Royal Road has a lot of interesting reads. I wish there was a way to read them on my Kindle, though.
Dawn of the Void is a good one there:
I fell down this rabbit hole several years ago.
RoyalRoad is the place to go for most of these, just about everything recommended up thread started there and most of it continues there as well. One thing to note, very few of these have any sort of hard end in sight. They are serials. These authors have a fun idea and a neat system they want to work with and then they are off. There’s a fair bit of Dickensian being paid by the word stuff here.
There are two main subgenere’s here. LitRPG and Cultivation/Progression. LitRPG is what it says on the tin, stats, skills, levels and people in the world have access to that. Just like sci-fi there’s hard and soft, though in this case soft is often called Gamelit where the numbers aren’t hard, are only casually tracked and are there as set dressing mostly.
The hardest of the hard is Delve. It’s an interesting world and a completely mathed out system. It’s huge. But, it starts to suffer from that Dickensian thing after the second big arc.
Edit: I completely forgot to include my absolute favorite. The Infinite World by JR Wright. There are currently four books. It starts with The Land of the Undying World. It has a bit of a rough start, but it quickly segues into the main character and his delightful partner Tersa. Trent is the main character and he’s sort of a clever version of Pants. He’s a completely blank slate for the reader to self insert with. There’s a spectacular cast of characters around him, the aforementioned Tersa, the mentor/trainer Cullen, Kerry, Felicia, so many including the world itself. The world is fascinating. The system is not Delve by any stretch of the imagination, but it is fairly solid and is used frequently to build and direct the story.
On the gamey side are the Good Guys and the Bad Guys by Eric Ugland. They are two stories in the same world. These are Kindle Unlimited books. A decidedly less solid system, but a fairly fleshed out world with neat mechanics and ideas. The writing is fairly light, breezy and jokey. Montana is one of my favorite characters.
Another lighter LitRPG is Threadbare. It’s about a stuffed bear who got lost and just wants to find his girl. I teared up repeatedly here.
Another really long one, but surprisingly non Dickensian, is Ar’Kendrithyst. This one is about an father and his daughter who get sent to another world. It’s mostly the dad’s story. LGBTQ+ friendly, subtly early on, but much more overtly later.
Oh, that brings me to another point. These are power fantasies, and they sadly go in the expected places. There’s another whole subgenre, the harem. Usually, their covers are obvious, but very rarely some will sneak through on me.
First off, great idea for a thread, thanks for this. As a huge fan of Cradle (the largely unspoken elephant just outside the room) I’ve been interested in finding similar, reasonably well written stuff to read.
I quoted your suggestion above because Will Wight explicitly recommended it on his blog awhile back, so along with Awaken Online and He Who Fights Monsters (both of which I picked up the first volume of based on book thread chatter here at QT#) it’s been high on my list to check out.
First, though, I’ve got to read Reaper and Dreadgod. I figured we’re close enough to book 12 that I should finally get caught up.
There is. There are browser extensions designed to download web fiction as an Epub (possibly other formats but Calibre can always convert if need be) and you can then sideload. the one I found already understands how Royal Road is formatted so can do those easily, might take tweaking for other sites like blogs or such. I don’t remember what it is called at the moment but will edit to add that detail soon.
Not sure the authors get any compensation if you do that though.
Edit: WebtoEpub. Available for Chrome, cannot guarantee other browsers.
I don’t think many Royal Road authors get compensation from the site itself, though some do I’ve heard. I think most hope for tips and Patreon compensation. I’ve heard you need to be a really popular author to get compensation from Royal Road.
You can also set your Royal Road account to show that you are following the work and if you go to the trouble of clicking on each available chapter it will show as read, or something like that.
My guess is tipping the writer a few bucks is probably more compensation than he or she would get from you individually reading all the chapters on Royal Road.
Royal Road authors don’t get compensated from the site. However, it is a great launching point for self publishing on Amazon.
I’ve written one LitRPG, but I got out of the genre for reasons and I unpublished the book. I can say that some of the authors named in this thread make a lot of money. We’re talking six figures a month thanks to Kindle Unlimited and Audible. LitRPG and Gamelit are a legitimate phenomonon.
The World Ends, Not in Fire and Flames but via a series of Blue Boxes
All John wanted to do was get away from his life in Kluane National Park for a weekend. Hike, camp and forget about his ex and the mess his life has become. Instead, the world comes to an end in a series of blue boxes. Animals start evolving, monsters begin spawning and he’s now got a character sheet and physics defying skills. Now, he has to survive the apocalypse, get back to civilization and not lose his mind along the way.
The System has arrived and with it, aliens, monsters and a reality that draws upon past legends and game-like reality. John will need to find new friends, deal with his ex and the slavering monsters that keep popping up.
Life in the North is Book 1 of the System Apocalypse, an Apocalyptic LitRPG that combines modern day life, science fiction and fantasy elements along with game mechanics. This series contains elements of games like level ups, experience, enchanted materials, a sarcastic spirit, mecha, a beguiling dark elf, monsters, minotaurs, a fiery red head and a semi-realistic view on violence and its effects. Does not include harems
This has been the series I have enjoyed the most, 12 books with a finish, others I have tried just don’t seem to work but some great suggestions above
One series I like, which I’ve mentioned in the books thread and I think is apropos here is Sarah Lin’s Street Cultivation trilogy, which amongst other things has the advantage of being a three book series that actually ends after three books :) It is on KU.
Street Cultivation (3 book series) Kindle Edition (amazon.com)
It’s somewhat stat heavy, but draws from the wuxia side of things… I liked it because it sort of takes the qi-based progression fantasy and then explores what a modern world with that would look like. So qi is associated with credit ratings, jobs, and education abilities. The main character does end up in a fighting tournament during the first book, but the second goes in a thoroughly different direction, and I thought the third brings the main characters’ story to a satisfying close. And the main character never really ends up overpowered, which is pretty common in this genre.
Many RR authors are running Patreons. I am subscribed to a couple.
Man, so many recommendations and yet since a couple of the series I’ve actually read (and don’t recommend as such - The Land and Way of the Shaman) haven’t come up I’m also confident y’all aren’t just listing everything… there’s clearly a ton of people writing in the genre at this point. Including women, apparently! (One of the things that made it such a questionable genre for me is how exclusively male it was seeming.)
For LitRPG adjacent but not actually LitRPG recs I’d also suggest Mother of Learning (time loop progression fantasy over on Royal Road - though it’s starting to hit Amazon. Now complete.) and Rachael Aaron’s Forever Fantasy Online trilogy, which she wrote with her husband. Mother of Learning has its own thread if people are curious (not lengthy, but it does have one). FFO is clearly written by people who played a lot of MMOs but are professional authors and is about a VR MMO that suddenly strands a whole bunch of players in the now very real bodies of their game avatars…in what turns out to be a real world that’s been magically locked in the game loops of MMO play and is now very upset with players.
I read Royal Road on a browser called Berry. The browser makes it a bit easier to read things. You get a good dark mode and the have a button that gets rid of all the ads and makes the width of the paragraphs more comfortable to look at (on an iPad in Portrait Mode).
I read Chrysalis on Royal Road and then noticed that it came out on Audible and grabbed it to support the author. I never realized it was on KU or I would have grabbed it there first.
Royal Road helps get the Author noticed; I am thinking it is similar to how the older SciFi authors got their start doing short stories in magazines back in the day. I will hold off on reading it on Royal Road now and wait for it on KU (or Audible if I happen to be subscribing at the time).
I like this series and have read all the books in the series except the last one. What made it interesting to me is the Architect side of things.
No one has mentioned the Viridian Online series?
I believe this was one of the first series that I read and felt it was a cut above the rest when the genre was starting to gain ground. I am still working my way through the series. Taking me longer because I use KU to read it and I tend to read a bunch of series at a time when I subscribe to KU. I never have gotten through all the books. Its interesting because some successful LITRPG series are starting to attract other authors writing in the same world (which this is one of). Reminds me a bit of Thieves World or Wild Cards
So what’s the difference? Both subgenres have started making theitr way into my Amazon recommendations over the past year (since I started reading Will Wight’s Cradle series), but I haven’t jumped in yet (but I am strongly considering it). But a couple of reader reviews of what were flagged as Cultivation made it sound like they had a gamebook aspect - so the reader was actually doing stuff on the side. Did I misunderstand that?
This thread delivers.
Would you consider Cradle to be game like? I would say it is not LitRPG because Cradle does not list stats, levels etc but does have what some may consider to be game like elements….progression being one of them. I suppose it could argued that cultivation type stories always had that.
I think that these terms get intermixed a lot when being discussed and for the most part I enjoy all of them wherther it is Cultivation/Progression, LitRPG or Game Lit.
Personally, I do not like having stats and ability lists so much (which is the hallmark I suppose for LitRPG). Especially when listening versus reading them. In a book I can skip through them but that is harder to do when listening. I like how in Chrysalis they make the stat and ability lists a chapter itself so it is easy to skip them if the reader is so inclined.
The interesting thing about LitRPG is that authors can create fantasy stories without worrying about modern tropes. The author doesn’t have to worry anbout expression that would never be used in straight fantasy. I think we are seeing this upswell because it allows an easier entry point for writers in fantasy.
No, I simply observed that I started getting these recommendations after picking up that series. I assumed it was somewhat adjacent, but not of the actual genres.
Yeah, Cradle is adjacent. Cradle is considered ‘Progression’ fantasy/sci-fi/etc. Many of those lean heavily on wuxia/cultivation type advancement systems like Cradle (but not all of them do), but they they don’t always display the characteristics of gamelit and litrpg - namely overtly gamified RPG style worlds and stat systems.
Cradle is progression/cultivation. People calling Cradle gamelit are really pedantic. It’s mostly a case where Cradle’s progression/cultivation is softer instead of defined with hard definable stages. I might go so far as to SAT analogy the thing LitRPG/Gamelit is to Cultivation/Progression. Cultivation/progression is more about internal development and power advancement, whereas LitRPG/gamelit is more about development through greater access to a larger system bestowing power. Granted, this division breaks down in most systems the higher up whichever power tree they are climbing. Higher levels in cultivation usually reference connections to universal truths and concepts, whereas higher levels in litrpgs often reference breaking free of the systems and building individual power.