Bone Dungeon

Elemental Dungeon, Book 1

By: Jonathan Smidt, Portal Books

Narrated by: Will M. Watt, Annie Ellicott, Jeff Hays, Laurie Catherine Winkel

Length: 12 hrs and 13 mins

Publisher's summary

Ryan doesn’t remember much about his life before becoming dungeon core. Only that he had a bit of a disagreement with the church - something to do with a beheading?

Now reborn, Ryan begins to arm his darkness dungeon with devious traps, bestial zombies, and ill-named skeletal creations, without doing anything too evil. Well, mostly. Some adventurers just deserve a stalactite to the head.

But Ryan quickly learns being a darkness dungeon isn’t all loot and bone puns. With a necromancer on the rise and the Adventurer’s Guild watching his every move, he must prove that not all darkness dungeons are malevolent...even if they do have a few skeletons in their caverns.

Sadly, all of these issues keep distracting him from his own guilty pleasure, skeletal fight club. But don’t tell his fairy about that.

©2019 Portal Books (P)2019 Portal Books

great book. terrible fairy.

awesome story the only thing that was bad was the dungeon fairy and the stupid music. the fairy is every negative female trope rolled in one useless package. i think the music it's meant to set the mood, but it's more jarring and silly than anything. my last issue with the book is he breaks the first 2 rules of fight club. :)

Fun dungeon core novel by emerging author

A few predictable trends that might not have been necessary but quickly picked up and kept me entertained the whole while. Towards the end some more original aspects of litrpg and dungeon core novels came out. Unique element of affinity and a potentially cool new class type for book two. Will be awaiting book 2!

I’m thirsty for more!

Jonathan Smidt’s first installment starts off in an unexpected way for our protagonist but quickly sets the framework for the story. You won’t have to wait long for some witty comments and some action which is always a plus. The cast of voice actors also do a great job portraying their roles and it was nice to hear a diverse yet familiar set of voices (Annie Ellicott & Jeff Hays) .

The general theme here is that we get to witness a dungeon wrestle with its conscience while also observing humans place their’s aside, putting a spin on the usual trope we see these days.

I was happy to get a chance to binge this first book and my review is all thumbs up, including the bony ones.

Can’t wait for more skeletal fight club!

For transparency I was gifted this audiobook by the author however my review of the story wasn’t impacted by this.

Bargain brand dungeon born

Title says it all. I saw Jeff Hays and thought it would be a winner. Nope. The MC is too annoying and childish. I couldn’t even finish.

good but weird sound effects ruins it a bit.

I probably gave the book 5 stars on kindle, but there are 2 sounds used Constantly. One is some battle music that sounds like a bad rip off of the Bastion sound track. the other is this like cartoony comedy music that plays whenever something is supposed to be funny, ruining the joke. They get really annoying and kept ruining my immersion in the story. The actual narration was fine, just the weird sound effects kept ruining the experience.

fun read except for one character

The semi incompetent fairy annoyed me but other than that it was pretty good thanks for the good read

good start

i enjoyed this book the first one is more getting you use to how the core became a core an the core getting use to how a dungeon is created with it's fairy . like most core books the core has its favorite adventures that come into its dungeon. an a interesting plt that i dont want to give away but if you are a dungeon core fan you will enjoy this one

Great story

Loved the story and the voices. However, the music and sound effects sometimes made it difficult to hear the words. most of the sound effects and music were a good addition (not my personal taste, but well done). But during a couple climatic scenes I wished I could just remove them all.

God level good

All around thrills and suspense. I must have the next book. 20/10 everything I wanted out of a dungeon story.

Uuuuh....

As a starter series for dungeon core, it's a decent book. For veterans, skip the first 3 or 4 chapters and you miss nothing. The dungeon mechanics, magic and leveling stuff is fine, even interesting at points. Character wise, Ryan and Erin are just one whole bundle of cringe. Erin is already a short name, so how does using "Rin" become some endearing thing? Randomly calling each other cute, hun and/or sweetheart for no reason, annoying levels of jealousy from the both of them while actively trying annoy the other or attention seek at every turn and both are really.....dumb. There is using ignorance to explain the world and systems for the readers and then there is what was done with those 2. There's a lot of cringe from them. Everyone else is fine for the most part. There should have also been a different choice made for the bg music for the dark theme. Sure circus music can be creepy but it's just out of place in every instance here. Finally, if you thought nothing could ever top your previous experience with "Fight Club" jokes and references, sucking any possible humor from them, be prepared. This book will show you a new level. The first joke was barely a chuckle, the rest just didn't need to exist. Most of the pop culture references and jokes in here are more annoying than funny