The Gift of Loot

Blurb

System Integration has been announced on Earth and Thomas just wants to keep his skin intact, maybe carve out a life that’s more interesting than the one he’s had so far. Is it too much to hope for both?

When he steps inside a dungeon for the first time, he receives a magical Gift reflects the shape of his soul: Now every monster kill drops mana crystals, weapons, and powerful gear.

While others struggle to survive in a new world, Thomas begins to build something far more dangerous: An advantage.

Thoughts

As of writing this review, I’ve ready all available 80 chapters on Royal Road.

I normally wait until stories have a few more pages (1000+) before I review them, but I jumped on this quickly because I saw it posted a few times on Reddit when talking about great reads that have recently been on rising stars. And yeah, this one is fun, and I’m very glad for a change up to the normal overpowered-combat-focused-MC to get one whose gift/skill/ability/trait/whatever is focused on the best part of stories. Loot! Thomas’s ability is effectively extra loot and rarer loot. Simple but effective.

Unfortunately, we’re still in the part of the story where Thomas has to hide his ability so he doesn’t get, ya know, kidnapped, but he’s finding workarounds because it’s not fun when your MC has some great ability but some external reason means they can’t exploit it properly. I still feel like Thomas hasn’t yet hit his stride in getting properly crunchy and powerful loot, and the fact the man still doesn’t have a solid personal loudout kills me (Thomas gives away a lot of his loot to other people and his party members because he’s such a top bloke, but I’m glad that at least he has a decent weapon now, even if he needs a ton more gear).

The system in this series is quite light. You can absorb a skill shard per level, and there’s no stats or similar to assign. Levelling up just makes you Better^TM and you can focus on the loot. Thomas and other supporting characters, and the story transitions from Thomas by himself to Thomas plus friends slowly, which is good because it gives each new character more time to breathe and be their own person, instead of a slap in the face of “Here are a bunch of characters enjoy”.

There are a few oddities with the story for sure. Some reactions by Thomas (like the plot point with his dumbass brother and nephews) seem a bit too blasé. The dark elf plotline, while I’m glad for the worldbuilding expansion it enables, felt very out-of-the-blue. And there’s the “mana types change your personality” which is going to be a fun one for the author to navigate given many RR readers hate things which impact agency. I’m curious how these separate plotlines will tie together, and the fact they haven’t right now isn’t because the story is slow, it’s because I’ve picked it up early.

I’m very curious to see how the story develops and let Thomas get into full loot-goblin mode!