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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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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That then got me thinking about an anime and book series. Is it Wrong to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon and Sufficiently Advanced Magic both deal with towers/dungeons that have various floors and in one case the lower floors are harder, in the other the higher floors are harder. And in the case of Sufficiently Advanced Magic there are multiple towers. The anime obviously has an anime feel to it, but so does Sufficiently Advanced Magic. I’d say that it has litJRPG feel to it.

So stealing a bit from a number of them, I really like the idea of these towers being out there, put in place by some magical being. The tower is never the same as they are magical and they are an important part of the culture.

Instead of starting at level 1, players start at level 0, which is pretty deadly, but they get to go in as a group of four and the tower provides some starting gear for them. But the PCs have to survive the first floor of the tower which is basically the proving grounds. If the PC’s survive, they hit level one and get their class. That is basically the goal of people in the society, to get into the tower and get a level and be able to have a more interesting life than those people who aren’t able to afford the entry fee or can’t find a group to put together a proving.

Once the PC’s (or their back-up PC’s have succeeded), the PC’s will be courted by a couple of different organizations, basically schools who train up adventurers so that you have skills for the real world, but only once you’ve done several years of work for them. Each school is always trying to get the best and the brightest, and each school has an area that they specialize in, so there is sabotage, corporate intrigue, spying, that goes on between the schools that the players might have to take part in.

For the players, though, the biggest thing is going to be the first ever tournament that they have to get ready for which will be a grueling slog through the largest tower to get to the highest level, which no one has ever done before, but that event is ten years out. So that is what the game is building towards, that final big climb.

Before that, there are going to be several things that the PC’s will have to do. They are going to have to do some covert operations to find out what other schools know about various towers, since schools will specialize in a single tower. Along with that, they are going to start to find out that weird things are happening, such as monsters who have only been seen in the tower are coming out of the tower and the inner workings of the towers is starting to get known.

You’ll have to decide when you want to hit the tournament and the tower, but I think that level 10 would be a great starting point. The competition will have them in the tower for weeks if not months, so players will, for once, actually have to keep track of things like food, arrows, spell components, carrying limits, etc. I wouldn’t track these things otherwise in the game, but this competition is supposed to be huge and grueling and by making them worry about what they have, it’s going to make the tower feel more epic and challenging.

This then is going to be a lot of the rest of the game as your players power through level after level of this tower that is set in a pocket dimension somewhere. Players are going to have to deal with traps, monsters, puzzles, and possibly other groups who are making their way to the top as well. All while keeping track of their gear. This part is going to be pretty intensive for the Dungeon Master because you are going to want to create something where there are short cuts, hidden routes, etc. so the players have a plethora of options and that they don’t have to get stuck somewhere.

Once your players get to the top, or even if they don’t, some other group will, that is going to unleash something bad onto the world, probably an elder god. The towers are all going to be prisons that are keeping something sealed away. That’s going to be the big boss and why the monsters are starting to break free from the towers in preparation for the the elder god being released.

Just a few other notes:

If your players are up for it, it could be really interesting to have the tower randomly select or weighted selection for what class the players are going to get. If the player does more combat, go with one of the martial classes or weight it towards that. If they are the ones who solve the puzzles, start building a pool of the more INT focused characters. You could really have a hat for each player and drop in pieces of paper to go along with one of each class to the hat and have them draw it out of their specific hat.

The other thing is that you’ll need to spend a fair amount of time building up the big bad so that it isn’t a completely surprise at the end, top of the one tower. Maybe there was a minor monster released when one of the other towers had it’s top floor reached before, but then there was a massive boon/blessing that went along with it as well, so that is why the various schools are willing to send people to climb the biggest tower to the top, because they hope the boon will be great, and there should be a great boon up there. I would even tailor them to the players so they have a boon specific to them to take on this over the top monster that is released.

Would you want to play in this game? What are your thoughts on the idea?

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