Underpowered Howard

A LitRPG Adventure

By: John L. Monk

Narrated by: Neil Hellegers

Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins

Publisher's summary

When there's no way to win, cheat, and cheat big.

Deep within Heroes of Mythian, a game world where retirees exchange their physical bodies for an eternity of adventure, Howard learns a terrible secret: The game is glitched, and it’s killing its mightiest players forever.

Desperate to save his friends and countless innocents, he hatches a plan to fix things. Doing so will require skill, determination, and help from a number of unlikely heroes along the way. Using his deep knowledge of game mechanics, he’ll start again as a level 0 necromancer and exploit his way to power.

With luck, his game-breaking exploits will alert Mythian’s admins that something is wrong. With more luck, they’ll pull him aside and ask how and why he'd done it.

With even more luck...well...in that unlikely event, the game’s creators - uncaring at best, and sadistic at worst - won’t delete him for exposing their mistakes.

It’s a risk he’s willing to take, though some warn it may destroy all of Mythian in the process.

Don't miss an epic LitRPG Adventure from number one best-selling author John L. Monk. Did we mention it's got plenty of laughs? It's perfect for fans of Dakota Krout, James Osiris Baldwin, and Ryan Rimmel.

©2021 Aethon Books (P)2020 Aethon Audio

Howard is awesome.

This fantastic one shot has Howard breaking the Game in a hope to fix it.

A fun tale for us OK-Boomer crowd

John L. Monk crafted a unique tale where senior citizens could live their remaining years inside a VR adventure game with litRPG mechanics inside it to allow individuals to play any role among the plethora that exist. The society is that of medieval environs with the typical fantasy characters you'd expect. The added incentive is that for those who chose to advance to the end and best the final challenge would be given a new youthful body to live again in the real world. The MC, Howard, discovers that there is a major defect in the game preventing users from accomplishing the end achievement and sets out to discover a way to fix the problem and, runs into resistance from the game in doing so.

Some of the methods for tricking the system become fairly convoluted and difficult to understand but through the excellent narrating skills of Neil Hellegers I didn't get bogged-down trying to to gain an in-depth understanding and allowed myself to simply follow the flow of the story line and, in doing so, enjoyed the entire experience.

I should have read the chronicles of Ethan first

I didn't realize this was a part of that series until I was browsing to fill up more of my wishlist after reading it. It made a few references that I wish I understood.

Otherwise I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Took a few twists and I honestly want to see "Delectomancer" as a class in DnD. for some reason in games like runescape i enjoy getting my cooking up and to be able to actively use that in fighting would be right up my alley.

Fantasy with classic scifi themes.

I enjoyed the story. It made me laugh often, which is rare for a book. It's a good, solid litrpg story that touches on some classic scifi themes. The story can be hard to follow at times as the character progression jumps. It is also nice that the story is wrapped up in a single book.

good book

like in other reviews it seems like the lvls and stats dont really matter much. it was a good idea, but it seemed to be lacking...something.
I always felt like the story was half done in parts, rushed in others. also, with the stat system just seeming to be broken all around every battle just kind of ended with A WIZARD DID IT.
the only thing that saved it for me was that the characters were all pretty likeable and entertaining. that and the karma system was used pretty well. enjoyed the whale.

A fun twist on the genre, but not great.

This story had a couple ideas that were interesting. The author turned these into a plot that was used to have some fun with the LitRPG genre. So, it was fun and funny from that perspective.

The story itself was pretty good and well written.

Our protagonist's path to the end was too smooth. Had there been more challenges or setbacks, this would have added the spice needed to make this tale a better "meal".

3 stars for a decent tale and originality.

Was loving it until mc made a deal with the devil

Spoiler: Was thoroughly enjoying the book until the main character betrayed the intent and morality of character in a deal with the well. That compromise was unforgivable and someone who just killed in self defense wouldn’t be so quick to toss away such stipulations. The chance of permanent killing up to this point should be an anathema given why he was on the quest in the first place.

Does not follow.

Nice Standalone

A good standalone LitRPG book with a delightful narrorator who knows how to fit a voice to a character.

interesting installment

Interesting installment in the series. but this one does seem to wrap the world up patly. I really hope to learn more about the world of Mythica.

I found myself engrossed in the story

At first, I thought this would be a mediocre story that was an okay time filler, but as I listened to the story, I became vested in the characters and story. The characters were fairly well fleshed out with good development throughout the story. The story moved well and kept me interested. The narrator did a very good job, but because audible ratings goes from "pretty good" to "it's great," I didn't feel I could give the narrator 4-stars as the story was the real focus here, but the narrator did a very good job presenting it. I would gladly have spent a credit on this and will likely spend a credit on book 2 when I catch up on the backlog in my library from the recent sale.