Wexler, best known for his gunpowder fantasy series The Shadow Campaigns, takes on the the LitRPG genre with this humorous tale about a human woman who is summoned into a fantasy world as a savior, but winds up failing and dying horribly. Repeatedly. However, she's determined to not only be on the winning side, but also to get herself chosen as the Dark Lord themself. Davi has approximately two months to recruit some Wilder followers and cross most of the map before the convocation that will choose the next Dark Lord. After her many lives. and deaths, she knows every inch of the human Kingdom, including the location of the nearest camp of Wilders, but she knows almost nothing about the Wilds themselves. Or how the convocation actually chooses a Dark Lord. No problem. After all, what's the worst thing that can happen? She'll just find herself back in an ice cold pond listening to a doddering old wizard's long winded speech again and hope she doesn't make the same mistake again. Yes, there's a lot of dying, a lot of swearing, lots of sex off screen, and thousands of confused Wilders along the way.
As someone with absolutely nothing to lose, Davi generally says and does what she wants to. She figures she's spent a thousand years living the same basic story and she's the only one who remembers, so in a way none of this is real to her. Hence, setting out to become the Dark Lord herself. At least it isn't something she's tried doing, at least a serious effort, 238 times before. She heads for the nearest camp of Wilders, mostly orcs and wolf-wilders. Since Davi uses the term orc due to their resemblance our idea of orcs they're self explanatory and most other Wilders are humanoids that share characteristics with an animal type like a wolf or deer. Let me just say that the deer-wilders were my favorite. After much trial, error, and dying Davi has her first few followers and they set off for the convocation. The book takes some time to really get going and in some ways it's like exploring new zones in an MMO. Davi even makes that comparison herself. Eventually, Dark Lord in waiting Davi (she regrets coming up with that pompous title about the third time she hears it) and her horde of several thousand Wilders arrive at the convocation (she feels better when she's introduced to Dark Lord to be Sebirae). None of her horde had any more idea how a Dark Lord was chosen than Davi did but they all assumed there was some kind of system. Not so much. In fact, there isn't any guarantee that one of the four contenders will be chosen at all beyond Davi's knowing that one is always chosen at this convocation. There are official contests, some nonsensical and some dangerous, there's a lot of midnight murder, and even a labyrinth with terrible monsters.
This is a LitRPG in the sense that Davi was from Earth and got summoned into a weird fantasy world. While she doesn't gain experience or levels she does retain any skills she learns along the way. Let's just say that in hundreds of lives of practice she's an amazing archer but has to build her muscles back up each time she starts over. Although she has few specific memories of Earth, she still tends to talk in colloquialisms from the English language which just confuses the Wilders. This can occasionally be amusing but more often it's just annoying and seems oddly out of place for someone who has been speak the Kingdom language for a thousand years. I imagine that she would be using a lot more Kingdom colloquialisms. There are also plenty of pop culture references from movies and games like World of Warcraft. I don't find Davi a very likable character but then she's the result of a lot of painful deaths and dealing with annoying tropes. Perhaps the one thing I do like about Davi is that it may all start as a big kiss off to this world but Davi can't help but see that the human Kingdom really is trying to exterminate the Wilders just so it can keep growing. She finds herself liking many of the Wilders and developing actual relationships for the first time in as long as she can remember. With the exception of the deer-wilders it's not as funny as a comedic LitRPG like Dungeon Crawler Carl but this first book appears to be just scratching the surface of a much deeper story so I plan to keep reading.
One note: In the ebook format the many footnotes which add a lot of the snark and comedy to the story are not very convenient. Each chapter has up to twenty footnotes and going back and forth is a pain. I was hoping someone on Audible mentioned how that was handled in the narration but it wasn't specifically mentioned. With only three reviews so far Illidge's performance is at 4.7 stars which is the same as the overall rating. (Two reviewers loved it, one fan of Wexler's other books didn't like it much but still gave it 4 stars)