Dungeon Born by Dakota Krout is a litRPG/progression fantasy told from the perspective of the dungeon. That sentence alone was enough to sell me on it, and it turns out it’s a very fun enjoyable read. I’m not 100% sure about the narration, I love Vikas Adam’s positivity and energy, but I felt he went a little overboard at times with the excited screaming. 

Dungeon Born is the first book in the Divine Dungeon 5 book series, the latest of which came out this year. Cal is the main protagonist, he is the dungeon, he controls it and grows with it. There is also another point of view character, Dale, a human from the area where the dungeon showed up. I wasn’t very keen on Dale’s chapters to begin with, but he ended up doing a lot of the heavy lifting for worldbuilding and socio political context, and on the fun adventuring side. 

I was not expecting it to be so sweet. The beginning especially, with Cal gaining consciousness and learning about the world, his constant sense of wonder, it was very endearing. I liked how both with Cal and Dale the book was mostly about their growth, as a dungeon and as a person, accumulating knowledge and understanding, sometimes very literally. I also liked how Cal felt distinctly non-human, especially his version of morality. 

LitRPGness 

I’m not really knowledgeable about the genre, but I think this is also among the ones that might work for people not keen on it, but who want to give it a go for bingo. There are no boxes, at least not that can be perceived in the audio version. There are some stats, namely a sort of power level that characters increase by accumulating mana, and that they can see if they look in certain way at other characters. It’s got more gamelike stats that Sufficiently Advanced Magic for instance, but it’s still an internally consistent world that has characters, not players and NPCs. It’s not someone playing a game, but a world that functions with game mechanics. You could even make the argument that it’s more progression fantasy than litRPG, but I’d say it’s close enough to count. 

The worldbuilding is a very traditional, almost  Dungeons and Dragons tie-in, RPG world. I think it would be great to read for D&D GMs as it really spends a lot of time on planning and populating a dungeon with traps, mobs, bosses and fair rewards. I mentioned D&D tie-in because I was very surprised to see Drow appear and be called Drow not just dark elves. The dungeon mobs on the other hand are original, a mix of cute and scary, as Cal is limited in his creations by working with what his environment provides. 

I only read the first one for now, cause bingo, but I felt like I got a complete story out of it. There are plenty of hooks for the next book, and it ends with an ominous epilogue suggesting a new great threat, but it’s more a foreshadowing than a cliffhanger situation. 

As all gamelit/litRPGs, I think this is very audience specific, if you like this sort of thing, you’re probably gonna like Dungeon Born. It offers such a fun and interesting perspective on how dungeons work and think, and Dakota Krout really went into detail for a lot of aspects, answering a lot of questions such as why don’t they eat, why do they drop loot, why do people keep going in, etc. 

Bingo squares: Small Scale, self published (not sure about the audiobook) , audiobook, LitRPG