Book 1 of the Ruinland Ranger series: Framework of the Frontier
Let's take a look at the author's description first.
Monster girls, divine magic, and a frontier of dungeons to tame.
William Adams hoped to escape his dead-end life by reconnecting with estranged friends. They died when a floating cuboid interrupted the gaming night and vaporized everyone. Waking with powers reminiscent of his paladin character, William finds himself alone in a fantasy frontier of dungeoneers, desperadoes, and damsels of the monster girl varieties.
Set on reuniting with his friends, William accepts the duties of a Frontier Ranger. Unfortunately, the job is a ticket to a lifetime of trouble.
Local ruffians, a laser golem infested dungeon, and enemies from the deep seas force the former mall cop to stretch his magic of divine blessings to its limits. Thankfully, William has a nerdy faun archeologist and a psychic aboleth princess by his side. Together they explore the hidden mysteries of the Cursed Frontier.
Ruinland Ranger contains explicit engagements between a monster girl harem and the main character.
William Adams hoped to escape his dead-end life by reconnecting with estranged friends. They died when a floating cuboid interrupted the gaming night and vaporized everyone. Waking with powers reminiscent of his paladin character, William finds himself alone in a fantasy frontier of dungeoneers, desperadoes, and damsels of the monster girl varieties.
Set on reuniting with his friends, William accepts the duties of a Frontier Ranger. Unfortunately, the job is a ticket to a lifetime of trouble.
Local ruffians, a laser golem infested dungeon, and enemies from the deep seas force the former mall cop to stretch his magic of divine blessings to its limits. Thankfully, William has a nerdy faun archeologist and a psychic aboleth princess by his side. Together they explore the hidden mysteries of the Cursed Frontier.
Ruinland Ranger contains explicit engagements between a monster girl harem and the main character.
If you're sold already, click the link above to check out the listing. That's an Amazon.com link, but you should be able to find the listing on your home country's Amazon by running a search for it.
If you're not sold yet, keep reading and I'll tell you what I thought about the story.
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Spoiler Warning!
There be spoilers past this point!
Really spoily spoilers! Don't scroll past here if you don't want to be spoiled!
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So the story starts off in the real world. William (the protagonist) doesn't like his job. He and his buddies are playing Dungeons and Dragons and then they all get isekai'd to a fantasy world. Only they all get sent separately. William is the last to arrive and finds his friends have already caused trouble and skipped town, so right off the bat he's separated from his friends (You guys know I liked that, because I went for the same kind of setup.)
William is a Radiant Paladin. His team needed a support player so that's the character type he chose, though he didn't know when he chose the class he'd end up in the body for real. It's not a particularly powerful class for direct combat, but he can buff himself and his allies.
He wasn't totally out of luck from picking his character though. He happened to pick up a thimbleful of god blood as his special item, which hints at grand stuff later in the series. How this character class plays out in the story basically means William sleeps with monster girls and then he can buff them to increase their powers significantly. He starts out stronger than average in the setting but not by a huge amount. He's definitely not OP and that's the cause of more than a little internal character conflict.
The setting is somewhat reminiscent of the frontier (I guess that's why it's called Framework of the Frontier, though the Framework part doesn't come in until the very last chapter), with settlers and pioneers exploring lands that were settled once but have since become completely abandoned by the races that once controlled them. This book in particular takes place in a sparsely populated area with a lot of ruins, and a few rough adventurers lending a hand here and there.
I'll leave the details to those of you who read the book, but at the end William bonds with something that seems kind of like a dungeon core at the heart of an ancient but extinct city. Sain even directly told me that there'd be a lot of base building stuff in the future books, which I know you guys enjoy.
The characters are all solid. Everyone is built well and the protagonist especially has his own baggage which shapes him but doesn't become all-consuming. There's plenty of attractive women, some harem material, some possible future harem material, but they're all definitely their own characters with their own goals, aspirations, and dispositions.
The first girl on the right, who we get to spend the most time with, is a magic researcher who went exploring to prove one of her theories right to her classmates, which leads the protagonist into a lost city and a conflict with the faction the girl on the left comes from and her own back story. Most of the conflict for this book involves fighting against the left girl's enemies from the Underwater city of R'lyeh (no Cthulhu yet, but maybe we'll see some great old ones later on.)
In summary, this novel is an adventure story that sets up a city-building series later on. I think fans of mine will really enjoy it, and Sain is a new author deserving of a few more readers. Go check it out!
