Review: Dark Town, A Fantasy LitRPG Adventure: Level One of the Dragon's Crawl by Palmer Pickering

Blurb:

Part cozy, part bloody, all fun.

Hidden underneath the small town of Haverly Arms lies an entrance to the Dragon’s Game, an extensive world where adventurers compete to collect power objects and progress to the next level.

Temerity’s father and brothers have been down in the game for years, leaving Temerity and her mother, plus their house goblin, Half-pint, to manage their tavern. Bored with small-town life, Temerity decides to enter the tunnel labyrinth, launching an adventure to survive Level One of the Dragon’s Game: Dark Town.

Review:

Well… this one is long overdue. I didn’t read this as a review copy and just picked it up on whim after seeing Dave Lawson's review of Pickerings novel (link to that here). And then ARC copies and review copies took over for a while and through a whirlwind of activity, this review fell on the wayside. All the while, I won a copy of this novel, and I got to meet Palmer Pickering at worldcon, so, seeing as how this review hasn’t happened yet, I think it’s prudent to begin. 

More or less, grabbing a random off the street and trying to sell this novel to them in a long winded speech won’t do, so I’d entice them with this snippet:

“Once, Temerity had brothers and a father, until they went adventuring in a dungeon. She decides to follow them to learn of their fate. Care to know more?”,

and if they are still interested, I’d give them the rest of the tale because “Dark Town” is so much more than a kid gallivanting off into a dungeon to inquire after her family's fate. Way more than that. So without further to do… 

… let's get into the middle of it with the two characters mentioned in the blurb. Well, three if we count Temerity’s mother.

Temerity is a young adult helping out at her family’s tavern. She gets bored of bussing the tables, sweeping and cleaning after patrons and just the general day to day life in her village. So, one day she asks the family’s house goblin about the dungeon and what it’s like. Half-Pint obliges and tells her a bit about it, and she has the idea to meander down there to have an adventure and to find her missing family members. Temerity experiences more and more chaos crawling through the dungeon, amassing a wide assortment of crystals that boost the abilities of the wielder, alongside loot.

Then there’s Half-Pint, the house goblin. He’s the Brom, the Obi-Wan Kenobi, the mentor in this series. Or he could be seen as a way more helpful Mushu from Mulan. He’s already gone through the dungeon and got to experience its horrors, and his other family members are continuously running amok down there. Throughout this book he’s the guiding figure to what Temerity is attempting to do, giving her the lay of the land and what to expect down there.

Lastly, we have Temeritys mother, who is, understandably so, worried about her husband and sons. So when Temerity herself shows interest in meandering down into the dungeon to look for them, she is understandably upset. And besides that, she’s stuck running the tavern with Temerity in the absence of the rest of the family, and is not very keen on having to do that all by herself. Not much else is said about her though and she’s only in the book for about 50ish pages.

Next, there’s the world building of “Dark Town”. I have no map of the overworld, but that is fine, because it’s all mainly focused on Temerity’s rather small hometown anyways. The real magic is the dungeons. First the caves, then the town, and then the alleyways of that town. Each part of the first level is fraught with various dangers, with the caves having large pits leading to nowhere, the town, which is also the name of this novel, having very predatory NPCs, and the alleyways are full of various never do gooders who prey on those who’ve made the mistake of going in there unprepared. And then there’s the monsters with the gems that they drop. Wonderfully crafted.

After that, there’s the rather straightforward plot of “Dark Town”. Run off into the dungeon, get loot… find family. However, Temerity’s family is nowhere in sight when they get through the first level, so onwards they go. There’s some twists and turns, with a few detours, dubious warnings about maps, and new friends, but the end result is but a rung in the ladder of at least six more books. It’s cozy fantasy with litrpg all the way through, meaning one can sit down with a cup of tea, a bag of chips, and comfortably spend the afternoon reading the tale of Temerity and her woe of not being able to find her missing family members.

Next, there’s the magic system of “The Tales of Temerity”. Instead of levels, people pick up gems, and those gems, depending on color, boost a trait of a person, not in a negative way, but in such a way to give them an edge in combat. There’s various kinds of gems, varying sizes and strengths, and there’s rules and conditions as to the tier of the gem and the amount that can be used by a single human. Besides that, dragons are the ones running the dungeon, and they’re cruel in a way, less of a human nature, and more of the main villain from SAW discovering the ability to create labyrinthian mazes, horrors, and other things just hanging around in a closed space, as well as the ability to lure people in instead of kidnapping and trapping them.

To round off this review, before the negatives, I do have to say that this is a memorable novel. Since I’ve read the book, I’ve not touched this book besides flipping through to look at all the black and white paintings. Still, about 130 books later, I still remember the base outlines of both the characters and the story itself. Some parts are more obscured than others, but overall, for the most part, I remember most of the novel. And I believe that has something to do with the pictures included with this novel. Pickering has gotten several people to do various artwork that captures various scenes in the book. Once the novel is read, one just has to look at the pictures within the book in order to remember the content.

However, there is something that irked me about “Dark Town”, and it was the difficulty. Sure, I get that it is the first level, and I get that Half-Pint is a tank due to everything he knows and understands, but, my D&D game master mind is mulling over the ease of it all. However, that is my own thoughts about it, and I get that it’s a cozy fantasy novel, so it might just be the genre.

If you like LitRPGs, cozy fantasy, and shenanigans involving a goblin and a human bumbling through a dungeon created by dragons, “Dark Town” is for you.

As always, thank you for reading this review, and I hope I’ve helped nudge you towards your next read. If not, don’t fret, here be a link to a random review on the site, and who knows, it might be something up your alley, it might not be, but there’s the fun of it. Carpe Diem, read something new, explore.

Wherever you are reading this, have a good morning, good afternoon, good evening and good night!