. I just didn't understand why they would want to kill him. It wouldn't give them the quest and no one knows in advance that he'll run across a dungeon.
While I liked the world building done on the adventurer half of the story, he doesn’t actually interact with the dungeon for most of the novel. Even that contact with the dungeon is really brief. It ends up feeling a bit slice of life and almost a separate story up till the end.
Overall, the story isn’t poorly written and it has its funny moments. But it just didn’t click with me. The dungeon side took a bit too long to get going and didn’t bring anything new to the dungeon core genre. The adventurer side barely interacted with the dungeon, which is what I came to read.
Score: 6 out of 10