Cozy Fantasy as it should be

I have been burned by the cozy fantasy term before, but TUTBAD puts a soothing salve on that burn mark and heals the wound.

This Used to Be About Dungeons tells the story of the formation of a party in classical fantasy terms, but there are no dragons to slay, no great evil to defeat, no war looms on the horizon. In fact, it’s something of the opposite: the last war of note is more than a hundred years ago, the cultural point of view is from a multi-cultural salad bowl / melting pot kind of society, and the society at large appears to be heading towards post-scarcity, with it being difficult to determine if they’re already past the mark.

The viewpoint characters are a bit on the eclectic side, as is usual for a fantasy setting party, but not jarringly so: everyone has some background that offers leads to further adventures in the classical sense, plot hooks by which a game master or story teller can nudge the party in particular directions. The characters themselves do have their own views on that, though, and have had reasons to either not mention these parts of their back story, or are themselves unaware of them.

In a way it is like patrons at a cafe deciding to become friends, and they’re slowly getting to know each other, with the associated tiptoeing around each other since they don’t know each other’s hot-button issues, but still have a genuine desire to get to know each other.
Except this group of cafe patrons decided they want to explore dungeons on the (somewhat) regular, and their day jobs, so to speak, aren’t that important that they can’t be put on hold while they figure out if exploring dungeons and getting to know these others is what they want to do.

The author switches between viewpoint characters, with every chapter past the introductory few being told from the point of view of another, giving insights into their world view, without suffering from too tight a focus on them. At times this change in point of view becomes only apparent by stint of what is not mentioned in the narration.

The Narrator, Zura Johnson, is quite high quality, adapting her voice to the respective characters and providing dialect flavours where necessary.

I eagerly await the release of the next volume (case in point: I finished this audiobook in 9 days, so 2-3 hours per day, which cut into my other regular listening habits of various podcasts…). If I could, I’d probably preorder the next volume, in fact.

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A good Start

I really like how the mystery is slowly being revealed and I want to see more of this world.

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1 Person fand das hilfreich

Rich world and interessting characters

A lovely story containing characters with depth and background and a rich world with stable rules. Slice of life, coming of age and over all characters get time to develop.
A great start into the Series, well read, with intrigueging voice enactment. Looking forward to the next one.

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Can't wait for the sequel

I loved the gamyfied take on fantasy. And the riff in tropes style of story

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..meh ...

Not what i expected from the description or the 5minute listen in.

Starts of very sluggish and with the MC always "it's not a lie ... but i am not telling the full truth" foreshadowing stuff... all the time.

The whole interactions get so tiresome... and somehow they all get together? Just like that?
He gets his harem of girls/young woman that are weirdly okay with going into a dungeon?

I kinda don't wanna know what he's foreshadowing ... either he's a prince on the run or some other noble sion... or such.

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