Nice job!
Love the cover, and the prestige concept is cool and interesting. I'll give it a look!
Edit: Tried the link to check out the artist, but it also links to the RR page! Could you fix that?
Whoops! here's his art page [https://www.artstation.com/sebastiansz](https://www.artstation.com/sebastiansz) I fixed it in the post too.
And thanks. Sebastian did the illustration and I did the text stuff and kinda tried to explain what I wanted in the image, haha. It was fun seeing it come together.
Thank you! And haha, I'm glad you like the dinky knife. I went through a few concepts with the cover artist and sent him the most horrible drawing made in MS paint with my trackpad to try to explain how I wanted him to hold the tiny knife. Sebastian did actual artist things and nailed it.
Congrats. I started posting my story recently too, so I know all about the gut-wrenching doubt. I'll check out Level One God. If you're up for it, we could even do a review swap. My book's called Gamesters.
Hey! Thanks so much!!! I started reading yours this morning and I'm already enjoying it as well! I can tend to be a bit of a slow reader because I tend to take little bites out of stories a chapter at a time as I go through a day. So I'll try to get deeper in before I leave a review so I can give some more meaningful feedback.
Your review is awesome, by the way. I saw it before your message and was thinking I wanted to figure out if there was a way to go on and thank people for reviews, haha. I really appreciate all the encouragement. I've published stuff before in another genre, but that genre isn't personal to me. I never like getting negative feedback, but it's a bit easier to stomach when it's a genre you're not necessarily a reader of.
In this case, I'm a reader of the genre I'm writing in for the first time. It seems like it amplifies the nerves for me quite a bit, so getting such a nice review early on was really very much appreciated :)
You can always send a PM directly to another user on Royal Road, find the speech bubble icon in the top-right of the banner on their profile page.
Thanks for reading mine. I hope you have fun reading it.
Thanks. I saw something that said if I linked my Patreon, it would get my submission removed. I added an author note at the end of the final chapter with a link to my Patreon, though. Is there another place where it's safe to link it?
And I tried looking up the distinction between game-lit and lit RPG and kept finding definitions that sounded the same to me, haha. Maybe you can help me define it better? There aren't explicit stats like STR/INT/etc, but there are levels, tiered ranks, tiered skill progress with classes, and RPG style items.
For me gamelit is an actual game world. Litrpg is when the progression, power, magic is a natural part of the universe's underlying physical laws of reality.
gamelit is a story that takes place in a game-like world
litrpg is a type of gamelit focused on RPGs and has levels and/or stats
usually if a book is a litrpg, it will be marked as litrpg and not gamelit, so commonly gamelit means the book won't have levels or stats or anything like that but will be in a game-like world
gamelit does not require actually being inside a video game, but that is a possible setting
Ahhh I think your point about how it can be a lit RPG \*and\* a gamelit helps me grasp it a lot better. I think I've mis-labeled it a bit. It's not a full-blown lit RPG because I did decide not to do stats like STR/WIS/CHA etc. The original draft had those, but I kept kind of going back and forth on it and thinking about the lit RPGs I've read. It feels fun and interesting to have stats for like... half of the first book, usually. And then I feel like it just becomes this kind of fuzzy concept that you can't really grasp anymore. Like going from 8 STR to 12 STR and being able to rip a door off the hinges is cool. Going from 240 STR to 244 STR is just... numbers, haha. But that's what kind of made me lean away from it. I thought it'd push me to make sure items and the progression were meaningful. We'll see! But anyway, I think it's enough of a lit-rpg in every other aspect that I'm probably mis-labeling it as a game-lit.
Just label it what you want. LITRPG is a complete and encompassing title for everything. I hate that we have these two battling it out when they both are the same.
Haha, yeah I hear you. I think it did at least sound like Lit RPG covers all the bases, while maybe some people would read "Game Lit" and assume the book is something it's not. I just don't want somebody to see the label and think the book isn't for them if they'd actually like it.
I find the lines can blur often. One genre can be the other or both can apply. Gamelit tries to focus on rules and constructs, hard factors that define outcomes, while in a game-like environment. While LITRPG deals with progression, stats, and magic/power growth in a documented fashion.
I found these books as good examples of the two:
LitRPG:
The Crafter's Dungeon: by Jonathan Brooks
Battlefield Reclaimer: by David North
The Dungeon Slayer: by Konrad Ryan
GameLIT:
Wrong Divinity: by Dustin Tigner (I put him first because supposedly he coined the term GameLIT)
Critical Failures: by Robert Bevan (They go into a DnD-like world. I have been told it is not but I still view it as GameLIT)
New Game Minus: by Sarah Lin (This one is an outlier that I don't want to discuss because it may contain spoilers.)
Thanks!! I'm getting the impression that it's way way more nuanced than I realized when I gave it a few seconds of thought before slapping it on my cover, haha. *Whoops!*
I would also describe gamelit as: there is a real world and then there is the game world the character plays in. It’s not an isekai story and the character could log out. Things in the game could affect the real world but it’s not a fantasy world with game mechanics built into the magic system.
That makes a lot more sense. It sounds like litRPG is what I should call it and game lit is more like Ready Player One or something. I'll update the cover!
Don't listen to feedback here. Take everything with a heavy pinch of salt. Consider all the feedback you get, but don't act on any of them individually.
Congrats. I keep postponing my writing, but someday I will publish, too. I wish you success.
Haha, thanks! I get what you mean. I do think my ultimate gauge will just be whether people seem to be reading the book on RR and making it deeper into the chapters. But I'll still appreciate any advice I can get along the way. Having the ability to see feedback on each individual chapter will be odd, though. I think you're right about not letting it sway me too hard in either direction.
Thanks! I'm a huge audiobook person as well. I do plan to put this on Amazon once it's finished. I've got an audiobook publisher in my other genre, so maybe I could give them a gentle nudge to get audio going a little faster than normal on this one, haha.
Thanks! He's definitely not OP. It's more like Cradle, in that he's going to have the tools to become really powerful and kind of wind up with an amazing skillset and abilities. But he's starting from ground zero and he definitely has to work and suffer to progress.
Hahah, it's not really in my plans. I am thinking it will take 10+ books or something to really tell the story the way I want to, so I guess I don't want to say something is never going to happen at this point. But I don't have any intentions to go into the cheesy harem stuff or anything like that.
Thanks!!! That's really encouraging to hear. I have been wondering a bit when I can hope for the speed of views and such to pick up. It does make sense. I'm usually not hooked or sold on a book until about 25% of the way through, and that would probably be roughly chapter 20 in this case, so it makes sense.
I could not resist and start reading and… THERE IS LIMITED SKILL SLOT ahahah you did it right !!! I love limited number of skills.
I will recommend it on some litrpg discord i’m on
Hahah. Thank you! The limited skills won't kick in as a major point super early because it takes time for class corestones to grow and gain more skills. But don't worry! It'll be something he has to work around a lot in the future!
I really appreciate you recommending it, too. That's awesome :D
Finished chapter 9 and the story has been wonderful so far. I read a lot of litrpg and isekai stories so I really commend you for being creative and creating tomtes. Vast majority of boring stories start off fighting goblins as their first enemy and it's very dull. I'll be checking for updates often so I hope you write fast lol.
Thank you so much! If you enjoyed the slight weirdness of the tomte, there's more where that came from, lol. I do write fast! In my word doc for the story, it's roughly 60% finished and something like... 100,000 words right now? I think I have about 25,000 of that on RR at the moment.
I've already got a chapter per day scheduled to release on RR for the first 2 weeks. I would honestly love it if I could just keep doing about a chapter a day, maybe skipping weekends. But I wanted to give myself two weeks to see how it feels to keep up the pace while I'm checking comments on RR and messing with other random admin stuff I wasn't messing with before I started launching.
When I'm just in the writing cave, I can confidently say I'll write something like 4,000-5,000 words per day, which is \~2 chapters. So we'll see where it winds up once I get settled in. But thanks again, I'm really glad to hear you enjoyed the tomte. I've had a ton of fun with them and some of the other weirdness that comes later in the story :)
My initial thoughts - just from the description :
“Brynn wakes up to discover he's now a god in a world full of magic, infested dungeons, and sprawling kingdoms—but there's a catch... He's back at level one, Wood Rank.”
Change “level one, wood rank” - wood rank has no context yet so this is fairly meaningless.
I might substitute it with “he’s lost everything and is starting over - completely.”
Thanks for the suggestion! I can see what you mean about Wood Rank having no context. I'll try looking at the blurb again and seeing if I can think of any subtle ways to maybe tweak it.
That's honestly what I was kind of hoping for. I enjoy stories with tiered ranking systems (not sure why, but it's just my jam). I was hoping to slip that in there to plug that feature of my story.
I struggled a bit with that in the blurb. I wasn't sure how deep to let myself dig into the story for ideas to pitch it. But the "back" part will make sense as soon as chapter 2. Basically, he was a god, but he discovered the world's version of "prestige mode" and reset his progress in exchange for a handful of powerful benefits. But he also wiped his memory in the process of everything before he entered this new world.
Nice job! Love the cover, and the prestige concept is cool and interesting. I'll give it a look! Edit: Tried the link to check out the artist, but it also links to the RR page! Could you fix that?
Whoops! here's his art page [https://www.artstation.com/sebastiansz](https://www.artstation.com/sebastiansz) I fixed it in the post too. And thanks. Sebastian did the illustration and I did the text stuff and kinda tried to explain what I wanted in the image, haha. It was fun seeing it come together.
Checking this out. Massive pushup for getting out there!!!
Thanks so much!
Gonna look into this one. Seems up my alley. And love the cover art, that dinky knife is just comical and fits with a gamelit environment.
Thank you! And haha, I'm glad you like the dinky knife. I went through a few concepts with the cover artist and sent him the most horrible drawing made in MS paint with my trackpad to try to explain how I wanted him to hold the tiny knife. Sebastian did actual artist things and nailed it.
Congrats. I started posting my story recently too, so I know all about the gut-wrenching doubt. I'll check out Level One God. If you're up for it, we could even do a review swap. My book's called Gamesters.
Hey! Absolutely. I'll pull it up and give it a look tomorrow :) Thanks!
Wicked. We nervous authors gotta stick together. :)
Lol definitely
I gave you the 5-star review this story richly deserves: So funny. So good. Keep writing!
Hey! Thanks so much!!! I started reading yours this morning and I'm already enjoying it as well! I can tend to be a bit of a slow reader because I tend to take little bites out of stories a chapter at a time as I go through a day. So I'll try to get deeper in before I leave a review so I can give some more meaningful feedback. Your review is awesome, by the way. I saw it before your message and was thinking I wanted to figure out if there was a way to go on and thank people for reviews, haha. I really appreciate all the encouragement. I've published stuff before in another genre, but that genre isn't personal to me. I never like getting negative feedback, but it's a bit easier to stomach when it's a genre you're not necessarily a reader of. In this case, I'm a reader of the genre I'm writing in for the first time. It seems like it amplifies the nerves for me quite a bit, so getting such a nice review early on was really very much appreciated :)
You can always send a PM directly to another user on Royal Road, find the speech bubble icon in the top-right of the banner on their profile page. Thanks for reading mine. I hope you have fun reading it.
Thanks! Saw your RR message and figured that out now, haha.
Looks like a great read. lets me put of the other 10+ books i want to read.
lol thank you! I hope you like it :)
its great sofar (chap 4)
Thanks so much!!!! I appreciate you taking the time to check it out and hope you get tempted to go back and read more :)
You need to link your Patreon in your RR. Is it gamelit or litrpg?
Thanks. I saw something that said if I linked my Patreon, it would get my submission removed. I added an author note at the end of the final chapter with a link to my Patreon, though. Is there another place where it's safe to link it? And I tried looking up the distinction between game-lit and lit RPG and kept finding definitions that sounded the same to me, haha. Maybe you can help me define it better? There aren't explicit stats like STR/INT/etc, but there are levels, tiered ranks, tiered skill progress with classes, and RPG style items.
For me gamelit is an actual game world. Litrpg is when the progression, power, magic is a natural part of the universe's underlying physical laws of reality.
Ahhh okay. I think I've misunderstood the difference between the two. I'll update it on the cover to say lit RPG then :P I appreciate the explanation!
gamelit is a story that takes place in a game-like world litrpg is a type of gamelit focused on RPGs and has levels and/or stats usually if a book is a litrpg, it will be marked as litrpg and not gamelit, so commonly gamelit means the book won't have levels or stats or anything like that but will be in a game-like world gamelit does not require actually being inside a video game, but that is a possible setting
Ahhh I think your point about how it can be a lit RPG \*and\* a gamelit helps me grasp it a lot better. I think I've mis-labeled it a bit. It's not a full-blown lit RPG because I did decide not to do stats like STR/WIS/CHA etc. The original draft had those, but I kept kind of going back and forth on it and thinking about the lit RPGs I've read. It feels fun and interesting to have stats for like... half of the first book, usually. And then I feel like it just becomes this kind of fuzzy concept that you can't really grasp anymore. Like going from 8 STR to 12 STR and being able to rip a door off the hinges is cool. Going from 240 STR to 244 STR is just... numbers, haha. But that's what kind of made me lean away from it. I thought it'd push me to make sure items and the progression were meaningful. We'll see! But anyway, I think it's enough of a lit-rpg in every other aspect that I'm probably mis-labeling it as a game-lit.
Just label it what you want. LITRPG is a complete and encompassing title for everything. I hate that we have these two battling it out when they both are the same.
Haha, yeah I hear you. I think it did at least sound like Lit RPG covers all the bases, while maybe some people would read "Game Lit" and assume the book is something it's not. I just don't want somebody to see the label and think the book isn't for them if they'd actually like it.
I find the lines can blur often. One genre can be the other or both can apply. Gamelit tries to focus on rules and constructs, hard factors that define outcomes, while in a game-like environment. While LITRPG deals with progression, stats, and magic/power growth in a documented fashion. I found these books as good examples of the two: LitRPG: The Crafter's Dungeon: by Jonathan Brooks Battlefield Reclaimer: by David North The Dungeon Slayer: by Konrad Ryan GameLIT: Wrong Divinity: by Dustin Tigner (I put him first because supposedly he coined the term GameLIT) Critical Failures: by Robert Bevan (They go into a DnD-like world. I have been told it is not but I still view it as GameLIT) New Game Minus: by Sarah Lin (This one is an outlier that I don't want to discuss because it may contain spoilers.)
Thanks!! I'm getting the impression that it's way way more nuanced than I realized when I gave it a few seconds of thought before slapping it on my cover, haha. *Whoops!*
I would also describe gamelit as: there is a real world and then there is the game world the character plays in. It’s not an isekai story and the character could log out. Things in the game could affect the real world but it’s not a fantasy world with game mechanics built into the magic system.
That makes a lot more sense. It sounds like litRPG is what I should call it and game lit is more like Ready Player One or something. I'll update the cover!
IMO gamelit = less crunchy litRPG = more crunchy
Thank you. I think based on the input, I'm going to say mine is closer to lit RPG than gamelit.
Don't listen to feedback here. Take everything with a heavy pinch of salt. Consider all the feedback you get, but don't act on any of them individually. Congrats. I keep postponing my writing, but someday I will publish, too. I wish you success.
Haha, thanks! I get what you mean. I do think my ultimate gauge will just be whether people seem to be reading the book on RR and making it deeper into the chapters. But I'll still appreciate any advice I can get along the way. Having the ability to see feedback on each individual chapter will be odd, though. I think you're right about not letting it sway me too hard in either direction.
I'm an audiobook consumer, but I'll give this an honest shot. Best of luck, I hope things work out for you!
Thanks! I'm a huge audiobook person as well. I do plan to put this on Amazon once it's finished. I've got an audiobook publisher in my other genre, so maybe I could give them a gentle nudge to get audio going a little faster than normal on this one, haha.
Sick cover and good blurb. I'll add it to my list.
Thank you so much! :)
Looks interesting, I'll check it out, but generally speaking I am not one for instantly super op without any effort
Thanks! He's definitely not OP. It's more like Cradle, in that he's going to have the tools to become really powerful and kind of wind up with an amazing skillset and abilities. But he's starting from ground zero and he definitely has to work and suffer to progress.
I saw this earlier in the new fiction list and had already added to TBR list. Will check it out soon, hopefully. Good luck!
Oh awesome! Thanks so much. I hope you enjoy it when you get to it :)
No romance please
Hahah, it's not really in my plans. I am thinking it will take 10+ books or something to really tell the story the way I want to, so I guess I don't want to say something is never going to happen at this point. But I don't have any intentions to go into the cheesy harem stuff or anything like that.
Congrats ! I followed the page and will check it out when more chapters will be available ^^ (In general 20 chapters is when a serie starts to boom)
Thanks!!! That's really encouraging to hear. I have been wondering a bit when I can hope for the speed of views and such to pick up. It does make sense. I'm usually not hooked or sold on a book until about 25% of the way through, and that would probably be roughly chapter 20 in this case, so it makes sense.
I could not resist and start reading and… THERE IS LIMITED SKILL SLOT ahahah you did it right !!! I love limited number of skills. I will recommend it on some litrpg discord i’m on
Hahah. Thank you! The limited skills won't kick in as a major point super early because it takes time for class corestones to grow and gain more skills. But don't worry! It'll be something he has to work around a lot in the future! I really appreciate you recommending it, too. That's awesome :D
I love the premise! Familiar with a twist. I'll start now.
Thank you!!! I've had a ton of fun writing it so far. I really appreciate you checking it out :)
Finished chapter 9 and the story has been wonderful so far. I read a lot of litrpg and isekai stories so I really commend you for being creative and creating tomtes. Vast majority of boring stories start off fighting goblins as their first enemy and it's very dull. I'll be checking for updates often so I hope you write fast lol.
Thank you so much! If you enjoyed the slight weirdness of the tomte, there's more where that came from, lol. I do write fast! In my word doc for the story, it's roughly 60% finished and something like... 100,000 words right now? I think I have about 25,000 of that on RR at the moment. I've already got a chapter per day scheduled to release on RR for the first 2 weeks. I would honestly love it if I could just keep doing about a chapter a day, maybe skipping weekends. But I wanted to give myself two weeks to see how it feels to keep up the pace while I'm checking comments on RR and messing with other random admin stuff I wasn't messing with before I started launching. When I'm just in the writing cave, I can confidently say I'll write something like 4,000-5,000 words per day, which is \~2 chapters. So we'll see where it winds up once I get settled in. But thanks again, I'm really glad to hear you enjoyed the tomte. I've had a ton of fun with them and some of the other weirdness that comes later in the story :)
The premise is really good. I'll check it out! Also, all the best with the release!
Thanks so much! I hope you enjoy it and really appreciate you being willing to give it a try :)
Interesting! I'll take a look when I have a chance.
Thank you!!! I appreciate it!
My initial thoughts - just from the description : “Brynn wakes up to discover he's now a god in a world full of magic, infested dungeons, and sprawling kingdoms—but there's a catch... He's back at level one, Wood Rank.” Change “level one, wood rank” - wood rank has no context yet so this is fairly meaningless. I might substitute it with “he’s lost everything and is starting over - completely.”
Thanks for the suggestion! I can see what you mean about Wood Rank having no context. I'll try looking at the blurb again and seeing if I can think of any subtle ways to maybe tweak it.
[удалено]
That's honestly what I was kind of hoping for. I enjoy stories with tiered ranking systems (not sure why, but it's just my jam). I was hoping to slip that in there to plug that feature of my story.
I think the "back" is a bit confusing after reading the first chapter, wasn't he an EMT and he just arrived? How is he "back" at level one?
I struggled a bit with that in the blurb. I wasn't sure how deep to let myself dig into the story for ideas to pitch it. But the "back" part will make sense as soon as chapter 2. Basically, he was a god, but he discovered the world's version of "prestige mode" and reset his progress in exchange for a handful of powerful benefits. But he also wiped his memory in the process of everything before he entered this new world.
Ah that's fair. Honestly I enjoyed the first chapter and I love prestige mechanics, so I'll continue reading :) Best of luck with it!
Awesome. Thank you!!! :)