One More Turn [Turn-based/Gamelit]

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

They took his sister, his team, and his freedom. Now he's got one more turn to steal it all back.

Treasure hunter and outlaw Tarn Arisfal is ready to admit his life sentence is inescapable. Though desperate to reunite with his team of expert misfits and rescue his sister, after 97 escape attempts the glacier prison has proven to be the one puzzle Tarn can't solve.

Then the last thing he expected happened - they let him go. Only he must rescue the ruling Arch Mage, the man responsible for abducting his sister and having him imprisoned in the first place.

Now Tarn's luck has turned, and with his team by his side, he must navigate a bizarre time-frozen dungeon where magic forces all combat into turn-based, tactical battles.

Tarn must plan his moves carefully, or his next turn could be his last!

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Back from hiatus! New chapters posting 8am EST every Mon / Wed / Fri!

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Note: Tactical combat begins in Chapter 6, story is slow burn until then from a combat / system perspective

Information

Status: Ongoing
Year: 2022
Author: dhdunn

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.2/ 5.0
Followers: 361
Views: 46,839

Reviews

No reviews yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!

Community Reviews(7)

cowiieRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Promising start with good writing and no obvious week points. If I am right, the author likes harmony, thus will not betray the main chars, or readers with story backstabs and omega dump decisions. (Sometimes dialogues are cut short to keep a nice and fast pace)
neen more words for the ratings.... just no idea what to write..
InscrutiableRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Here's the updated Advanced Review
Style
Author plays with the idea of a heist story, with a twist, the characters are in a magical world where they have to take "turns" on "pulses" that are a result of a magical item they receive early in the story. This makes a lot of the storytelling in combat scenarios to feel strategic and meaningful, and the style emphasizes those components. The characters are praised for their witty choices, while also addressing emotionally important points throughout the story where helpful. Therefore I say the style is well executed, and clearly the author's own.
Story
Strong Narrative - characters have a clear purpose that is to "save the realm" by getting an item key to the survival of their kingdom. They care about this because the characters are presented as generally "thieves with a heart of gold", and they are a team of professionals who were let out of prison for this very task. This is emphasized by a cool magical system - turn based magic, with defined class roles for each of the characters that work together in strategic and rational ways.
Choices are meaningful, and there are consequences to the poor choices characters make at key moments. This leads to a strong set of stakes that follows throughout the story.
Grammar
I give this 5/5 since I notice no grave errors that would otherwise make me unwilling to give this rating.
Characters
I greatly enjoy the main character Tarn, but the fun/silly Gremlin character Lash is my favorite. Tarn is great as a main character because he views the world through a very perceptive / questioning lens, which means problems / mysteries are presented to the reader as challenges to beat - which makes it fun to see the story through his (the primary POV's) eyes. He works particularly well in this area, but also benefits from having a strong motivation - save his sister / the realm - as well as the emotional pain of having suffered from being responsible for his team being imprisoned. He has depth, a
Jess D. AstraRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Chapter 1 blasts off on all fronts. The backstory gets hinted at, the system gets hinted at, and the MC decides to start the adventure by the end of CH1. No Passive Patricks here.
Author has a strong grasp on spelling/grammar and good sentence structure.
Looking forward to getting deeper in and updating my review.
DBoddenRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Tarn Arisfal is a master thief and tomb raider who is serving out a life sentence (that may nevertheless be quite short). This is because, while Tarn is very clever, he's not a pillar of intellect. He does impulsive, emotional things, and in some ways, he's responsible for the predicament he finds himself in. He's also quick to do the right thing by others and trusted by his entourage of misfit tinkerers, warriors, and burglars.
The tension ramps up when an object [which is some kind of dungeon seed] appears in the frozen wastes near Tarn's prison, and Tarn and his team need to choose between escaping for a few days or risking their lives to prevent a system apocalypse. While the choice they make is far from surprising, the mix of game elements and real high-fantasy world is well done and had me smiling a few times--especially when the characters who have never seen a computer experience texture pop-in and have to explain it in their own terms.
The primary conceit of the book, that it is a turn-based RPG, is also delivered seamlessly within the high-fantasy within a multidimensional universe setting, like the Cradle series. I'm intrigued as to how it's all going to come together and what the overarching villains of the series will be (as well as how far the team has to travel to fight them).
WiredNaviRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
A story about characters dealing with being stuck in a turn-based system should not be nearly as good as this is, or make nearly as much sense as this does. Combat scenes are clear and do an excellent job capturing the tension of a tactics game - the fear that you've made the wrong choice of moves and can't take it back, and the sense of expectant triumph when you've figured out a way to handle a dangerous encounter and all that's left is the execution. But the real value here is the characters, who are vibrant and interesting without being caricatures, and behave quite naturally in a bizarre situation. It's clear the story is written with the characters in mind, and that the numbers and special abilities are there to reveal and highlight who they are. Really top-notch.
WutsRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
This story is great! Our MC is a "designated hero" - he is treated positively by people around him and by the tone of narration. However under this veneer is hidden a sinister uncaring creature, who'll betray any of his companions or condemn the whole world to continued suffering, just for the selfish desire to help out his sister. Gaslighting his companions into helping him and into thinking they are benefitting from this, is a great view into his deranged siscon mind. 5/5 - there should be more stories with utterly contemptible protagonists like this on RR - all the heroic stories are getting boring.
LizardryRoyal Road
★★ 2.0
This story has the appearance of a litRPG, but it doesn't feel like the author is actually keeping track of any of the characters stats or abilities. Stats change wildly from one chapter to the next; one chapter a character will be the strongest, the next they'll be letting someone else go first because that person is strongest. Abilities come and go at random; so far I don't think I've seen the same ability used twice by anyone who's not the main character, every time it's a new ability that just happens to perfectly match the situation. It really feels like the author isn't really tracking much of anything about the characters, just making up something new every time a character needs to do something.
Every power being pulled out of nowhere also removes most of a sense of tension. There's no feeling that the characters are being clever in figuring out how to apply a limited toolset to unexpected solutions. Instead, it'll turn out that someone just happens to have the perfect power for every situation. Dealing with an enemy who heals everything? Your teammate happens to have an attack that shuts down healing. Need ice damage? Hey look, another teammate suddenly has that ability!
And even the narrative often loses track of the abilities. Teammates will talk as if they don't know their own attacks can shut down healing, or have other effects. We will be shown the text of abilities, then people will do things that make no sense based on that text.
With all that said, I'm not saying this is a horrible story. The writing is decent and the setting is very interesting. To me it just feels like the author is writing in the wrong genre. LitRPGs involve an almost obsessive amount of attention to detail, tracking lots of things about the characters and setting, and often derive much of their story from how those little details interact. The author here seems to write in a much more improvisational style, which is completely legitimate but interfaces extremely poorly with the