So, what is a LitRPG book?

LitRPG is a novel where it takes place in a world where there are statistics for the characters, like you would in an RPG. This can either be split between the real world and a game world, like Ascend Online and Awaken Online, or it can be a world that just happens to have RPG like rules, which you get in Towers of Heaven (though that kind of walks the line between the two) and Sufficiently Advanced Magic. In these books, you see the characters clearly leveling up and becoming better at things, gaining new skills, and getting new quests (fairly often). The quests is more obviously laid out in the ones where they actually go into an RPG, but the other ones really do the same thing as well.

LitRPG is a really easy and obvious way to do the heroes journey as you have that marker of progression for the character, and if the character is good, eventually they’ll be able to do more and more good. Now, you also have books like the first one in the Awaken Online series where the characters aren’t good, but might, in fact, be the villain of the piece if you really look at it. But if you don’t consider them going that far, they become an edge lord. I have mentioned the term before, but an edge lord is a character who is supposed to be the bad boy and edgy. I highly recommend not doing an edge lord character if you decided to write litRPG, because it seems like a wish fulfillment and often then leads to stupid situations just for fulfilling some wish of the author.

Now, LitRPG has also moved into other mediums. I actually think LitRPG most likely started in Japan, though you could argue that D&D Novels might have been the original. Manga and Anime like Is It Wrong to Pick Up A Girl in a Dungeon? and Sword Art Online are examples of LitRPG or LitJRPG that have been around for a little while. Is It Wrong to Pick Up A Girl in a Dungeon? is an example of an anime where the world itself has RPG rules to it, and Sword Art Online goes between the real world and various game worlds. It’s interesting to see how popular that these anime are or aren’t, but personally I find them both enjoyable.

So, what makes a good LitRPG?

I think that there are a few things to look for. First, you can often tell within the first few minutes or pages if the book has some sort of fulfillment edge lord fantasy feel to it. This will often be done by creating situations of unnecessary violence or hits of things of a sexual nature. This has happened in a few times when I started listening to something and I could tell quickly that it was going to be a situation where we were going to end up with an edge lord.

I also think that you can tell the quality of the writing pretty quickly by how they use descriptions or dialogue. I’ve noticed that some of the writers, since a lot seem to have originally been self published, don’t structure their books in the best way. I talked about this in my world building article, but don’t spend the first few chapters or third or whatever of the book explaining your world to me. Show me and also give me plot at the same time. If you can’t do that, I’m probably going to set down your book. And the same with dialogue or maybe more so with relationships. Know your strong points in writing. Also, be careful what point of view you use.

Also, when creating LitRPG works, have your system figured out and dispense some of the information for leveling up, things like that into your book. But don’t lean too heavily into the trope of the pop-up messages in your screen of how much damage you take or when a skill upgrades. You can show us a character sheet once in a while. I think that this is less annoying in the written form, but when I’ve been listening to things on an audio book, it really wrecks the feel you’re trying to create for the world and the characters.

Finally, have your story cohesive. People are familiar with RPG’s, you often have one quest and then another and then another, and eventually you might tie them all together, but you’ve been playing for a year now and you’ve lost one of your story threads along the way at some point, so that’s fine. But in a book, I can listen to even some of the longer LitRPG books in a week or maybe two. So that means the thread that you lost, because you might actually be pulling from your own pen and paper RPG, or just because you didn’t keep enough notes in your writing, it’s obvious to me. And if you’re doing it intentionally, don’t. It might feel thematic, but you’re writing, and like the character sheet, those things that you don’t notice in a pen and paper RPG are very obvious in a LitRPG book.

And let me do a finally, finally and say this. LitRPG is a ton of fun, I’ve been enjoying what I’ve been listening to. It has been making me want to play more D&D and write my own LitRPG, but please, people, please, if you are going to write something and self publish it on Amazon or somewhere, please hire and editor. Or at least have some friends who aren’t going to be Yes Men read the story and give you feedback. In Ascend Online, he needs someone to edit his content because he isn’t great at description so uses words over and over again. If the Sufficiently Advanced Magic writer had a good editor, they could have fixed the bad romantic language that the author tried to add to the book. And really, this isn’t just for litRPG, but please use a good editor people.

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We meet up again with the main characters of the first book, Lyr (Marcus in the real world) and his friends in their guild Virtus. Things are going pretty well for them, they have a large guild, Aldford is growing, and possibly the most fun news for them, their stream is doing really well and they are making a lot of money for the guild members in the real world. However, things can’t keep going smoothly for Virtus as they run into an old enemy and characters from Eberia make their way to Aldford bringing new challenges with them. Lyr has to decide who he can trust and figure out if he can save Aldford from problems growing below it.

If you look at my goodreads scores, I knock this book down to a three star as compared to the others that I had a four star books. I don’t think that this book is a massive drop off, just a little one. The biggest issues I have with the book are one of editing that I’ve mentioned before. It’s just using the same adjective or not reading something out loud so it has past and passed within a couple of words of each other. The editing is still rough, and it’s a shame because it doesn’t seem to be getting better. And now that might just because he doesn’t actually go to much of an editor or because the books are being rushed out, but they would be better, and possibly a full star better if they were well edited for content.

The other thing I had an issue with, and this was only for part of it, he tried to wrap too many storylines together. While the first book bounced around, the stories generally stayed separate, with just a few odd bits of tying things together, but it was done pretty simply. In the second book, and by that I do mean #1.5, the story is contained to a smaller area, and for that reason, Chmilenko does a solid job of tying various story elements together. In this one we’re back to the bigger world that surrounds Aldford, and we get too many storylines trying to tie together. I actually think that he does a good job tying them together at the end, but the rest of it, is chunky. That’s the best way to describe it, and it’s pretty obvious. You’re dealing with one thing, then that thing is completely dropped for another thing, and then you drop that other thing for another thing, and repeat. The characters have pretty one track minds. It could have been blended together better. Another way to put it would be in Dungeons and Dragons terms where the players get distracted by a seed you were laying for the future and leave the current main plot for a long time, so you feel like you have to tie it back in sooner than you would have. That’s how it feels like this story was written.

That said, I do think that in the end, it was tied together. There was some actual weight to what happened at the end. You got some of what you wanted as a fan and that had been hinted at earlier in the book, but the book isn’t without loss. In something like a game where you can respawn, Chmilenko makes sure that some things do have some real consequences. Though, I think the epilogue scene is kind of out of place, just because of how they are handling a future villain, again, probably too early.

I also think that the characters continue to develop. Not just the main five characters who were in the original book, but some of the added members of Virtus. While a few characters get less page time than in the first book, it doesn’t seem like they are being overlooked, and with a large cast of characters to draw from, that’s pretty impressive. I can see why he wrote the #1.5 book now as well so that you’d get to know some characters and some ideas of what is going on in Eberia and the larger world as Aldford is off by itself. But there are characters who show up in this book from #1.5 and they continue to be developed. Though, I feel like some of that is being handled poorly because of how forthcoming they are or aren’t with information sometimes. It seems a bit out of place for the character and it seems a bit like this book and characters were started before #1.5 was with those characters.

Overall, I still think that this is a good LitRPG series. I want to read/listen to the next book, but that probably won’t be until 2020 for the audio book, even if the book is published this year. I hope, eventually, that more content editing work will be done on the books, but even if there isn’t, I’m fairly used to it at this point. This book definitely doesn’t make me want to stop the series, even with a bit of a lower rating. And I care about the characters and what happens to them, which is always a good thing.

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Ascend Online, a book by Luke Chmilenko, is a story of a new, fully immersive video game that is coming out. It’s basically a surprise to everyone in the world that it’s happening, because, other places have tried immersive games, and they’ve failed. But this one looks much more impressive from the trailer and it certainly is. In fairly typical LitRPG style, the main characters end up in the video game and the whole of the story is spent there. Marcus and his friends go into the game together, but because Marcus takes longer than everyone else picking his character, he gets sent to a small village and separated from everyone else, instead of the main city. So it follows him as he has adventures and gets different quests while waiting for his friends to join him, beating the rush of adventurers who will be pouring out there for sure.

Now, that bit of synopsis screams edgelord, an edgelord, in this setting, is that character who would set themselves as an actual ruler of an area and do things that they think are dark and edgy that makes them cool. And there have been a few LitRPG stories that I’ve listened to where characters seem to be headed in that direction. Also a few authors who seem like they are trying to be that themselves. This book could have easily gone down that path, and you do run across some characters who get that sort of treatment in the book, but Marcus and his friends are actually good people. It’s really refreshing to see handled that way, and I think that is one of the things I appreciated about the book.

The other big thing I like about the book is that while it’s in a game, the author does take some steps to just write a fairly epic feeling fantasy story. Yes, we do get one of my least favorite bits, because it is a LitRPG, but the world is well conceived as compared to some other LitRPG’s that I’ve read where it just felt very generic. It felt much more like a video game than this one does. Now, like I was saying, we do get one of my least favorite things which is stat blocks and heads up displays that you get in actual video games. I think that in book form, that wouldn’t be as bad, but for an audio book, it makes for some boring listening. Since I’ve just listened to it, I’m going to assume that the book has it laid out in a table you can skim over faster than it takes someone to read it, especially when not a ton has changed always.

Let’s quickly talk about the actual writing in the book. This is another spot where I don’t want to say it’s bad, but it certainly isn’t good. I think that Chmilenko writes compelling characters and a fairly interesting story, tying different things together well, while stringing together different quests, but the actual writing is a bit clunky. This book could be made a lot better by just having a better editor, or having taken the advice of a good editor. It isn’t a case where there are just dumb sections of the book that could be cut, I think that they’ve done a good job of keeping what is needed, but there is a lot of need to clean up sentences. A word will be used in a sentence and then used again, or something will be described at the start and end of a sentence. Just a little more time on editing would have been able to clean up the sentences, that in some sections were pretty commonly bad and other sections were better, and made it an easier listen to. Does this take too much away from the book to make it listenable/readable? I think for a lot of people it might, which, is a shame, because I like the story. But it really pulls you from immersion when you feel like the author is repeating himself. I think I said this with Sufficiently Advanced Magic, if you are going to write and possibly self publish LitRPG work, find a good editor and listen to them. I know it might be beating a dead horse, but it’ll make a huge difference.

So, what do I think of the book and would I recommend it? Clearly I’m enjoying the book as I’m listening to what is technically book #1.5 in the series. Different cast of characters, but I think better writing than the first book. If you can make it through the rough sections of writing and want to check out a LitRPG book, I think it could be an interesting read. I think I might prefer Sufficiently Advanced Magic, though that one drags in spots more so than this one does. Ascend Online is a good book in the LitRPG genre, however, most books in the LitRPG genre seem to be less good than your standard fantasy. So yes, I can recommend it, but don’t spend much money on it, in fact, try and find it at your library if you can.

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