Shade's First Rule: A Fantasy LitRPG Adventure cover art

Shade's First Rule: A Fantasy LitRPG Adventure

Divine Apostasy, Book 1

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Shade's First Rule: A Fantasy LitRPG Adventure

By: A. F. Kay
Narrated by: Travis Baldree
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About this listen

A new LitRPG world has arrived!

It's Ruwen’s Ascension Day, and he finally dies for the first time. His newly revived body can learn spells and abilities for the class given him by the Goddess Uru, and dying is no longer permanent.

Ruwen’s high intelligence makes becoming a Mage inevitable. With his new powers, he will locate his parents and clear their family name. But nothing goes as Ruwen imagined, and when a rival God tries to kill Ruwen shortly after his disastrous Ascension, his focus turns from his future to just surviving.

His choices place him in the middle of an ancient war, and he must overcome the limitations of his unexpected class to reach level five. Only then will he have the tools needed to survive. But dying now comes with a terrible penalty, and failing Uru might not only cost him his life and loved ones but his entire world.

It turns out dying on your Ascension Day is the easy part.

*****

Hey, LitRPG readers! I've created an FAQ for Shade's First Rule to answer some of the common questions and to help you decide if this book is for you. It can be found at: afkauthor.com/faq.

©2019 A. F. Kay (P)2020 A. F. Kay Epic Fantasy Fantasy Fiction Science Fiction & Fantasy Survival LitRPG Fantasy Adventure
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It takes a bit to get cooking, BUT GOD DAMN DOES IT COOK. This is some 3 Michelin star goodness God damn I'm glad I stuck with it because it gets exponentially quicker

Review from the future

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you'll probably like the book if you like this genre. the narrator is amazing as always. the story lost a star for a similar reason to other reviews criticism, which is the constant talk about how smart he is while never truly showing any intelligence. yes it's not as bad as made out by others, especially when you factor in the debuff to explain some of it. the only time he does something resembling intelligent is at the end of the first floor. the rest is him just listening to a "pressure building in his brain" if he stops thinking enough to be given the answer. so that whole thing could have been written better. otherwise the rest of the story is pretty damn good

interesting book and worth the read.

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Clear your schedule, if you like litrpg fantasy this series is perfect for you. Not my favourite narrator but I'll admit he does good on this series, you'll want to skip the stat's as they repeat a bit but the story itself is gold. 5/5

Absolutely outstanding

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This first book isn't perfect, but the series gets so good that I can justify retroactively raising the first 2 books to 5*, if you're put off by the leveling system and the less than stellar writing at the start just stick with it until the end of the second book, I guarantee you'll be hooked by the third book and it just keeps getting better!!!

Gets a lot better!!!

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The humour was well placed most of the time and I enjoyed the digs and small inside jokes sprinkled throughout. Travis did an amazing job as usual. Great start to a series that I’m now about to binge

Pleasantly surprising

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it was abit slow and all over the place to start with but once it got going.. well I'm on the 7th book now

great listen

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We are told over and over that the main character is intelligent, but he has no agency and makes no plans. He is just acted upon by the story and other characters. He is just given some interesting abilities early on, without any work on his part. But, as soon as he starts to investigate them, the story takes them away in a really irritating scene, making him worse off then he was before. I just couldn't get invested in the character because he has no agency and doesn't act like the smart person he supposedly is. I couldn't get invested in the story because things just happen for seemingly no reason, unguided by the protagonist or anything the reader understands.

As always, Travis Baldree's narration is fantastic.

Useless Protagonist

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The writing is sloppy and alot of the reviews seem fake. Pretty cool concept though

Poor writing

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