The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the first Dungeon Crawler Carl book that I didn’t absolutely love.
So the third floor of the dungeon is a series of train tracks with corresponding train lines. The goal is to find the stairs to level four and go down them. Easy enough. But the train system takes them almost their entire allotted time to figure out. And despite reading the book from start to finish — and re-reading a couple sections — I never figured it out. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to. Or maybe it was just over my head. It seemed like I was doing algebra for the entirety of the book. And it wasn’t fun.
It wasn’t a total disaster, of course. It was still a DCC book with fighting, political intrigue and fun stuff. It certainly moved the story along. But I thought more than once while reading it, “If this had been the first book in the series, I wouldn’t go on to the second.”
Of course, Jeff Hays was still masterful in his delivery (although I found Mordecai’s voice annoying in this book). So with his perfect 5 out of 5 and the author’s 3 out of 5, we end up at a solid 4.
All that said … on to the fourth: “The Gate of the Feral Gods.” I hope this is less complex.
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