Dverger

A Deckbuilding LitRPG

De: Tracy Gregory

Narrado por: Graham Mack

Darkness stirs in the depths of the world!

As Gareth and his friends celebrate their latest victory in their quest to topple the gods, an ancient horror wakes half the world away. Asked to help by a traveler to the tower they must seek out the terror lurking beneath the far side of Acamida.

With this new Dverger ally by his side, Gareth must navigate the treacherous outback, battling horrid monsters and discovering ancient secrets in its dusty wastes. Gareth will need every skill and card he owns to survive as he helps end a generations-old feud.

As Gareth grows in power, so too does his terrifying new foe. Two great powers start a collision course that will change the fate of Acamida forever!

©2023 P.W Hillard Fiction (P)2023 P.W Hillard Fiction

finally getting somewhere

the book series is good, this book plods a little bit like the others but finally kicks up the action and the stakes. now the stakes have always been high, they just havent felt high to me until this book when we meet the new enemy.

the only small complaint i had was the narrator, whp is fantastic, made the Arakos sound absolutely hard to listen to. i get that their descriptions of speech are jarring, and he masterfully brought that to life. id like it toned down a little bit.

I could also tell the narrator was exhausted reading batches of XP notifications because hed start to yell them. which was absolutely genius.

to the Author: please respect your voice actor enough to write some sort of a seperate script for the skills, cards and notifications. like was it necessary to read the description of the same card multiple times or read 5x about how X enemy was killed. it would be far more simpler to say: 5 enemies defeated, xp total.

otherwise a great piece of Gareth and crew's journey. if i could offer any other advice, it would be to stop repeating so much of the stuff new readers would need to get it. were very deep into the series now. its time to give your audience some credit.

Way to shake it up

This book has a lot of the elements that drew me in in the first two books and more. new Races, New monsters, Competent heroes doubted at every turn, and real stakes stacked on top of the existential stakes they have been working against since book 2. The only part I didn't like in this book was in the post credit talk when the writer said he only plans on making 10 books. these books are too entertaining to end so soon.

Expected more from the story

Performance was great, and on par with the rest of the series.

Story was meh, i realized for the short length of the books you are paying for truncated versions of real stories.

The universe being built is really good, overall plot points I think have a lot to them, but with the lengths everything always seems rushed. I will continue to read, especially the spinoff novel which I liked more. But I would like to say I am not an author so take my comments with a grain of salt, or a pinch, or more….

It's not bad necessarily...

My first problem was that it seemed like the narrator spent more than half book whispering. I understand the reason but surely there is a better way to add gravitas to your reading that doesn't necessitate constant volume manipulation.

***SPOILERS****



My second and arguably larger gripe is with the story itself. The entire ending scene was just bad. Why would the MC send away the party but stay himself. The teleport item can easily take them all and if he had the time to throw it to Magda and explain his reasoning then he had enough time to tell the party to gather around him and then they could've all been whisked away to safety. I assume the author needed the MC to get captured for story reasons but there were definitely better methods and ones that made sense. I just feel like the characters all abandoned common sense at the end and it was all just to accommodate lazy writing.

This series and world just keep getting and better

MTG, wizards of the coast folks, have you seen this amazing series? When are you going to get with this author and make a version of his cards for your game!? This series is wonderful! The character development, card variety, magic usage, all of it is just so well developed and is so well integrated into the story. Between the main storyline and the one solo spinoff so far, I just can’t recommend this enough. His sci-fi series is great as well! I was voluntarily provided this free review copy audiobook by the author, narrator or publisher

such a fun series

I really enjoy this series! if you're a fan of trading card games then you'll love this one. the deck building in this series is a blast! I really wish there was a video game that played by these rules because it would be so fun!

Pure tropey filler. Gets old VERY fast.

The plot formula has become so predictable, it was actually a slog to get through while resisting the urge to simply skip ahead through the obvious fluff.

The plot for this book is "German steampunk cybermen/borg take over Australian dwarves, but MC's group screws off to spend the whole book doing side quests for kangaroo bandits." That's it. That's the whole book. Only thing that happens that advances the overall story is a bit of powering up (levels and cards), and they manage to check off one more godsword from the list.

No meaningful character development, no other meaningful overall plot advancements, no meaningful callbacks to any previous story lines/enemies/adventures. Just a bland "we rode around and taught like five monsters and gained three levels or so" story with little to no impact, wrapped in the idea of a heavily tropey mush-mash-of-stereotypes enemy that isn't actually even seen by the MC until the last hour of the book.

Interesting new cards? No. Epic card battles? No. Builds on previous relationships? No. Builds on previous adventures? No. You'll miss something important if you skip the obvious fluff sections? No. This whole book reads like a filler short story that got artificially inflated to novel length by simply adding more pointless fluff.

I won't be continuing the series after this installment. Which I hate admitting, since there are so few deck-building litrpg a to begin with and the idea was initially a good one. It's a shame that the execution became so poor.