Shrubley, the Monster Adventurer

Blurb

Born an outcast weakling monster. Destined to be an S-Grade hero.

Shrubley marches into town, wishing to become a heroic adventurer. But as a monster, in a world where most are feral beasts, he is forbidden from joining the Adventurers Guild. Worse, he is weak and treated as an outcast.

Fortunately, Shrubley wields his unwavering optimism with a magical trick. With his Curiosity essence, he can mimic and learn another’s powers. Against all the odds, he discovers a loophole from the Druid that gave him life, but there’s a deadly catch!

For a chance of ever being accepted as a true adventurer, he must undertake a Quest into an otherworldly realm threatening to consume the region. A place rife with dangers and opportunities in equal measure.

With a band of fellow low-tier monsters, a tiny slime, an undead skeleton mage, and a koblin, Shrubley sets off to prove that monsters can be heroes too.

Join Shrubley’s perilous journey with his band of misfit monsters as he slowly evolves in power from a weak, hunted creature into an adventurer knight with a heart of gold!

Thoughts

As of writing, I’ve read the first book on Kindle.

I loved the premise of this story, and the adorable cover art ensured cinched the deal. I like light-hearted stories, the underdog trope, and any fun inversions of the common LitRPG themes (like having a monster MC instead of an isekaied one). That said, I did end up struggling a bit with this story, but let’s dig into that later.

So, to restate the premise, Shrubley is an awakened shrub. He wants to be a hero, but monsters haven’t exactly been part of the adventurer’s guild before. Shrubley is your perpetual optimist, always does the right thing, loyal to a fault, and believes that if he simply follows the normal adventurer process, he will be made an adventurer. All he has to do, of course, is convince everyone along the way not to kill him and that this isn’t some kind of joke.

He’s very earnest about the whole thing, even during the many ‘misunderstandings’ that happen. Joining Shrubley is the cast on the front cover, so I feel like it isn’t spoilers. There’s Cal, the skeleton that needs to drink more milk, Smudge, the pink gel that swaps between “Pyuuuu!” and actual sentences when truly needed, and, I guess, of to the side and maybe a mentor role, the Countess. She comes in later, so no details from me about her and her role in the plot. There’s a Koblin as well, and I’m pretty sure that’s her tail in the bottom right. She likes to punch things.

Each of the main characters here follow some of the normal archetypes, and each have their moments of perspective, though the main focus is definitely Shrubley. Characterisation is probably a bit lacking, and honestly I think the main issue here isn’t the characters having less depth, its the writing style stopping it from coming through. The writing is probably my main gripe, so to explain this point, the chapters have very frequent and unannounced point of view shifts. We can go from Shrubley talking and thinking about things, to suddenly a thought there from Cal, or an internal monologue from the Countess, and back to Shrubley all from one sentence to another. What this means, though, is that rather than having well-defined sections or chapters from a specific character, the flowing nature of the PoV shifting means that the narrative voice feels very omniscient, rather than giving you the feeling of experiencing the narration and the world through one character’s eyes (and world view).

The other main thing which I think further reduced the immersion was a lot of telling rather than showing, especially about either how good Shrubley was as a person, or how the system and resources worked. Exposition is very common in this genre, so allow me to provide a brief example:

Minor spoilers I guess? The context is that a town is under attack and things are looking very dire, as enemies are both currently battering at the gates, and are managing to get into town via gaps in the defenses.

Remal downed the potion in one go. He hadn’t realized he spoke aloud. “The shorter one has a fire in him,” Remal pointed out.

He had a good eye for these things.

“He’s always fancied himself an adventurer,” Sel said. She tucked a strand of auburn hair behind a pointed ear and sagged a little now that she was out of sight of most people down in the street. “Not many people can afford even the weakest essences out here. And the choice to risk life and limb for the low chance of getting one naturally is not appealing. Not when one errant strike or miscalculation means you’ll be crippled for life or worse.”

Remal nodded. He’d come from such a village where the people stuck to what they’d known. It had been fishing for his hometown, here it was farming, but it wasn’t so different.

Climbing the Ranks wasn’t for everyone. Not when even Bronze was far, far out of reach.

Few people could get their hands on three essences and still be in the prime of their life to hit Copper. Not without help. That was meant to be one of the tenets of the Adventurers Guild, but the branch offices were often the least well supported.

You tended to get the strongest crop of adventurers from the Inner Ring. Places where the ambient mana was high and the people living there were stronger as a result. While it wasn’t common to have all three essences in one of the big cities, most of the tradesmen had at least one or two. And even if they weren’t technically Copper Rank, their levels and attributes mimicked the strength of one.

Out here, even the Coppers were barely the martial equal of a common plumber. Not that Remal would say it aloud. That was just rude, and even the Mundanes were fighting for their lives and homes. There was no call to belittle them. They deserved to live peaceful lives just the same as anybody else.

This sort of inner-monologue-as-exposition is, broadly speaking, totally fine. But, in this case, this same information about essences and what not has been presented numerous times before in the book, but more importantly, it’s ruined the tension of the moment. This is meant to be the calm before the storm, as the defenses are about to fall, as Remal is thinking about throwing himself into the fray and possibly sacrificing himself so others can fall back… but instead of using all those words to heighten the tension or delve into the emotional state of anyone there to make it more real… we’ve got worldbuilding exposition. This happens in a few places, where action-packed or tense moments suddenly get the brakes pumped, and I just don’t know why the authors decided to keep it that way.

I note that, perhaps I am more sensitive to such things, as this is something I explicitly self-edit for to ensure my climactic moments remain as on-point as possible, and thus the bell ringing in my editing brain to “cut this” may not be ringing in anyone else’s noggin.

My main hope with the follow on books is that, now that the system, essences, magic, etc, has all been explained, we get to focus closer upon the characters, their growth, and most of all, their interactions with each other. I’d be very keen to hear anyone else’s thoughts that have read the book as to whether I’m being overly picky on the above.