Warmaster 1: Dungeon Spiteful: A LitRPG Fantasy Adventure by Melissa McShaneMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
LitRPG is usually awful, but Melissa McShane is usually great, so I hoped the two would cancel out and give me something solidly entertaining. Nor was I disappointed.
This book has much the feel of her series that starts with Company of Strangers, except that the "system" of classes, skills and levels is visible to the characters as a heads-up display in the usual LitRPG fashion. It also contains a transmigrator, a person from our world who has portaled to the other world, but interestingly, he's not the viewpoint character. Instead, the viewpoint belongs to a young woman, Aderyn (exact age unspecified, but roughly the age of Owen the transmigrator, who's just graduated from college, so presumably early 20s). She's a Warmaster, which is usually thought of as a useless class, but is actually a support class that's powerful when paired with the right partner - which Owen is.
Their main quest, along with three friends they add to their party along the way, is to return Owen to his world, but as Aderyn gets to know him, she's less and less keen to lose him. Meanwhile, they're levelling up rapidly - perhaps a bit too rapidly, given that there's a level cap at 20th level - by not only fighting monsters but uncovering human bad actors and their plots. What's more, Owen appears to be a candidate to become the Fated One, a legendary figure who will somehow break the 20-level cap for everyone.
The level of challenge they face is about what you'd expect for the genre: sometimes the fights are tough, and sometimes things look dicey, but they always pull through OK through teamwork, clever skill use, bravery, and perseverance. As usual with McShane, there are very few editing issues, and it reads smoothly.
It's a solid piece of writing craft, not so amazing as to get into my Gold recommendation tier, but comfortably sitting in Silver. I definitely plan to read the sequels.
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