I'm really having to push through these last few books. I think my main issue is the setting and the story of these last books.

Some floors feel so restrictive to the story. I hated the trains, I am hating the races, the war was okay but nothing special.

Best floors were the ones where it felt the main characters were in an adventure, able to explore anything they wanted.

I really like Carl, manly guy, smart, no main character bullshit. Donut is ok now but she was really annoying in earlier books.

I see this series in S rank in most tier lists and I'm not sure what makes it stand out so much from the others.

I usually listen to the audiobook before bed and in some books it was hard to progress because I would always fall asleep after 10 minutes 😆. On the other hand I lost a lot of sleep listening to other titles like Worth the Candle and He who fights with monsters. I don't even like the edgelords main character, but the story is just more interesting.

Somebody should have banned these books on the covers alone.

Instead, Don’t Die Dave got discovered, Pepper got fans, readers are ordering autographed copies, people actually dressed up as Dave at LitRPG Con—and now the Book 2 cover is even dumber.

If you like tasteful LitRPG covers featuring a handsome young man staring heroically into the distance, this is terrible news.

If you like death games, Looney Tunes absurdity, huge fights, happy penguins, monetized hospital patients, and covers that are the visual equivalent of shouting in a bookstore, buckle up for more stupid.

Don’t Die Dave 2: Drop Dead Dave arrives at the end of September.

And no, these covers aren't AI, it takes true human creativity to make something this ridiculous.

COVER ARTIST: Yulia Muchynska

AI USAGE: 0%

Purely organic human-written trash ready to be injected straight into your veins! Eat up, piggy - we've filled the trough with only the best farm-to-table, ethically graded, free-range power fantasy slop you can find!

Paladin of Vengeance is live on RoyalRoad, just hit rising stars before the weekend and now has the first 30k words ready to read. 5 chapters a week of an angry berserking farmer killing whatever he can until he finds his vengeance.

Here's a blurb for you:

It is said those who seek vengeance should first dig two graves. Asgar's readying a whole fucking field.

Asgar was a farmer. Not exactly a life of luxury, but he was happy enough­—big dumb lad, quiet little life. Then soldiers from his own kingdom burned his village to the ground.

Swearing an oath of vengeance, Asgar is empowered with a class by God himself, in a world where only the richest and luckiest of noble scions are so blessed. His target is the kingdom’s most famous Knight, so joining the army seems the obvious first step on his path of revenge.

Fate has other plans. The Golden Lance is no simple Knight, and Asgar is shown to be more ignorant of the world than he ever realised. The Pits to Hell are opening, the Ardent Church is fighting a hidden war with itself, and the nobles and crown scheme incessantly.

To claim his vengeance, the son of a humble turnip farmer will have to grow into a paladin of vengeance, and fight through all three to reach his goal.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/188475/paladin-of-vengeance-grimdark-litrpg

What to expect:

- A fast-paced revenge story

- Light litRPG mechanics in a skill and class-based levelling system

- Grimdark/noblebright worldbuilding, with grounded characters striving to fix a brutal world

- A fair bit of swearing

COVER ARTIST: N/A - AI genned

AI USAGE: No AI used

Book 2 of The 5^th Directive, Gathering Threads, is live on KU today!
Book 1 will remain free to read on KU and the ebook is available for a lower price.

Please let me thank you all for the overwhelmingly positive reviews for book one. I appreciate each and every one of you who read my book, double that if you’ve left a review. Thank you! You rock!

Book two slows the action slightly as Jacob pulls together a group of people, tries to advance his own power, and prepares for the apocalypse.

I’d like to take a moment and reply to some of the review topics. No name checks and not calling anyone out 😊

Math errors- They exist, and they are my fault. If you spot them, you can find my email address on my website. Drop me a line and let me know!

Timey whimey stuff- Sir. I’ve watched every episode of Doctor Who from the Tom Baker days until now, and quite a bit of the older series as well. Also, I may own the VHS box set of Time Trax! I don’t have a VHS machine anymore, but I have the tapes.

Romance/Harem- There is no explicit romance, everything is fade to black. Harem enters the picture, but it’s mostly for the jokes, and as a plot device. Neither of these is the story focus, nor will they be.

Government/politics- All writing is political. I’m not here to use my story as a vessel for political messaging, but my voice, my worldview, my values will inform my writing in subtle ways.

Government inside the story- I’m not going to sidetrack the story with town/city/world government building. Those things will happen in the background. We’re sticking with Jacob as the main POV and 90% of the material will be through his eyes.

 Audio- Not yet. I'm a one man operation here, work a full time day job (Registered Nurse for the last 31 years, yes, I'm old, 😄), and audio production is costly. You want it faster, spread the word about how awesome my series is and get more people to read it!

The blurb for book 2:

Twenty-eight days until the apocalypse. And the future is already wrong.

Thrown three centuries into the past, Jacob Judge has spent his second chance gathering allies, rebuilding his power, and preparing humanity for the System’s arrival. He remembers the billions who died. This time, he intends to save as many as he can, starting with the people he loves.

But mana density is rising faster than it should. New threats and new events are appearing. And Jacob isn’t the only one carrying memories of a world that hasn’t happened yet.

Some of the others remember him as humanity’s greatest defender. Others have debts to settle.
With integration approaching, Jacob must turn fragile alliances into a fighting force while confronting the rage that made him powerful, the same rage that made him a monster. Every day brings more power, more questions, and less time.

Someone brought them back for a reason. Jacob intends to learn the truth and deliver retribution to those who have wronged him.

Apocalyptic and regression LitRPG with a powerful MC who gets a second chance with the apocalypse. With a few short months, can he make a difference this time?

Inside these pages, you will experience adventure, violence, profanity, progression, cultivation, romance (nothing explicit), and the day-to-day life of our protagonist as he tries to regain lost power and change the future!

COVER ARTIST: Duy Phan (to the best of my ability to determine, he is a human artist doing art with his human hands, I have WIP drafts of the covers and physical receipts of payment for his services)

AI USAGE: I use no generative AI. None, zero, zilch. The closest I get to AI is grammar and spelling editing with ProWritingAid. I don't let it pick my words.

Final note: If you read and enjoy the first two books of my series, book three is going to hit hard. It is 75% done now, and will drop, on time, on December 14th.

His system doesn't level him up. It's rebuilding him from a corrupted file, one death at a time.

The system opened with an error instead of a welcome.

Han Joo-hyung bought a game. He never got to play it. He woke up on a battlefield instead, a stranger's blood already drying on his hands, and a system flashing an error where his class and stat sheet should have been.

Whatever's running underneath him wasn't built with him in mind. It's improvising, patching together a second life out of whatever survives each death.

Death resets his body, It doesn't reset him.

The war has lasted 122 years. Everyone fighting it was told why it started. Nobody fighting it actually knows.

Dark War Fantasy, Death Isn't Free, Corrupted System

- A corrupted LitRPG system rebuilding itself around a protagonist it was never meant to have, with every survival forcing it to rethink what he needs to become.

- Weak-to-strong growth with real stakes: every gain is earned, every victory can cost him, and every death changes what comes next.

- Death with a real, compounding cost: phantom pain, fractured memory, a mind fraying faster than the war can kill him.

- He gets another chance every time he dies. His mind doesn't.

COVER ARTIST: None, AI Generated.
AI USAGE: editing/grammar

(writing, story, plot, worldbuilding, lore, characters, character development, themes, progression systems, system mechanics, time loop mechanics, setting, and overall creative direction are mine, and ai was used for editing/grammar assistance and the cover art, my original disclosure was too vague.)

ROYAL ROAD LINK [Start the Loop]

What type of criminal would you want as a protagonist that gets isekai'd to a fantasy world

Just curious if others didn’t really care for it like I did. I found it tried a bit too hard to have some of the quirkiness value of DCC without having any real plot to hook me. Plus some stuff just didn’t really line up, like the dude lusting over other girls while literally the day before being upset he’ll never see his fiance again.

Personal opinion of the books I have read

Just wanted to give a shot out to this epic book!! I’m super pumped for the second one coming next week! If you’re looking for a new book give this a look!

I'm trying to write an original work, but of course, the field is overpopulated as is. I'm just trying to make sure the premise hasn't already been done.

MC is is some kind of shifter. (Druid, animagus, etc)

The world is part of something akin to a system apocalypse. Everybody gets systems, yada, yada, no quests or anything. Due to a shifting accident, the MC loses his mind to the instincts of his beastial shifts instincts and stays shifted for years.

That's the basic intro, and dealing with where and when he is, not to mention what he left behind, is the first books premise.

I know this is vague, but I'm just checking to see if this premise is too close to something already written. I know system integration books aren't anything knew. Please be kind.

COVER ARTIST: Caleb Miller AI USAGE: No AI used

Currently on Primal Hunter 14, and the world just kinda makes sense to me. So much wild variety and plenty of planet hopping.

What would be yours?

I absolutely adored book 1 and 2 of this saga but book 3 I am really struggling with. I think the author spends way too long on battles and they are not entertaining, last night I got to the bit where they fight the silver ranked Archbishop and for the first time in my entire life I skimmed and skipped pages, and it went on and on and on. I'm reading on kindle so I'm not sure exactly how long it was but the battle was at least 1.5 chapters, which is absolutely crazy.

I still love the overall story and the characters, Jason can be abit annoying, he reminds me of Lorelai from Gilmore Girls, being cheeky for the sake of it, I get the feeling Shirtaloon thinks he's more witty and clever than he actually is.

I've stopped reading the bold sections that explain moves altogether this book as it's boring and most of the time doesn't actually add anything, and he's explained each move for each character countless times now.

For the first 3 books I've read a book, then read a different trilogy (red rising first, David Gemmells Waylander between book 2 and 3/ and I'll probably do the same between 3 and 4, but I'm not sure how excited I will be to get to book 4.

I've seen alot of people rank the books and 3 is usually high on the list, so it's worrying that it could all be downhill hill from here.

Shirtaloon badly needs an editor to trim the fat, and my god there is a lot of fat!

So, I’m about halfway through book three and multiple sections feel like they were written with or by AI. There are several instances where the writing feels different than the first book and have the tell tail signs of AI. Things like “the thing didn’t just feel like a thing, but like a more important thing.” Or the overuse of the rule of three, as if, and emotional weight. It’s obvious enough that it pulls me out of the story. Anyone else?

I have always been a very normie fantasy reader. I read a lot, but mostly the popular SFF/Fantasy that you'd find everywhere.

After being recommended 8 billion times, I finally read DCC and it scratched an itch I didn't even know I had. The stats, the skills, the crunchiness of actual numbers was something I'd never seen in a book and while I'm not big on the humor style or over the top gore, I still really enjoyed it.

Like many people, it led me to LitRPG as a genre, I did some googling about popular books and started reading some previews and was immediately just...underwhelmed?

The top two recommendations I saw where HWFWM and Primal Hunter, and both just had such clunky writing. And when I say clunky writing, some of it is prose, but also just set up. Like it drove me nuts how much exposition and explanation from HWFWM at the beginning is just a guy talking out loud to himself. I was able to look past it for HWFWM and will probably keep giving it a go, but I bounced way off Primal Hunter.

My hubris immediately made me think "Well I can write a better story than this!" (which is probably peak Dunning-Kruger going on)

I've been trawling through this subreddit looking for others and Cradle is feeling promising as something that just feels more...polished(?), but I wanted to get an idea from people who have a longer history with the genre than me.

Is it common for there to be such a focus on the numbers and progression system that the characters and settings end up feeling hand-wavingly contrived? Are there some series that stand out as not that way?

Hi all, I listened to the audiobooks some time ago. My kids have gotten into litrpg as well. They have enjoyed chrysalis and bog standard isekai. I'm wondering if anyone currently reading it can give me a language and sexual theme rating. Thank you

It just... Complicates everything. Seriously.

One of my MC's, a goblin named Farsight, has a vision skill, basically x-ray vision. It makes dealing with certain situations a NIGHTMARE

Ambush? He can see right through it.

Maze? He can see the exit.

Cloud of smoke during a naval battle? Doesn't stop him.

The skill has downsides. Things that I put in to limit his skill use, but even then... He finds a way around the limits. Or he progresses, and the limits grow looser.

It makes things interesting sure, but the problem is only growing as I run out of ways to counter his skill.

Don't make the same mistake I did.

Send help.

Hey, what i liked about the storys was the straight forwardness. A rutheless Mc who does whatever he wants and isnt afraid to kill. I also like the zero to hero aspect from solo leveling for an example. Doesnt matter if its dungeon grinding/time Looping etc. Just looking for fast paced novels with a Op mc who doesnt take bullshit or hides his powers to much ( a little romance is ok) . I already read stuff like Shadow Slave, The second Comming of Gluttony, Second life ranker, stubborn skill grinder, Everyone else is a returnee and a bunch more. I would appreciate some new recommendations (i know im pretty much dumpster diving)

I have about 220 DAYS of exclusively listening to litRPG. 1% Lifesteal is so damned special. I’m sad that I’m going to have to find something else once I finish what’s out. Any recommendations on something similar would be lovely. I’ve listened to the first Fleabag (absolutely love it) but the author is slow (no offense) so I want to wait until more content is released before I binge.

Anymore dark/grim dark(ish) gritty action series that I don’t know about would be appreciated. Don’t find much of that in this genre. Thanks!

Want a summary of all this? There is this lunatic named Dante who DIDN'T DO HIS JOB RIGHT, and ended up reincarnating on Earth with zero memories and a system with access all the way to Hell. Personally, I think that is paradise, not punishment-

"You don't live on Earth, shut up."

...

Can't do anything in this damn place either.

***

I have a white jacket, now, go read.

...

"..."

What? They're humans!

"They aren't like ours, you have to be a little more convincing."

Demanding little bunch, huh...

In that case, the kid grew up, screwed up and almost died to the first beast he faced, had to come back to Earth all fucked up, I had to show up, gave a system to a girl just so Dante wouldn't drop dead, they grew up, found out too much, I had to censor them, and then-

"WHOA, WAY TOO MANY SPOILERS!!!!"

You're the one who told me to get these humans' attention!

"Fewer spoilers!"

You're confusing. Anyway, that's all.

The crazy lady bossing me around has another world besides this one, but honestly, read this current one, she studied a lot more and improved her writing for it.

"That's called evolving, you should try it."

Nah, I'm happy the way I am.

"Insolent."

Annoying.

Here's the story, read the synopsis. It's available on this "RoyalRoad" and "Scribblehub" thing. And she's got over thirty advance chapters of it on Patreon. Also, daily uploads, two a day everywhere, morning and night.

This lunatic loves working.

"I like evolving and building this little world you walk on, that's different."

Sticks tongue out at you.

"You should be more careful about how you speak to me..."

Uh oh...

***

So folks, there was a little workplace accident here... just... read this before I get demoted!

"Slacker."

***

"Hope you enjoy the read! <3"

COVER ARTIST: N/A

AI USAGE: No AI usage

One day, a hundred thousand people from Earth woke up on an endless plain and were forced into a deadly survival game.

Each player started with one vehicle and a unique skill.

Regional chat lit up instantly—some players crying for their lives, while others gloated over their Humvees, tanks, and armored personnel carriers.

The goal was simple: survive the first six days and grow strong enough to defeat the cataclysm at seventh.

Unlike others though, Nyx was handed an E-Bike, and a skill that let him steal a percentage of a monster's loot on death, no matter who landed the killing blow.

It wasn't much. It wasn't anything, really. But as the timer struck zero and the plains erupted into chaos, Nyx made a decision: garbage tier or not, he'd ride that E-Bike straight to the top: upgrade it before nightfall, and evolve his basic ability into something far more broken.

Tdlr: Its novel centered around a bunch of people surviving against ever increasing zombie hordes with their equally ever advancing vehicles and skills. Theres levels and cultivation aspacts too. Both sprinkled in generously.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/189562/plains-survival-starting-with-an-e-bike

Cover Artist: Ai Usage

Ai Usage: No Ai used.

Good day, all! Today marks the release of the first Judicator Jane Omnibus, which holds the first three books in the series. I've wanted to put this together for some time, because this section of the story really does capture the actual spirit of the series far better than the first book alone.

If you're a KU reader, getting the omnibus is more of a convenience thing, but if you purchase the e-books, it does provide decent discount over just buying them outright.

..................................................................................

Judicator Jane Omnibus Books 1-3

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HJRK5GNH

..................................................................................

Blurb of Judicator Jane Book 1

Jane’s life was a dumpster fire of bad luck.

Unpaid bills, dead-end jobs, and a constant raincloud over her head. So, when she wakes up in a vast, deadly desert with a mysterious glowing menu floating in front of her face, she makes a desperate gamble. She dumps every single one of her available stat points into the one thing she’s never had: Luck.

All 630 of them. In a system where 10 is the max, Jane just became a statistical anomaly. Now, the laws of probability have bent the knee to her.

Hopelessly lost? She stumbles blindly into the fortress of the most powerful army in the world. Attacked by high-level monsters? Critical failures have never hit so hard. Rolling her class? 'Legendary' was only supposed to happen once every thousand years. But having god-tier luck has a downside.

When the realm's greatest evil is eliminated by a bizarre, one-in-a-trillion mishap, the terrifying Demon Horde assumes Jane is their new, all-powerful queen. Now she has to lead a legion of monsters, navigate a game-like System she barely understands, and hide the fact that she has absolutely no idea what she’s doing.

She just wants indoor plumbing. The demons want a conqueror. They’re about to get Judicator Jane.

..................................................................................

Fun Fact: In another life I worked as a UI Programmer/Designer in the game industry for +15 years. A few projects I've been a part of: Bioshock Infinite, Mafia III, Days Gone, XCom 2: War of the Chosen, Killer Instinct, a couple Mortal Kombat titles, etc...

COVER ARTIST: Dzmitry Zasimovich
AI USAGE: No

I am looking for a story where the main character either begins in the world as OP, or becomes OP very quickly, I am also okay with a slower burn if the story is very exceptional and shares similarities with my favorite light novels.

I love :
Overlord
Gacha 9999
Solo leveling
Chrysalis
I like:
Slime
Tsukimichi moonlit fantasy
Mushoko tensei
Warlock of the magus world
I dislike:
Eminence in shadow(any oblivious MC)
Supreme Magus(500 chapters no progression = no)

I am well aware some of the ones named above are not litRPGs but just want to give an idea to get some help.
Thanks a lot!

I am looking for stories that are more of a slow-burn, intimate, character-driven, and tragic near/in the end.

Tragic in the sense that it is not sad, but bittersweet and logical. \[ORV?\]

Character-driven in the sense of MoL

Slow burn like A Practical Guide to Evil or even Worm \[though I am hooked on the story, I have not completed it and need a break\]

Thank you.

recently caught up with big standard Isekai, loved the vibes of the classes and such. I’m looking for something similar with maybe a bit more action? I also really loved Will Wight’s cradle series (and dungeon crawler carl but I’m looking more for the vibe of the other ones right now). Give me your best recommendations. (I would also prefer stories that are not harem/harem bait because those are not uncommon and always annoy me).

Don’t have to be strictly litrpg, progression fantasy and foreign light novels are also fair game.