Thieves' Dungeon Book Review

Thieves' Dungeon is another Royal Road book that I recently read. The book is written by NoDragons, the author first started writing the book 5 months ago. Since there the book has been finished, its actually the only complete book that I've read on Royal Road. Here is the link: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/27261/thieves-dungeon

This is a dungeon core book, for those that don't know what I dungeon core book is I'll elaborate. Basically, a dungeon core book is an entity that creates a dungeon, traps, monsters, environment, the whole deal. The dungeon gets stronger with each adventurer's struggles or death, and the adventurers get stronger by fighting in the dungeon. There are many dungeon core books out there but each have slight differences. For this book there were quite a few differences from the typical book. First difference, there isn't one elemental choice, the dungeon builds upon each attunement, as they're called. I liked this a lot, it gave the dungeon a lot of versatility. Second difference, there isn't a guiding sprite/fairy/guide, the dungeon is all alone. This was a negative part about the story for me, usually the guide is funny and keeps the story interesting with dialogue between the core and guide. Because of that, I felt the story fizzles out.Third difference was every adventurer actually posed a threat to the core. This made tensions higher, in a good way. The last main difference is, in my opinion, another bad thing. The only way the dungeon really gets stronger in this book is by killing adventurers. This balances with the fact that every adventurer poses a threat to the core, but I still didn't like how it actually changed the story. Many core books, for instance Elemental Dungeon, has adventurers that return and grow with each delve along with the dungeon. Through that, you gain the entertainment of dungeon and core. This book was different, the dungeon tried with all its power to kill every adventurer that entered. Overall, there were some positive takes on cores and there were some negative takes on cores in book.

I thought the book started out promising, but it went on too long and it just became mundane and boring. There were conflicts that I felt the author just forgot about. The core was "fighting" with the gods and the author seemed to forget about that for the majority of the book. I felt like the same thing happened with many secondary characters, the dungeons creations. One was his creation's creation, a mini golem that the author only revisited twice. I wanted to read more about that little guy and the rest of those characters. Overall, I felt like I disliked this series more and more as it went on and do not recommend it, the initial promise sadly dissipates.