Dungeon Tour Guide

Blurb

Lucas used to delve dungeons. Now, he has to run one.

After Lucas dies during a freak explosion, divine intervention sees him brought back to life with the power to control a new dungeon.

There’s just a couple of issues: his old body is bound to his dungeon, and the craziness of what he thought was his final act is only getting weirder. When he sees newbie adventures entering his dungeon, though, he decides to help them survive and complete their quests.

After all, adventuring is a process, and someone needs to guide the rookies.

Thoughts

As of writing this review, I’ve read the first published book.

It’s been a long while since I’ve read Divine Dungeon, and I really wanted to scratch that dungeon-core itch. Enter Dungeon Tour Guide, which seems to get the best of both worlds - a human bound to a dungeon. It gave off the same vibes as Orcs Must Die and I’m there for it.

Now, our tour guide and MC (Lucas), is originally from earth, though this doesn’t mean anything to the plot, so don’t worry about it. Actually, as an aside, why is this so common? I’ve just read Queen in the Mud, Unbound, Reborn as a Demonic Tree, etc, and so many LitRPGs seem determined to also be an isekai story, despite the MC’s earth heritage meaning absolutely nothing? In Beneath the Dragoneye Moons, Elaine’s earth life is what gives her medical knowledge central to the plot. In He Who Fights With Monsters, Jason travels back to Earth and has family important to the story. In Defiance of the Fall, Zac finding his family after the apocalypse is a major plot point. But for stories not like these, where you could simply have the MC be from Omicron Persei 8 instead of Earth without changing any plot, why bother? Anyway, this isn’t a particular issue with DTG, so let’s get back on topic, and I might make a separate post about this whole thing later.

So, Lucas is now bound to a dungeon, and can’t leave it physically. He puts on his educator’s hat and decides to run the dungeon with groups of adventurers to train them up, where he acts as a tour guide, giving tips, tricks, heals, and advice to try and prepare new adventures for the dangers of the world. It’s a wonderful premise. On top of that, the various groups coming in have classes and skills that can (with help) syngergise together. Reading Lucas explain things (even if they can sometimes be painfully obvious things) is fun, and reminds me of my MMO days, without the book being an actual VRMMO.

There’s lots of potential for really interesting skill combinations and class evolutions from those characters, which I assume we’ll see in book two. You don’t get this as much in book one, simply because it’s set with low-level characters who still have to, you know, learn a lot.

One of the downsides of watching these groups learn and improve their teamwork, is that things can feel a bit repetitive. You do have the same group of people running very similar permutations of the same dungeon multiple times. To compare it to Divine Dungeon, which has a mix of mining, economics, the dungeon creating proper ecosystems and traps, multiple levels in the dungeon, the goblins moving in, etc, to allow for a lot of variation in what happens, despite it all being in the same dungeon. With the beginner dungeon in DTG, you don’t have nearly as much variety. That said, if you’re a fan of snake-themed dungeons (like I am), it’s not an issue!

In terms of the wider plot, there is an aggressive and nefarious external faction set to try and conquer everything. I’ll have to admit here too that I wasn’t able to follow this conflict, and as a result it often seemed very forced. I thought the dungeon was located near the rich and populus city of Ketz, and the reason there weren’t many adventures around was because the area was so pacified and deep in the host country that adventurers weren’t needed. And yet, when this external force attacks (with tens of thousands of high-level soldiers), somehow a squad of them show up to the dungeon? Where did they come from? Why are there only two proper higher-level commanders with a few dozen troops? Are other cities being sacked? Where is literally any of the miltary might of the kingdom to face off against the Kingsguard? Is there a map? Ultimately it felt like there needed to be some external conflict and an appropriately-sized aggressive force was conjured up just at the right strength to allow the dungeon to survive. Or, earlier in the story when they are attacked by an assassin, there’s this exchange:

“This is suboptimal,” Rose admitted.

“Where’s the Guild?” I asked. “And thanks for saving those lives.”

“Not here,” Troy said. “I suspect they’re sleeping.”

It just doesn’t feel very satisfying when the reason there is conflict (ie the guild didn’t sort it out) is waved off like that. Aaron, if you read this, I would love a deeper dive into all this external conflict to help ground it in book two or beyond. There’s so much fun potential in here and I think it would amazing to explore it all properly.

Anyway, to summarise things:

• If you like MMO without a VRMMO book, you’ll be happy.
• If you like dungeon-core, you’ll be happy.
• If you like watching parties learn how to work together, you’ll be happy.
• If you want an OP MC who travels a lot, you will not be happy.
• There’s a much larger conflict now begging to be explored in the follow-up books.