Barrow King: The Realms Book 1: (A LitRPG Adventure)

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The Realms seemed like it had the potential to be a fun place but all we seen of it was a boring dungeon. The main character is coming along well ending the book at level 14 but able to fight well outside his weight class. The MC repeatedly gets huge advantages and somehow uses them to kill creatures *far* above his level. Almost every fight MC is about to loose and then something outside of his purview or control happens, and the fight is won.

This story is packed with action, great characters both heroic and evil and a Great God, Aluran and his pantheon of Gods who run the realms.

The game world, the Realms, was not a game at all, and Alistair had exploited the system to conquer and become a god.

The big negatives for the story was the obsession with the game mechanics and stats and the whole dungeon crawl Barrow King story arc. LitRPG has become one of my favourite genres to read, and I have read quite a few series of this genre but I must admit this first book in The Realms series has blown me away. The Realms is a non harem LitRPG series that contains action violence some swears, but no sex and is appropriate for teens and adults. It sets up a quest for a man to save his sister by entering a Game World, and then spends the rest of the time with him on a dungeon crawl. Betrayed by those closest to him, Finn Caldwell thought he'd escaped his life of violence and deception.But when a frantic message from his estranged sister draws him into The Realms, the world’s most advanced holographic reality game, Finn is forced to embrace his deadly skills once more. But Gryph as he is known in game, is courageous to a fault and never one to back out of a fight, he struggles on and meets others who he befriends and teams up with, namely Ovrym, Wick and Tifala and using their cunning and wit they do their utmost to kill the Barrow King and exit the vile dungeon. The narrator does a good job with the different characters, reading pace is excellent, and is very easy to listen to. But each of the paths were wrapped up in under 5 hours which is what I was hoping for from an adventure I had planned to run at a con (until real life interfered).