The Elder Lands by B. Salem | Book Review [3.7/5]

Contains AI-Generated Portraits of Characters Within the Book

Due to the nature of book reviews, there will be some spoilers from The Elder Lands by B.Salem in this review article. I will strive to keep major plot points a mystery, but what you consider “Main Plot Material” may differ from my definition.

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The Elder Lands Synopsis

Lucan has reached the age of majority and is ready to receive his Elder Blessing, marking his entry into the world as a full adult. On this day, his father gives him a special enchanted sword, bestows the Wraith Strike Skill, and spars with Lucan to get the swordsmanship skill initialized by the Elder Blessing. He also learns the 7 Point Star Dance skill from a rare book he purchased from a shifty merchant years ago. Finally, his father instructs him to join a group of experienced Men-at-Arms on a mission to seal a break.

A break is a rupture in the ground through which horrific and violent beasts from the Labyrinth below the earth escape and wreak havoc on the surface. To close these breaches, the men carry an Elder root, which rapidly grows over the break, sealing it shut. Unbeknownst to Lucan, this event is just the beginning of his journey. He will soon face numerous other challenges and unexpected twists, including becoming an unwitting pawn in a game of political intrigue.

Can Lucan navigate the unforgiving and hostile Elder Lands and emerge victorious, or at least survive? Find out in The Elder Lands by B. Salem!

Lucan’s Circle

Lucan is the Son of Sir Golan Zesh and the story’s protagonist. He dreams of raising his family’s station into lords and building his father’s fief to greater heights. Personality-wise, Lucan is level-headed, and quite resourceful for his age. He confers to the wisdom of his elders to fill in the gaps in his knowledge, and values skill in individuals.

He has a lot of ideas he wants to put into action, and he is resourceful enough to make these ideas into reality. For example, he takes in a band of over seven hundred refugees from a nearby landed Knight that fled to their territory to avoid being conscripted.

He convinced his father to give them land to build on and food to eat. In return, they work as laborers to build a road to his father’s fief, and other projects that will enhance their lands.

Sir Golan Zesh is the father of Lucan and a Landed Knight. Golan is famous for his Wraith Strike ability, which allowed him to defeat a herald-class Labyrinth Monster, granting him a Twice-Souled Orb. He is fiercely loyal to the king and has a no-nonsense personality.

Sir Zesh was granted four skills for his blessing, a rare talent. However, the book never explicitly states all of his skills, only Wraith Strike & Swordsmanship.

Golan hires a ritualist to amplify the skills that Lucan has access to on his Elder Blessing Day, with no expenses spared. He invests multiple God Orbs into Lucan’s awakening, including his Twice-Souled orb that he obtained from slaying that Herald-Class Labyrinth beast.

Thomas is the Steward of Sir Golan Zesh. He is a dependable individual with a lot of experience in managing the fief. He also has many connections and is willing to go out of his way to use them to better the fief. Personality-wise, he is genuine, and mirthful, but serious when the situation calls for it.

When Lucan comes of age, Thomas is very supportive of him and has been acting as an advisor to his ideas. He would point out hypothetical issues with ideas, and offer suggestions to fix those issues. Lucan highly values his opinion.

The Princess is a cunning and intelligent woman who has plain facial features. She first meets Lucan at the Trial, where a scheduling conflict means that Lucan would need to share participation in the trial or miss out on his opportunity for several months.

Since then, The Princess has been skillfully manipulating Lucan and his father into helping better her position in her political game after Golan makes a colossal political blunder on behalf of the head of the Zesh Family. This mistake put his family in danger of being cast aside, and land rights revoked for going against the King’s wishes. She helps them out of the blunder and has been taking advantage of the situation since.

Starting with the Character development – The Elder Lands is written in such a way that a lot of the focus is on world-building and setting the tone of the scene. The goal was to sell to the reader that this is a gritty, dangerous Medieval world, and B. Salem succeded in that aspect well. In fact, he states as much himself in the afterword that The Elder Lands intentionally focused on worldbuilding to set a strong foundation for the later books.

The Elder Blessing System

The Elder blessing system is this book’s answer to the LitRPG integration. A blessing is instilled through the use of God Orbs and the Elder Trees that can be found throughout the continent.

God orbs can sometimes be obtained after slaying a Labyrinth beast, and can rarely contain the skills that the beast knew, which can be learned. Some of these skills, such as claw-based or teeth attacks, are unsuitable for humans. These orbs are considered “Feral.” However, that does not mean these orbs are useless – a ritualist can extract their essence to fuel an Elder Blessing awakening enhancement.

Unfortunately, ritualists are quite rare. Most awaken without one, as the costs of hiring them are ruinous. This results in them having less than their maximum potential, simply because they are too poor to afford the services and necessary materials.

God orbs can also be converted to Vital orbs directly with a blessing’s help. Vital orbs are used to enhance skills and refine the body or mind of an individual. This adds another use for feral orbs, as they can be converted to vital orbs.

The God orb/Vital orb system reminds me a lot of Path of Exile, one of my favorite games that I’ve dumped thousands of hours into over the years. Orbs are the main currency in that game and are used for crafting powerful gear. Anyways, back to the review.

Minor Characters Feel Underdeveloped

As a result of the focus on worldbuilding, character development feels like it is squeezed in for many parts of the book, with much of the focus on Lucan. Many non-core characters are introduced and are given a brief “This is their skillset” explanation from the perspective of Lucan’s thoughts. Then, they are scarcely given much time to show off their personalities. The result is that I can barely remember the names of these characters, because nothing they did stood out to me.

This is sort of addressed with the fact that Lucan is of higher station, so common people need to be formal around him where possible. This works for the worldbuilding aspect but hurts character development substantially. That’s part of the reason I dislike it when the main characters are of “noble birth” in books.

The Hierarchy of The Elder Lands Society

An interesting tidbit – technically, Knights aren’t full nobles, just minor nobles and Lucan isn’t even a knight himself. They are more akin to landlords in modern times. They can give out land, and enforce some laws, as well as build up their fief. But there are things they can’t do that a noble could. As for what those differences are, that isn’t well explored in this book, so stating anything here wouldn’t necessarily be correct, or even matter for the purpose of this review.

The hierarchy appears to be something like this, but I could be wrong on the exact order:

• King
• Crown Prince
• Royals
• Duke
• Nobles/Lords
• Knights
• Merchants
• Commoners

It’s just worth mentioning that a lot of “commoners” tend to refer to Lucan as “sir” and he has to constantly correct them – the proper term is “Master.” He’s above merchants but below Knights, and his station requires that he distinctly mark that difference.

Core Characters are Heavily Developed

With that said, Lucan, and many of the core support characters – His father, The Princess, and their steward are thoroughly developed because Lucan converses with these characters regularly. This fact makes up for the sparse minor characters that speckle the story. With almost eleven hours of reading to be done, you can imagine just how developed they end up being at the end.

With all of this information considered, Character Development scores 3.5 stars.

I’m going to be blunt. The plot of The Elder Lands leaves a lot to be desired.

This comes from the fact that this book is, in essence, a giant exposition of the world itself. A worldbuilding bible, if you would. There is some conflict here and there, and when it comes, it’s exciting and fun. However, these events are spaced out throughout the book, and it lacks a true antagonist for Lucan to be pitted against.

What this means is that this book doesn’t stand by itself very well. As it is a Kingdom Building LitRPG, much of the story revolves around the growth of their fief in the face of rules and hardships. Unfortunately, This sort of progression tends to be slow going, due to the sheer number of moving parts involved. Add in the fact that this is supposed to be a medieval world, and that progression slows down even further due to a lack of technology needed to speed up the production of assets.

For the first book in a series, this can be a death sentence. With all of that said, it isn’t like there is nothing there for the plot:

• The Wilderman raids were exciting highlights of the Elder Blessing system.
• The Labyrinth visit highlighted an incredibly interesting and mysterious world hidden under the earth.
• The internal conflict between the neighboring Knights created a feeling of tension.
• And the political intrigue can sometimes be interesting, even if I don’t enjoy that aspect much.

All of these factors are combined into a score of three stars.

While difficult to parse at times with older language terminology that I wasn’t familiar with, the writing style of The Elder Lands was quite good. I truly felt like I was in a Medieval world. But of course, I only have my imagination of what it was like based on my experience watching films like The Lord of the Rings, The Game of Thrones, and Merlin. But, that’s all you have access to as well, so really, we’re in the same boat in that regard.

As for the LitRPG elements, they weren’t as overbearing as other books, like Defiance of the Fall. Instead, I’d classify this book as LitRPG Lite, because the stats don’t currently dive too deeply into the capabilities of the protagonist. Instead, we see actions and descriptions of how events are handled take center stage. Could this change in later books? Absolutely. But right now, B. Salem could scrap the LitRPG aspect entirely and the book would still make sense. This is a good thing.

That isn’t to say that the LitRPG system is bad. Far from it – The Elder Blessing system substantially enhances worldbuilding and extends many plot hooks. It acts as a reason for actions to be taken and improves character development. It even has a hand in pacing in the form of skill progression. Plus it’s enjoyable to see because I’m big into video games. In short, Elder Blessings has a hand in every aspect of the story, and I’m all for it.

The Best Aspect of the Writing Style

One of the best aspects of the writing style is that the story stands for itself. Many books in the fantasy genre overly rely on the magic trope to progress the story. This is not the case with The Elder Lands. At no point in this book did I feel like the answer to a problem was, “Because, Magic.” Every hurdle that Lucan faced was addressed expertly with level-headed strategy and thoughtful solutions. This is a massive breath of fresh air and a large point in favor of the high rating of four stars.

My only complaint is that the older terminology required me to pull out the thesaurus on my Kindle more often than I expected. I’ve read hundreds of books in my years, so it is always a surprise when this happens.

A Lack of Clearly Defined Time Skips Is a Problem

My biggest gripe with the pacing, and really, the writing style too, has to be how often time skips occur without any telegraphing. One minute, Lucan could be sipping some tea. The next minute it’s two months later. What the heck was in that Tea, Lucan? (Note, he does not drink any tea in the book as far as I remember.)

It wouldn’t be such a big deal if these skips were infrequent, but there are several non-descript time skips scattered throughout, and there isn’t much indication of how much time has passed when they do occur. This is a big problem, as I felt kind of lost at several points throughout the book because of this.

It is often described as “A few seasons go by,” or “Last season” and it just felt haphazard at times. A whole two years pass in this first book by the end, and it felt like, maybe a month passed because it wasn’t clearly defined when the time skips occurred or how long they were.

The strongest point in favor of The Elder Lands is the stellar worldbuilding. It is clear that a lot of effort went into spinning a tale that established a world and a set of rules that it adheres to. I found myself thinking about how people had to engineer solutions back then, and the challenges they faced because of a lack of tools to overcome them.

To us, using complex machines to do work is second nature. It’s the way of the world today. But, something like complex machines with levers and pullies driven by oxen was a novel idea back then. I felt Lucan’s struggle to overcome something as simple as harvesting salty water from a lake with a high ridge surrounding it. I felt his struggle to do something as “simple” as building a road. Then having to patrol said road with men to fend off bloodthirsty beasts and protect the people building it. It’s a logistical nightmare.

We tend to take for granted just how large an undertaking something like that was, and The Elder Lands helped me realize this. Yes, I intrinsically knew this, but engineering really was in its infancy back then, and B. Salem captures this fact magnificently. I’ll remember that the next time I complain about potholes in my car, a marvel of the modern world.

Five stars.

Some Notable Locations in The Elder Lands by B. Salem

There are several notable locations that have an attached story to them that is explored within the book. I’m only going to list a few here, but there are many such locations that make this exploration into a medieval world interesting.

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All things considered, The Elder Lands shaped up to be an entertaining read. It was so wildly different from what I am used to from a fantasy story, and that is a good thing. Of course, some measure of tropes are in place:

• The main character comes from a place of privilege.
  • Many characters need to observe this privilege with titles and at the very least, feign respect due to their social standing.
• The Princess being cunning and resourceful.
• Progression system with Gamified elements that define staples of LitRPG Stories.

But these tropes serve to make it feel familiar enough to warrant my attention to the end. Everything considered, the ultimate question remains to be answered.

Is The Elder Lands an absolute must-read book?

No, it is not. At 3.7 stars, it falls just short of that.

But it’s close enough to be given a chance, considering it was B. Salem‘s first book. This is especially true if you have Kindle Unlimited.

I’m intently looking forward to the next book in the series – I’m intrigued about the unique direction this story is going that is so different from other LitRPG adventures like Shade’s First Rule. Finally, B. Salem‘s promise at the end about the second book being far more involved plot-wise is exciting. I’m hoping he can follow through with it, and you can bet on my coverage of it later on!

Pick up The Elder Lands by B. Salem

Now that you have an idea of what The Elder Lands is about, you can get lost in this epic Kingdom Building LitRPG for yourself!

I hope you enjoy Lucan’s adventure as much as I did!

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