Dungeon of Knowledge

As of writing this, the story is marked Complete on Royal Road at 631 chapters / ~2 million words.

Blurb

Aliandra Amariel loved magic, dedicating her academic years to the study of runes and spells, pushing the boundaries of mana’s infinite possibilities. Like most Fae, her destiny seemed clear until that fateful day of her Class Trial, when the Blind Lich unleashed an undead apocalypse on her home, the fabled underground city of Dal’mohra, and triggered The Breaking – a cataclysm that forever reshaped the world.

Saved by her mother’s legendary time-stasis spell, Ali wakes thousands of years into a dark future. Everything she knew and loved is gone, buried under a mountain, transformed into a twisted dungeon by the malevolent will of the Lich.

Now, Ali must confront her deepest fears, mastering the arts of battling monsters and braving a town riddled with corruption. As the Lich’s grand design shadows her every move, she scrambles to forge new friendships and unearth ancient knowledge in her fight for survival.

Why must she struggle? All she had ever wanted was to curl up in a comfy chair with a few thousand good books. But the immortal Lich is drawn to her unique magic, ever hungry for more power to fuel his cold-hearted ambitions.

Thoughts

I like me some dungeon core. I also find it realllly hard to find good dungeon core. This was better than I expected, and, oh my, a finished series.

It’s sort of chapter one spoilers, but the MC is a “dungeon”. A dungeon is an entity (like a person) which has a few properties that I won’t spell out because the hunt for a definition is a Big Deal to the MC and one of the main things tying her to the series antagonist, the Blind Lich.

So, the good news is there is an overarching plot about the Blind Lich and the fate of the world. I don’t know why, but so many stories in our genre seem to forget to have one. It’s a classic Good vs Evil tale, and effectively every character in the story falls fairly neatly into the black and white boxes. It would have been nice for maybe a bit more depth or nuance to motivations, but I also recognise many people want a clear cut plotline.

On the plotline, there’s a strong focus on raid like boss fights (I will eat my hat if the author wasn’t a massive WoW raid player back in the day). There are other conflicts, such as the merchants/underground/politics around the Keep, but they’re not the focus.

In fact, some of those plotlines are downright annoying. Like, Jax (or whatever Evil Merchant Man’s name is) keeps screwing over everyone and the main charactrs just do nothing for so so so so long. He unleashes his assassin on people and instead of pulling out the stops to find the assassin and solve the problem the main characters (and supporting characters) sort of just go back down into the dungeon merrily.

So if not for the plot, where does it shine? The dungeon itself, once Ali comes into her own. Her crafting, expansion, minions, bosses, the dungeon-core side of the book, for sure.

It’s not complete dungeon core, to be fair. There’s so much VRMMO inspiration and Ali is one of four PoV characters. I wish there was a stronger focus on just Ali, or at least when the PoV swaps I’d have enjoyed it more if there wasn’t so much revisiting the same scene from a different perpsective, and swapping PoV just to read how each of the four characters assigns their (mostly meaningless) stat improvements after each boss dies. Like WoW raids, fights in the series are long affairs, with bosses having stages and effects and retreating to find weaknesses and fighting the boss again.

The characters themselves (the main four) are good. They have distinct personalities, arcs, and classes. Party banter is light and fun. The worldbuilding is decent, but takes a while to expand from the initial dungeon and lost city.

People who enjoy VRMMO and raid bosses will love this. Those wanting a more focused single-PoV power-fantasy will not.