The Land: Founding

Executive Summary: Not great, but still entertaining. 3.5 stars.Audiobook: I haven't listened to much by Nick Podehl, but I've always considered him a great narrator. This book is no different. He speaks clearly with good volume and inflection and does a variety of voices that make for an excellent audiobook. I do however have some reservations. One of the drawbacks to Unabridged can be that some text is meant to be scanned/skimmed in a book, but must be read its entirety for the audio version. This books suffers from that. I feel it's also made worse by adding audio dings/music like you're leveling up in a game. In a game I appreciate it. In this book, I found that a bit irritating, especially when most of the text that followed was long and tedious.None of this is the narrator's fault and he does a great job despite the source material not always translating 100% well in an audio format. None of this was enough to put me off of continuing the series in audio because Mr. Podehl does that good of a job and this otherwise is the type of book that works well in audio.Full ReviewI first heard of “LitRPG” on the Sword & Laser podcast a few months ago. Mr. Kong labels himself as “The Father of American LitRPG”. American is a key word here because Japanese Manga and Anime has been telling this kind of story for over a decade. I also have read other books that are very close in style to this, albeit maybe less explicit on including all the stats/character sheets of everyone involved. I'd put this book in a similar vein as books like [b:Ready Player One 9969571 Ready Player One (Ready Player One, #1) Ernest Cline https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1500930947s/9969571.jpg 14863741] or [b:NPCs 22088245 NPCs (Spells, Swords, & Stealth, #1) Drew Hayes https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1400095217s/22088245.jpg 41426688], both of which I enjoyed more than this book. The idea of being trapped in a fantasy video game first crossed my radar in the early 2000s with the anime .hack//Sign.That all said, after nearly 2 decades as a D&D player and over 13 years playing World of Warcraft, this style of story really appeals to me. This book has many of the usual tropes present in any number of animes of this genre. The main character is a “dude-bro” although thankfully not 100% of the time. The book also severely lacks in female characters. The few that there are serve mostly as quest givers or providers of information with no real agency to speak of.Richter comes off as your stereo-typical “elite” gamer dude part of the time, and someone who actually seems to genuinely care about the people of The Land the rest of the time. He grew on me as a character, but I could stand fewer of his lame jokes and sexist comments.Overall the writing is fine, but not great. Some of the dialogue (beyond the aforementioned jokes and sexist comments) can be cringeworthy. It's important to note however that I wasn't reading this book for a deep wow factor. It's one of those popcorn books where you just turn your brain off and enjoy the ride. The ride was pretty good. The setting was established, some mysteries were set-up for the series and mostly our protagonist did what any new RPG player does: complete quests, explore, fight stuff and level up.I found the book entertaining enough that I not only picked up the second book right away, but I rolled a new character in WoW because it really got me itching to level my own character. If you're into the whole RPG/leveling thing and aren't put off by the dude-bro stuff, this book may be worth checking out. I hope as it goes on we get some more depth to our protagonist and some actual female characters with some agency.