Traveller's Trial

Blurb

Koji Athame left his house for the first time in five years today. When what was supposed to be a quick trip to visit his parents, turns into a deadly crash. Koji finds himself waking up in a realm of danger and wonder beyond his wildest imagination. It doesn’t take long to figure out he’s not in Kansas anymore, after escaping a monster attack and unlocking his new Traveller system, Koji learns that the Trial he and the other survivors are in will only exist for 4 more days, and only the strongest can escape.

With time ticking against him and the fate of his newfound companions hanging in the balance, Koji must navigate treacherous landscapes, battle relentless monsters, and confront his own inner demons. As tensions rise and the world crumbles around them, Koji’s party must unravel the secrets hidden within the perilous trials they face. With each victory, Koji grows in power, learning how best to allocate his attributes and how to efficiently use his growing magical repertoire. And amidst the chaos, he has to grow and fund his personal pocket dimension, his own Home, in this unforgiving realm.

Yet, not everything is as it seems. As Koji grapples with his unexpected abilities, the side effects of selecting all random for his starting gear, and a skipped tutorial that have held vital knowledge, he must confront a snarky, voyeuristic deity and escape the web of schemes his fellow humans have laid.

Immerse yourself in the heart-pounding journey of Koji Athame as he battles monsters, treads the fragile line between life and death, and unravels the truth behind why he was brought here. Don’t miss this pulse-pounding LitRPG fantasy, where every page brims with danger, system shenanigans, and the allure of unlimited possibilities. Grab your copy now and join Koji on his quest for survival, power, and redemption. The clock is ticking, and the adventure awaits!

Thoughts

I am writing this review after receiving an ARC copy.

Alrighty, the blurb sets up the premise pretty well. Koji, our MC, is a bit of a shut-in, very typical of a lot of isekai animes. He goes outside, tries to ignore the outside world (the man has some mad anxiety), gets on a subway… and then the subway car he’s on crashes, and the people on board end up in the tutorial dungeon level and have four days to escape.

So, straight into the action. No long preludes, no slower world-building or travel sections, shit hits the fan, and it hits hard. The tutorial dungeon is filled with timer-based respawning mobs, and Koji and not-really-friends get the fun of farming them for experience and sweet sweet loot. This forms the main loop of the book: farm monsters, get loot, level up, repeat. So if you’re a fan of those loops and the constant levelling up and rewards, you’ll probably enjoy this.

Outside of the loop, there are the characters that drive the story. I’ll focus on that, mostly because the tutorial area is, after all, just a tutorial area. The world-building that exists takes place through information passed on through the deity Koji is linked to via the Traveller system, but we’re not quite world hopping and seeing new sights like The Weirkey Chronicles, or at least not yet.

Back to the characters.

Koji is… complex. The author’s clearly written him with unexplored trauma in his backstory that has created his anxiety and dislike of people in general. He’s prickly, obstinate, and distant. Then again, it’s not like he’s having a great week. There are a small cast of characters that work with Koji sometimes, but the loner nature of our MC means we don’t get to see them developed as much as a book that focuses on party combat. Outside of these few characters, there are a pseudo-opposing crew of people also in the tutorial. Some of these characters seem to have more complexity (especially when Koji saves their lives), but others are typecast instantly into a stereotype “Mean Character”. For example, our intro to the character Jake, when he interacts with Koji, is:

“Have you ever played any MMORPGS Ko-Koji? Or maybe you’re more of a basement dwelling D&D player?” Jake asked while his eyes continued to run over the obviously new pair of boots, the still clean white gloves, and the bulging gray backpack.

Some may like these easy-to-absorb stereotypes, while others may prefer some more subtlety.

Be warned stop reading now if you don’t want some spoilers. These are fight spoilers, not plot spoilers.

For all the fun and dopamine hitting of levelling up a lot and getting so much loot, the main thing I didn’t mesh with personally was what I shall call a “Violation of the work-reward promise of progression fantasy.”

Or to put this another way, the real world is shit, and I want to read to escape into a world where smart characters are rewarded with power and skills for their hard work and clever plans, while stupid or lazy characters are not rewarded.

And for some more context, I am a min-maxer gamer at heart. I optimise everything I can in my games, and I dislike games with too much focus on RNG because I want my skills and effort to be rewarded instead of getting a lucky dice roll.

Traveller’s Trials is very much not this. Koji is, from a min-maxer or analytical perspective, stupid. But he has a really high luck stat, and what that ends up meaning is that, regardless of what Koji does or how he approaches anything, he comes out ahead of everyone else. For me, I prefer books where if the MC is stupid, they get punished and they have to learn from it. I bring three small examples:

1. Koji is presented a book explaining the tutorial and how everything works, but doesn’t bother to read it. When a goddess replaces the book to try and give him potentially life-saving information, he kicks her out of his mental home. For this rudeness, the goddess just waits and eventually helps him out, instead of Koji suffering for it.

2. Koji’s luck grants him a huge amount of OP spells. And yet his battle tactics are, to quote:

With a panicked thought about what would happen if he passed out in the den of monsters, Koji flailed his hand through the screen before him. He triggered multiple spell effects as the world shuddered and went black.

One time after doing this, his spells interact with the environment and cause a big explosion.

A slight smile spread across Koji’s lips before he pressed Stride of ShadowFaux. His body appeared on a small section of solid ground for only a moment before he pressed Thunderdome and the world turned white. Koji snapped his eyes shut almost immediately and groaned in shock as his vision swam even against the darkness of his eyelids. When the explosion came, he was totally unprepared.

I was so happy, thinking “Now you’re going to have to learn to not just button spam.” But when Koji came too, luck had it that he was fine and had killed all the monsters in the explosion. The consequences for his stupid “teleport in and press every button strategy” vanished, and instead Koji is rewarded with numerous rare and epic skill books.

3. Koji’s summoned home has a magical training room he flat out doesn’t use until right at the end of the book when a min-maxer would have been grinding that bad boy for experience.

4. Bigger spoiler alert. The final part of the tutorial was a “Every monster you’ve killed comes back to life and now you have to defeat them all” type deal. I was keen to see how Koji would face all these monsters at once… but lucky for Koji, he had just picked up a spell that effectively deleted everything from existence around him. One spell later and everything was dead. Koji wins again… not by outsmarting his opponent, or by outlasting them, or going through gruelling trials, but by simply pressing a button in his spell interface.

Now let me stress again that this is just the sort of stuff I like to read! If you like luck-based characters, if you like tons and tons of rewards, and characters winning no matter what, then you will love this.

I talked a bit about the mental home, and that was another highlight of the book. Koji’s powers allow him to have a home he can step into (where time doesn’t pass outside) to read, sleep, train, etc. It’s upgradeable, and honestly it was my favourite part of the book. It’s not quite as intricate as the soulhomes of Weirkey Chronicles, but it’s still a skill I would kill for, and I can’t wait to see how Koji upgrades the place.

So, let’s summarise:

1. Loner, socially awkward MC.
2. Luck-based progression and power-ups.
3. Lots and lots of fights and rewards.
4. Based in a dungeon tutorial for a wider magical world.

If those things tickle your fancy, give it a shot!