Morningwood

Read Time: 1 Minute

Not for the easily offended, this book is a hilarious spin on the usual LitRPG adventure. For a start, the main characters are the bad guys, a lowly treasure chest-shaped mimic and a succubus (pretty much as drawn on the cover).

The unnamed (for most of the story) mimic lucks out early on in his life and gets a level up or two in intelligence. This sets into motion the most horrific set of circumstances ever to befall the low-level dungeon and surrounding areas. Once he can summon a familiar, the succubus, well things just keep going his way.

The end-of-chapter statistic readouts are blessedly prefixed with “you can skip ahead” when they’re going to just summarise the characters. There is stat progression throughout the story but these generally help you understand the progression of the creatures.

The narration by Jeff Hays was top-notch. Added sound effects scattered throughout along with his collection of character voices really added to the overall experience. I would definitely listen to more from this guy.

A unique take on the usual dungeon crawl, and the world mechanics in particular where you “see” statistics in your head along with the dungeon “master” I thought were interesting ways to interpret the genre.

The first few minutes were a tiny bit slow for me, but once those were out of the way the story ticked along nicely to its conclusion. There are (at time of writing) another 3 books I can see in the series so will definitely be checking these out too.