All the Skills
Honour Rae
Awaken Online: Catharsis
Travis Bagwell
Bastion
Phil Tucker
Cradle: Unsouled
Will Wight
Defiance of the Fall
JF Brink (TheFirstDefier)
Dissonance
Nicoli Gonnella
Dungeon Crawler Carl
Matt Dinniman
He Who Fights with Monsters
Shirtaloon
Ironbound
Andrew Givler
Quest Academy: Silvers
Brian J. Nordon
The Primal Hunter
Zogarth
Throne Hunters
Phil Tucker
Throne Hunters
Phil Tucker
Progression fantasy
Dungeon-delving progression fantasy
2025
5
6
A privileged wastrel who has squandered every advantage he was given takes a demon's blessing in the dungeon beneath his city, and finds that each level of power drags him deeper into a noble war he was previously too useless to be part of.
A man with nothing but advantages, none of them used, is offered power by something that expects to be paid.
Epic fantasy politics with a light progression frame, confined to one city and the dungeon underneath it.
Harald Darrowdelve — well-born, directionless, and genuinely unlikeable at the outset. His flaws are not endearing quirks.
Rival noble houses, and the celestial and infernal conflict running beneath Flutic that is using him.
Character core
Power, standing, and to stop being the family's disappointment.
To work out whether he is choosing the dark blessing's path or being shaped by it, and to be honest with his friends about which.
If I get strong enough, the people who dismissed me will have been wrong about me.
They were not wrong. The power does not settle the question of who he is; it accelerates it, and the blessing is reshaping him faster than he is deciding anything.
His life in the dungeon, his friends' lives, and the erosion of whatever he was before the blessing.
Structure
Third person limited on Harald, past tense. System elements are present but restrained — no stat blocks, progression conveyed through prose.
Two interlocking arenas. The dungeon supplies escalation and reward; the city above supplies consequence, since every level Harald gains changes his standing in a house politics he cannot withdraw from. Tucker cuts between them so that neither becomes a break from the other.
Harald descends into the dungeon beneath Flutic and receives a demon's dark blessing.
The dungeon and the city's politics turn out to be the same conflict. Power gained below is immediately spendable — and taxable — above.
The blessing's cost becomes legible, and the friends who have followed him are exposed to it.
A confrontation where the blessing's power is the only viable option and using it is a concession Harald cannot take back.
Harald ascends in both arenas and is measurably less himself, which the book treats as the actual result rather than a price worth paying.
Story beats
| Beat | Where | How it lands |
|---|---|---|
An offer they should refuse and don't | Act I | The demon's blessing is offered, not imposed. Harald takes it, and every consequence traces back to that consent. |
The rules bent once, then bent again | Throughout | Each use of the blessing is individually defensible and cumulatively transformative. |
A power spike outpaces control — they hurt an ally | Middle | A power spike outruns his control and the damage lands on someone who trusted him. |
Two allies who hate each other, forced to cooperate | Throughout | The party is bound by circumstance and mutual need rather than affection, and the friction is the point. |
A duel of etiquette instead of swords | Middle | House politics are conducted through etiquette, and Harald is bad at it in ways that cost him. |
Tropes
The dungeon is layered and rule-differentiated, and it feeds directly into the surface plot.
Noble house politics are the second arena and the source of most lasting consequence.
The patron is infernal, the terms are unstated, and the sponsorship is reshaping the recipient.
Harald begins unsympathetic and the book does not rush to redeem him.
The party is drawn from his old life, which means every group conflict has history behind it.
Harald starts privileged, not oppressed. His weakness is squandered advantage, which is a rarer and less flattering starting position.
Craft notes
Tucker starts with a protagonist who is genuinely off-putting — not roguish, not misunderstood, just wasteful — and lets the reader dislike him for a long time. The gamble pays because his party members are specific and flawed enough to carry the reader through. If you want a difficult lead, invest the sympathy budget in the people around him.
Dark-power arcs usually make the corruption cosmetic: black veins, ominous whispers, no behavioural change. Here the blessing alters what Harald finds reasonable, which is the only version of corruption that actually reads on the page.
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