#litRPG

[prokopetz]

"But if this other world has always operated according to video game logic, why is the isekai protagonist literally the first person to figure out all these basic mechanical exploints" well, largely because litRPG isekai is merely the latest flavour of I've Been Transported To Another World Where Everyone Is Stupid Except For Me, a venerable genre that's been a going concern at least since Mark Twain.

When I was a kid, it was American sci-fi authors writing stories about shitass engineering majors getting portal-fantasied to alien planets and single-handedly saving civilisation on the strength of being the only person in the world who knows what a flowchart is, and very little has changed – right down to the weirdly inverted character arcs where the loser protagonist discovers that they don't actually need to engage in any self-reflection at all because the very traits that rendered them odious in their native society are what make them God here.

[ailishmaurafiction]

Indebted to the very demoness she was sent to kill, Thesa questions everything she’s ever known, bonds with the sexy [High Devil] Merijest, and practices her interpersonal skills. Can she help Merijest rebuild her army before it's too late?

Includes:

Slow-ish burn lesbian romance

[System]-lite LitRPG about two characters accustomed to life in a video-gamey world

Steamy tension

A reverse dungeon-crawl from the bottom of a kaiju-sized mimic

An ex-Paladin trying her best not to stare at a casually nude demoness

Weird monsters from the mind of a maniac author with art and simplified bestiary-like entries sprinkled in

Religious trauma. This one is especially going to appeal to the Catholic and Ex-Catholic girlies out there. Nobody does angst like we do, babey! (Nothing inside is strictly allegorical of any religion, but the sensibilities are definitely informed by a Catholic milieu.)

Updates Tuesdays at 11:00am PDT

Chapters hover around 1-2k words each

Cover and monster art by botjira

READ IT HERE

[lunchbagart]

People, I'm sorry to give you bad news: I'm publishing a novel. It's Isekai/LitRPG and its got lots of jokes, monsters and nonsense. I'm going to start pushing it here on this account, since my kids are too old to be impressed by art on lunch bags or me in general. Any objections?

[madcat-world]

Scions of Sylum - Nele-Diel

[litrpgburrito]

Gnight my tiny tacos. Sweet dreams.

[fyeahwebnovels]

i have created a webfiction fandom community!

hello all, i have thrown my hat in the tumblr communities open beta ring and created a community for fans (and authors) of web serials, webnovels, and generally any serially published web prose/prose-centric mixed media.

as i said, authors are welcome to join as well, but with caveats: please do not advertise any pay-to-read webfiction in the community, and please do not fight with fans over your work or insert yourself into fan conversations as an authority. basically just keep appropriate artist-fandom boundaries if you're an author, thank you.

the communities beta is still in its earliest stages and not super functional, so you'll need to send me an ask or a DM, or ask in the replies of this post, to join. i have to send out invites manually, but i will approve everyone unless your blog is outright, like, a nazi or terf blog or something. you can also DM my main @valentinedagger if contacting this blog doesn't work (i've had problems with DMs on sideblogs in the past).

[false-cowboy]

shout out to the like four other people who read webnovels on Royal Road, I see you and I love you

seeing posts on the perfect run, mother of learning, borne of caution beforeitgotweird, super minion, super supportive, primal hunter, mark of the fool, and a few more has been wonderful you guys make my day single handedly holding up those tags

[kathrynalexao3]

I painted in blood red today & wrote about walking till your feet blistered. I’m ready to get reacquainted with my past self, heal, & if shit burns down around me—well that’s just our lives at this point anyway. Fuck it. I do what I want.

And there will be more tentacle porn!

[alexanderwales]

Pitchposting: a wayward mother's litrpg

[cw: child abandonment, bad mothers]

I came up with this idea while trying to describe a non-standard litrpg that wouldn't sell, and it gripped me enough that I've been thinking about it. Now's the time to set that idea free.

Our protagonist is a woman in her thirties or maybe forties. She's divorced with two children, but she left the children with their father. She's got all kinds of issues, and felt trapped in the marriage and her life, and overwhelmed by taking care of the kids what felt like day in and day out. I don't think the age of her children really matters that much, but they need to be old enough to play videogames.

She gets isekaied into the world of a videogame that her children most loved, the one that they had been talking to her about for years, the source of their obsession. She gets a videogame interface.

Let's start with what I find compelling about the premise: the litRPG isekai stuff is being used to examine a relationship between a mother and her child(ren). We can have some power fantasy, as a treat, but mostly we have this very firm and unique lens through which to look at the world, and we have things that we surely must want to confront, revelations about motherhood and about this specific character, whoever she ends up being. In theory, the thing we're moving toward is a synthesis where we have excised the tension.

So, some questions that pop out to me:

How many children does this woman have? I don't know that it matters all that much, but where you have multiple characters who fulfil the same role, it's almost always better to condense them down. The flip side to this is there's maybe less to explore, and I think there's a different tenor to a single child and what we must assume is true of the character.

Does it have to be a woman? Is there not as much meat on the bone if it's a father who left his children? I think that this could also work, certainly, the reason it was initially a mother instead of a father was that I was trying to pick a protagonist that would lose as much RoyalRoad audience as quickly as possible while still being technically in the litRPG genre. (There are obviously different stereotypes about men and women. I kind of think the central idea of "your mom gets isekaied into that game you were obsessed with and she never really understood" probably hits right for more people, but I don't know.)

What kind of game? Alright, yeah, fair. The main point of the idea is that it's a game the mother is only passingly familiar with. Maybe she went so far as to throw a themed birthday party at one point, but she does not understand it, and maybe over the course of the story, gradually comes to understand (though really, understanding her child(ren) through the game is the main point). I'm thinking some kind of JRPG. Definitely better if it's a game with a story.

Should this game be real? Another interesting question! If the game is a real game, say FF7, then we can assume that the reader knows things, and there can be dramatic irony. If we invent a game, then we have a lot more control over what the game is, and can stay in the mother character's head better as we're in mutual ignorance.

Okay, I think those are all the most salient questions, time to stop workshopping this. I have more ideas than I have time to write novels. Thanks @thewadapan for the idea of pitchposting.

[horrifierproject]

[gleefully-macabre]

Okay this is officially the weirdest canon ship I’ve ever encountered. And I do consider it canon, if rather dubcon on one side.

A LitRPG Protagonist and his AI sugar daddy who is basically a petty trickster god with a foot fetish.

Yes, I’m reading Dungeon Crawler Carl.

Yes, I’m on the sixth book.

Yes, I’ve reached that scene.

If ya know, ya know.

[waterkangaroo]

Do you like found family?

Do you like horror and trauma wrapped in humor and ridiculous situations and dumb jokes?

Do you like cats? Do you like dinosaurs? Do you like cats riding dinosaurs?

Do you like amazing and well written female characters?

Do you like the concept of a fucked up, sarcastic AI with a foot fetish that goes more insane with each passing day?

Do you like the idea of a badass protagonist with oodles of trauma that is willing to kill for his family and yet cares deeply about humanity, all while not wearing any pants?

Then what you need is Dungeon Crawler Carl!

I will gift a copy of the first audiobook to the first 3 people to message me their emails.

Yes I am 100% serious. Yes the audiobook, because the narrator is so god damn talented that he adds an INCREDIBLE amount of depth to the characters and I legitimately cannot recommend consuming it any other way. Yes I am willing to spend this money if it gets even one more tumblrina into this fandom

[penultimate-step]

I've seen multiple people doing retrospectives on the LitRPG genre claim that the two major works that kicked off the rest of the genre were Sword Art Online and The Gamer. And I don't deny that those were definitely super influential, but I do wonder why those two get raised above all the others?

In specific, I definitely think The Legendary Moonlight Sculptor should be credited way more. And like, its not at all an obscure name - the site that most people associate with LitRPGs in EN spaces, Royal Road, is named after the series!

Especially because, when you look at that series, it's definitely way closer to what later litRPGs would look like. SAO may take place in a game world, but it doesn't care much for game mechanics - it cares much more for the vibe of playing old MMOs than tracking the characters' strength. And while The Gamer cares a lot more about tracking individual skills, it's honestly more of a urban fantasy thing - the protagonist's game mechanics stuff is pretty subordinate to that (though prevalent enough that I wouldn't rec it to someone who disliked LitRPGs.) Meanwhile LMS is exactly what you'd expect from the term litRPG - detailed discussion of character classes, stats, upgrades, levelling up, what have you.

And it came out in 2007 - far preceding the 2013 debut of The Gamer and the 2009 release of SAO's first volume. (Though technically SAO originally existed as a webnovel as far back as 2001; but I think at that point it was way too obscure to influence anybody).

I feel like in terms of influential pillars of the genre, between preceding basically every other major name, being super popular for it's time, and exemplifying a lot of the elements people both like and hate about the genre, it definitely deserves a mention in the genre history, right?

Though, the fact that both LMS and The Gamer are Korean works does make me wonder if they were working within an existing literary tradition that I am unaware of - as someone who doesn't speak the language I can only really talk about what was influential in EN spaces.

[madcat-world]

LitRPG: The Calamities (1 of 4) - Kevin Sidharta

[litrpgburrito]

Sweet dreams, my tiny tacos.

[thateepymissile]

Did not expect to have to dodge he who fights with monsters spoilers but glad to know I'm not the only fan I guess