This Used to be About Dungeons

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

This Used to be About Dungeonsis a comfy slice-of-life adventuring story that occasionally features dungeons. Now complete.

Mostly it's about walking in the woods with a friend, looking for mushrooms to put in your soup, or haggling with the guy selling squash, or taking care of a neglected garden. It's putting some jam on shortbread biscuits. And yes, sometimes you go down into the dungeons with your friends, and you kill monsters there, or disarm traps, but when you come out, you realize you've found the perfect magic item to give to one of the local kids that helped you out when your cat was sick. Look, the dungeons are always going to be there, and sometimes you need to make a journey to one of the Spirit Gates, or make a pilgrimage with the local Cleric of Symmetry to a holy shrine. Your tour through the local dungeons can wait. You'll have rivalries with other groups, and find some dungeon eggs that need to be carefully incubated in case they turn out to be something valuable, and help a friend to build a fishing weir. There's a big world out there, a mostly tame place with lots of magic, and even more to do and see. Join me, won't you?The cover image isMorning Sunlight Effect, Eragny, by Camille Pissarro.

Information

Status: Ongoing
Year: 2021
Author: Alexander Wales

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.7/ 5.0
Followers: 3,341
Views: 1,532,559

Chapters(70 total)

Reviews

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

Community Reviews(10)

skairunnerRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Don't be fooled by the title: This Used To Be About Dungeons is absolutely about dungeons. It's also... not about dungeons. You see, the focus isn't really the dungeons themselves -- they could be anything, really. Trials of the gods, a group project, building a home. The focus is the people, what makes a party tick, how you work together with your colleagues, and how you become friends. We follow our five point-of-view characters as they prepare for, delve into, make away with filthy loot, and then handle the logistics of selling said loot and preparing for more delves, and this whole process gets so much attention paid to it that it almost feels like other fics about dungeon delving are hollow in retrospect.
The characters are what this is all about, and unsurprisingly the author manages to create five (!) incredibly distinct voices and worldviews, five different upbringings and life experiences, and the complex relationships between all these different people. This, I believe, is what other reviews mean by 'slice of life' -- the fact that there's so much attention paid to people and relationships. I think that it's incredibly unique for any story on Royal Road to have such a polished and satisfying approach to character.
But that doesn't mean that the world is neglected. Characters constantly reveal tantalizing worldbuilding elements through natural conversation, ranging from the makeup of the entire world all the way down to the mundane like cooking and storing food. Dungeon's world is unique and like none other. It isn't a LitRPG, but it takes the best of that genre and discards everything that could be stale. Again, unique and satisfying.
This is almost an afternote, but the copyediting is impeccable as well.
I highly recommend this story to anyone who enjoys fantasy of the dungeon-delving kind.
pedromanoelRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
This story is really a joy for me to read, because the characters are so lifelike and real. The switch in viewpoint that the author employs emphasizes that, with each character clearly unique in their way of thinking and speech.
The story is set in a fantasy world, with monsters and different races, magic and classes, dungeons and a consistent setting that makes sense of all that, but for me, the story is about the relationship between the characters. I can say for sure that I learned some things about navigating social interactions with others.
In summary, read this story, it's awesome!
Chris RobertsRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
This story manages to feel real in a way that few stories on this site do. The world seems fleshed out and consistent, and characters motivations and personalities are diverse and interesting. This story is manifestly not an endless slog of dungeons, this is a slice of life done well.
Lurker657Royal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
This story is absolutely perfect. Every character has that thing that makes them seem real, more than just a trope to pad out the cast. The story is immensely comfy and has just enough character consequences, be it death, personal failings, or general emotional scarring, to keep you on your toes and grateful when everything works out in the end.
I again cannot stress how real each character feels, and how perfect of a story this is.
Randomly_SelectedRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
I like how this author made a solid good ending with "book 1" and "book 2". Thats something that can get tricky with a serialized webstory. I,ve grown to love the slice-of-life genre with DnD situations. If that is a genre you enjoy, this is definitely a story for you.
TegidRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
The characters seem to be well build and the slice of life-type stuff feels very nice to me. The bits of worldbuilding are also delightful.
I'm liking it a lot, for now, but I'm also intrigued about the backstories of the characters, and what the serial will actually end up being about.
(Five stars, for now. There's only 9 chapters published).
WiggyDoomRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Gotta say, it is really weird that that last two reviews are "not enough slice of life" and "too much slice of life"
I will agree that this isn't what I would have expected from a "slice of life" novel, but eh. It is mostly about what happens in between the dungeon instances and is almost always focused on the dungeon. Case and point, there is a gap between when the party is formed and when the -party gets access to the party chat feature. The author time skips like 4-5 days. Slice of life would focus so much on those 5 days. Oddly, most of the characters are living together at this point, but then show no development in their relationships. Very odd really.
All in all, I really enjoy it, but it isn't really a slice of life story at this point. Just a slow burn and character driven dungeon crawler.
YohaoRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
The characters are goddamn interesting, I love them all.
The world is really really interesting, and to every new word or notion or simple detail I just get more and more curious about it. The world building is quite natural, done from bit to bit or sometimes all at once.
Overall I just fell in love with the characters connections, they are 5 different persons that somehow actually work as a team and why and how they do is amazing.
Anyway if you like reading about different people with different personalities and lives uniting to go through dungeons or just move a heavy wardrobe from one place to another, give this story a go and you will really like it !
Thanks for writing mate ! Keep up your amazing work !!!
CorangeRoyal Road
★★★★★ 4.5
Alexander is a great writer, and this is another good story with interesting characters that all have their own personality and thought processes and are friends in a way that seems realistic. The story also has a very nice balance of slower moments and higher stakes moments. For the last month or so the story has been relegated to the bottom of my reading list though. He has introduced a very annoying main character and the most recent chapter is a grade below his usual output. Hopefully it picks up again as this arc looks like it's going to wrap up the main plot line of verity's effect on dungeons.
Also want to point out that contrary to the title and the author's description, it is still very much about dungeons.
Update: finished the series and it had a great set of chapters with a new character Quinn (though the annoying character Pinion is still inexplicably around) and then ends a bit abruptly. There are some epilogues but I really don't think epilogues ever do a good job of finishing a story, and wouldn't recommend them here either.
maelos61Royal Road
★★★★ 3.5
So, all in all, my thoughts on the story after a hundred chapters can be summed up as: it's a pretty decent slice of life, but the characters are simply TOO flawed. Which is funny, because most of the time characters fail because they're too perfect. Too clinical... Not realistic enough. But here the characters are simply too 'human' and flawed.
Grammar:
The author is either an English native speaker/writer or as good as one. There are likely mistakes, but they're small and rare enough to not be a bother.
Characters:
My general impression is that the whole dungeoneering party is essentially Alfric running a daycare for problem children. Oh, and it's really for children, not the (quasi-)adults that the story presents them as age-wise. I'm not trying to offend anybody with these generalisations, even though I doubtlessly will, but you have:
Mizuki: the ADHD kid who isn't capable of thinking anything through or having an attention span longer than five minutes. Boys? She flits through them like a butterfly looking for nectar. Authority? Nah, following rules is for boring 'bricks', even when those rules are perfectly understandable and have an actual reason to be there. Look, somebody who berates you for jaywalking when there's literally no car in sight is a stick in the mud. Somebody who asks you not to fly high up in the air when there's been dragon sightings and disappearances is just being logical... She isn't just negative of course. She's capable of caring for people... when she wants to and is feeling lonely... or not if she doesn't... She's just pretty selfish about it. That would be a human characteristic. Hell, I'm like that. Adding another heaping of faults on top of that makes her a pretty annoying problem child though.
Isra: a literal child. She's eighteen, but let's be honest, her wood-hermit life has essentially rendered her a child. She's getting baby's first love, baby's first friends, baby's first family, baby's first everything. It's kind of funny tha