Over the last decade—especially recently with the pop-sensation that is Dungeon Crawler Carl—LitRPG, Progression Fantasy, and related genres have been growing in popularity, and for good reason. They provide an interesting and divergent entertainment experience for readers. Some, such as LitRPG and GameLit books, incorporate stat screens and often include “blue screens,” much like one would expect to see in video games. They also include quests, and often a “system” (that may or may not be sentient and a character of its own). Other genres, such as Progression Fantasy and Military Sci-Fi, stick to a more traditional literary architecture, though they can include twists of their own and often find a similar fanbase.
Given the rise in popularity, I tracked down as many authors as I could here at Dragon Con and asked them a series of questions. As I have come to expect from the community, they were all fantastic and an absolute pleasure to interview. The questions asked of each author were: what is your book about, how did you become a writer of LitRPG, what other works in the genre inspired you, what can a book do that a game can’t, and where can a reader find a sample of your work?
C. Mantis, author of The Path of Ascension:
It is a character-driven story that is grounded, as much as a fantasy novel can be. I try to play the magical elements straight with real people reacting to real things, not just a fantasy world where fantasy things happen and people react fantastically. Gritty is the word I usually use.
I was in college for a Computer Science degree. COVID happened. I started writing. [I was inspired by] half the genres of Royal Road. I was like, I could do this better, in my infinite hubris. So, I tried. I couldn’t, but I tried. But I read so much. I try to read now, but once your hobby turns into your job, you can’t do your hobby.
Games are stories, stories are games. Games are more interactive, but stories can give a lot more depth to areas. Not every game is Call of Duty and not every novel is Lord of the Rings. There’s a lot of room in there.
You can find The Path of Ascension on Royal Road or Kindle Unlimited.
Marshall J. Moore, author of The Henchperson’s Guide to Unionizing:
Horrible Bosses meets What We Do In the Shadows.
I’ve been writing my whole life, but before I started professionally, I was a film and theater professional. Then when COVID hit, I was locked out of that profession, so I turned my focus to writing.
[Inspirations:] Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes series and Roger Zelazny’s Knight in the Lonesome October.
Reactor Magazine has the full first chapter available at reactormag.com.
John Graves, author of Starship Gilead:
Picture a universe like Star Trek that has an intergalactic governing body that collapses. Gigantic starships fly off into space for hundreds of years. In my universe, captains become kings, they pass their captain’s chair down from father to son, and they’re marrying off their children to the captains of other starships. When you get into a monarchy, people sometimes behave badly and want to become king before they’re ready, or they’re not fit to be king but want to be anyway. Within this realm, a captain of the ship Gilead has a daughter who never wants to be in command and also doesn’t want to be married off against her will.
I was writing indie stuff before I did this. It’s pretty much the only thing I ever wanted to do. I asked Steve and Rhett to look at the book, and they were willing to take it. That happened several years ago. It was a great experience as an author. It’s an even better experience as an employee. This is the best job I’ve ever had.
[Influence:] A lot of Star Trek. I really like fantasy, too. I would say that Lord of the Rings and Dragonlance were big inspirations. I don’t like hard sci-fi. It’s not my thing. I try to weave the character elements and things that you find in fantasy novels into the science fiction series.
You can find Starship Gilead on Kindle Unlimited.
Josh Hayes, author of Edge of Valor:
Take the movies Black Hawk Down and Courage Under Fire, combine them, and put them in a science fiction setting 2,600 years in the future. It follows an investigator who’s trying to figure out what happened to a mission gone bad. He interviews the survivors, but they’re lying. He’s got to put the pieces together and figure out what happens. By the time he finds the last survivor, you get what actually happens. Then you can go back to the other parts and see where they’re lying and why.
I was a cop for 12 years in Wichita. I started writing with Richard Fox, then they published Edge of Valor the first year they were a company. I got nominated for the Dragon Award in 2020. They published my books, but now I do all the formatting, about 300-ish books a year.
I’ve always been a huge SF fan, like Star Trek TNG, Battlestar Galactica, anything with spaceships and cool technologies, really drove me to the sci-fi route. I was in the military before I was a cop, and so the military aspect of science fiction.
Some games are open-ended, so you might not get the story in the way the developer intended, or you might do something that will change how the game will end up. In a book, the story is always the same from person to person. The only difference is that the person will see it differently. If you say a sports car, some will see a Viper while others see a McLaren, but it’s the same story.
You can find Edge of Valor at Audible, Print, Kindle Unlimited, and Aethon’s website.
Aaron Crash, author of American Dragons and Sinfire Chronicles:
My latest is a [cultivation] harem novel about a slave who grew up in a part of the world that didn’t have magic. He is captured by an ancient dragon woman and is given a magical core. In this world, the magical system is based upon the seven deadly sins, known as the seven deadly instincts. It’s him gaining power through mastering the instincts in a magical academy that’s more like survival of the fittest, and falling in love along the way. In this world, when two people fall in love and have relations, there’s a chance that they’re bound together forever. So, they have to be very careful about creating this forever-bond. Of course, he meets the woman of his dreams. Hijinks ensue. It’s cultivation, magic academy, slow burn harem.
I worked in hospital I.T. support. I’d get up early in the morning to write. I fell in love with writing. Then I met Shadow Alley Press. LitRPG is a rising genre, and harem was doing especially well. I read a bunch of their books, loved them, then started writing. Shadow Alley Press comes to Dragon Con and invited me to come along. Little did I know it is nerdy-gras.
[Inspired by:] Black Friday. I also like anime such as High School DXD. In a regular anime, or romance novel—I have written romance—you only get that one “falling in love” experience. In harem novels you get to fall in love over and over again.
You can find Crash’s books at www.patreon.com/aaroncrashbooks and on Kindle Unlimited.
Jeffrey Falcon Logue, author of The Slime Dungeon and Bio Dungeon:
My original book is a story where the dungeon is the main character. The living locations of the dungeon in this world is a sentient thing that can create monsters and treasures and wants to bring in adventurers and balance the adventurers making it out and not—mixed with a little bit of Pokemon and monster evolution.
I was in college working on a genetics degree and having some trouble because I wasn’t enjoying the process. I [turned] to writing as a way to stop thinking about science. Eventually, it just started doing better and better on Royal Road, and I published it. I was able to start working on my college debt, and I switched majors to creative writing. I’ve been writing ever since.
[Inspirations:] Not Dungeon Keeper, as most people imagine. When writing back in the day, “dungeon core” as a concept wasn’t completed. People tried it, but it either got too boring and was dropped, or it got OP too quickly and never came to a satisfying conclusion. I was the first to figure out a working formula for “dungeon core” stories.
I’m also making a game. It has to do with the mechanism of how the story is delivered to either the reader or the player. A video game is essentially a three-dimensional-interactive movie, where they see everything and hear everything and control everything at their own pace, as opposed to a story, where they have to imagine everything from the words, the recipe, the blueprint of the story. Some people are better at visualizing than others, so you can get a mixed experience as a result.
You can find The Slime Dungeon and Bio Dungeon on Kindle Unlimited and Audible.
Ember Holt, author of Oh No! There’s an Incubus in My Hot Spring:
A woman buys a business only to discover that an incubus is actually a dungeon core, living in the hot springs. A dungeon core is a magical centrifuge from which a designated space can be altered or affected by that magical piece.
I was a project manager at a game studio. I’ve been writing my whole life. James and Jeannette found me at Mile-High Con, and I was writing horror back then with LitRPG-lite systems. I didn’t even know what LitRPG was yet, but I was like, “I love video games, so I’m going to write video-game-esque stuff.” And then James was like, “Hey, your book was kind of good. Why don’t you write for me?” And I was like, “I think you’re lying, but I will take you up on that, sir.”
Final Fantasy was one of my first video games. It had such rich storytelling mixed in with a specific magic system. FF8, which had the worst magic system of all time, at least had rules and made sense. The materials and system in seven was also quite fun, and I’ve tried doing riffs on that as well.
[A book] gives you visceral body feelings. You can see something gory and disgusting happen with your eyes, but that’s one sensory piece. When you take those words into your mind and make a picture yourself, you oftentimes experience it in your body as well.
You can find Oh No! There’s an Incubus in My Hot Spring on Kindle Unlimited.
James Hunter, author of Shadowcroft Academy for Dungeons and Discount Dan:
I am the author of more than 50 novels, Rogue Dungeon, Shadowcroft Academy, and bunches more. Discount Dan is my most recent.
I’m gonna pitch Shadowcroft Academy because I did not do it at a panel the other day and Aaron got mad at me and now I feel guilty. He and I co-authored it. Shadowcroft is about a guy who dies and is reincarnated as a mushroom and goes to a magical academy for monsters to learn how to kill heroes. It’s whimsical and silly and fun.
I was in the Marine Corps, deployed several times overseas. I got out, my wife and I moved to Thailand to do international aid work, and I started writing there in my free time. I wrote an urban fantasy book, looked at traditional publishing, and was like “No, that’s for real authors.” I stumbled into self-publishing not expecting it to go anywhere, but then it was selling and people were asking, “When’s the next book?” I wrote it, and they bought that one too. And they just kept buying the things I was writing, which was insane to me.
I stumbled into LitRPG early on and fell in love with the genre. I started writing it on the side, in addition to my urban fantasy. I was having a blast, so I just kept doing it, and then in 2017 my wife and I started Shadow Alley Press as a way to help our buddies. That’s still what we do all these years later. We have about 30 active authors and I think 450 titles that we published in the LitRPG of Progression Fantasy space in addition to my own titles. It’s really just so I can hang out with my friends at cons.
The first books I read were Russian translated ones. The Way of the Shaman and Play to Live by D. Rust… I moved on to American authors. I had read Dakota Krout’s book, Divine Dungeon, and I eventually wrote my own dungeon book with a different take called Rogue Dungeon. Awaken Online by Travis Bagwell was another big one. I ran out of books to read, and I thought, “Okay, that’s dumb. There should be more books like this.” So I started writing what I wanted to read.
I’m a big gamer. I love tabletop games and video games. I love the collaborative nature of it. I think that one of the appeals of LitRPG, especially to people like me—I don’t have time to sit down and grind out 60 or 100 hours in Warcraft, or Skyrim, or whatever. LitRPG gives us that same catharsis, that same joy of playing the greatest video game or the greatest tabletop game with your friends, but you can do it in ten hours while listening to an audiobook while you’re doing dishes. It takes this thing we all love and compresses it in a way that makes it easier to consume and enjoy when you’re really busy, and you got kids and life and a career.
You can find Hunter’s books at discountdan.shop, Kindle Unlimited, and several on Audible/Audible Plus.Thank you to all the authors who took the time to answer questions for the Daily Dragon. And thank you, readers, for taking the time to read all the way through! LitRPG is very close to my heart and I hope these interviews have shined a bit of light on a burgeoning genre. The stories available are as diverse and interesting as the authors interviewed in this article. Stop by royalroad.com to read for free or grab a subscription to Kindle Unlimited.
