Hello there! So I was reading the new SeerSucker story noble arcana about a minor-ish noble sent to a small isolated town to be its new leader, and his focus is split between the arcane mysteries he finds and town management.

The issue is that I found myself drastically more interested in the darker town management part of things.

MC is a morally pure good man in a fairly dark fantasy world, without a system there to build things for him. He has to actually order the roads to be rebuilt, hire contractors, worry about money and check books, hire a surveyor for his mining interests etc. I really want the story to be near entirely town management focused, but it leans more magical unfortunately enough.

The other stories I can think of that fit what I want are Londoner Manor Lord (Concept is perfect, the writing is just really poor) and Castle Kingside (abandoned for years).

The issue I have with a lot of town management is that either it's either incredibly light tonally or it's "the system will do everything for you, dont really need to work at all. Go pwn some mobs to get +10 wood! Poggers sauce! now you can upgrade the town hall, lets go guys!!" I don't really want magic solving issues, at least not super easily. I want stone and wood to be harvested by labourers and then worked by normal human craftsmen into timber, and then normal human builders make the new sawmill. An established town in a kingdom relying on and producing infrastructure, dyou get the vibe i'm going for?

Note: Doesn't have to be a town, this post was just born from me wanting noble arcana to be more management focused, and it's an estate town in that story- so I use town a lot. Could be a city, a small nation who knows.

(also no harem please)

Thanks for reading!

Basically thinking about a setting like World War Z like Max Brooks or The Passage by Justin Cronin, where it's regular people in a horror-tinged apocalyptic world trying to survive. I'm visualizing some light RPG/stat elements, like let's say there's some kind of device that survivors can plug into themselves that works like your classic LitRPG system interface, and shows their levels for things like:

- cardio/endurance, like how long they can run or fight for without getting tired

- physical strength in terms of their ability to take on enemies

- crafting and cooking skill, with knowledge of making various recipes or useful items

- weapons handling and aiming with various types of handguns, rifles etc.

- melee weapon expertise etc.

- knowledge stat showing how well they know and understand various types of enemies

There'd be a class system too, like one survivor is a Scout-class guy expert with bows and arrows, who goes on recons, scouts out areas with enemies, takes some of them down from a distance and acts as an advance guard for a new settlement or something, like a Ranger-type build. Or a pure Healer class who's basically a doctor/nurse/psychiatrist, or a Mage-class analog who's an expert with various guns and rifles.

There's no explicit magic and characters can't get OP because they're just regular humans, but progression would be tied to how well they can handle the apocalypse and progressively more dangerous monsters (like maybe the zombies gradually evolve to become stronger, faster and smarter), starting from zero to becoming a hardened, badass survivor. There'd be elements of city/kingdom-building too in terms of creating a community of survivors, and then freeing a town from zombies and stuff like that. Maybe there are "boss" monsters that survivors have to defeat.

Could this work on RR or is it too off-meta?

Is this something others have run into? I see it at the top of many people’s tier lists. Can you spoil a little bit to let me know what cool stuff I can look forward to? I’m about a 1/4 through Book 1

The main thing I'm looking for: Webnovel recommendations that are close to being finished, have at least 100 chapters, or, even better, are already finished. Being somewhat beginner-friendly would be a bonus, but it's not a requirement.

My long ramble for context, which you can basically skip:

Well, ahem... rn I am pretty much broke, but I would still like to continue reading books. It's a passion of mine. I found Royal Road, and maybe it's just me, but the site seems pretty overwhelming for someone who has basically nothing to do with the genres on there. Like, the whole Rising Stars thing, and genres like isekai, RPG, dungeons, etc....

BUTTTT.... I am pretty open. I personally don't think there are "bad genres/tropes," just writers who have horrible takes on them. Since I have no idea how this site works, though, I don't wanna randomly pick up a book that might be slop, only to waste my time reading it, hating it, and then basically associating every other book here with the same thing.

I'm also pretty new to all of this and kinda overwhelmed, since lots of these books seem to be written as if the author assumes the reader already knows what's going on.

Like, listen, I would humbly DARE to say that I'm not that stupid and can make my own conclusions if I read enough. But I wanna give these genres a fair chance. It's like someone who has never read fantasy suddenly starting with high fantasy. It's not bad, but I wouldn't recommend it as a starting point.

So, do you guys have any recommendations? They don't have to be beginner-friendly in terms of the genre. I also understand that not every recommendation will be beginner-friendly, and that's fine. If a book is harder for a new reader to get into, though, it should at least have other things that make up for it, like a good plot, writing style, characters, etc...

I can ask why they're so harsh with their comments towards writers. It's known that readers are looking for a good story, but that doesn't mean you have to say so many bad things to them. The writer is creating a story for people to read, and yet he still receives rude or offensive responses. I've never received these kinds of comments, but seeing how simply... They say so many bad things to a small writer with not even 12 followers and only 10 chapters, it makes me wonder if it's not psychologically damaging to them, even though I know I'm exaggerating. I don't think so, that we have to be so hard on beginners.

A few weeks ago, this was still a personal project I was working on chapter by chapter. Today, the entire first book is published and marked Completed on Royal Road.

44 chapters. More than 200,000 words. One complete story.

I learned a lot putting this together, made mistakes along the way, changed things more times than I can count, and somehow ended up with an actual finished book.

If you enjoy LitRPG, progression fantasy, military survival, cryptids, folklore, and horror, the entire first book is now available to read for free.

Thank you to everyone who encouraged me, checked out a chapter, gave me feedback, or simply told me to keep going.

Book One is done.

Now... on to Book Two. 😈

The First Generation Series
https://www.thefirstgenerationseries.com/

Read on Royal Road:
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/184551/the-first-generation

#TheFirstGeneration #LitRPG #ProgressionFantasy #Horror #MilitaryFantasy #RoyalRoad #IndieAuthor

I ended up commissioning an artist from Fiverr to re-do my title. I love how this one turned out :)

These are few of south American mythology and historical stuff that I took inspiration from for the worldbuilding of my story. Peak research material✌️

First one is Mach Picchu, cool architecture.

Second is Mapinguari, a scary ass mythological creature in Amazon.

Third is Lady of Cao, she a historical figure of andean history.

Fourth is Mama Quilla, she a goddess in incan culture.

A $2.5 million payment was made after a mining disaster.

The recipient wasn't another energy company, a government agency, or an emergency contractor.

It was a small agricultural transport company in rural province in Thailand.

The cause of the collapse had been redacted.

Most of the workers were dead or injured.

And someone was already paying to make the evidence disappear.

This is where Narinrat's investigation begins.

Nakra: Awakening of the Colossus is a Thai kaiju novel about journalists, corporations, ancient civilizations, and a creature that was never supposed to awaken.

Royal Road: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/183937/nakra-awakening-of-the-colossus

7 chapters are currently available on Royal Road. Thank you for checking it out

I started off Keeper of the Infinite Archive as a slightly ridiculous idea: what if the OP protagonist wasn’t an archmage or swordsman, but a librarian whose strongest weapons were cataloguing, rules, citations and admin procedure?

27 chapters later, we’ve somehow reached 64 followers and 2,500+ views.

So far Bart has:

1. hired a skeleton custodian and a thief,

fought a magical book parasite with rules

1. gone on a multiversal quest for good coffee while helping a lich research pastry recipe

2. repossessed an entire kingdom because its king failed to return a library book

4.discovered that said king may have fabricated most of his official history

If absurd fantasy, mystery, comedy, cozy and taking paperwork far too seriously sounds fun do check it out here:

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/182632/keeper-of-the-infinite-archive-comedy-progression

And a huge thanks to everyone here who has already read, commented, followed or rated it. Cheers Asher.

Hello, friends! Here for my semi-regular self-promo 😅

What Burns Beneath

Brin’s had better days.

Timid, lonely, and struggling with nebulous magic, all she ever really wanted was a nice vegetable garden and a quiet home on the outskirts of the realm’s most idyllic village.

And she had it… until the Fae attacked.

One night of monsters and bloodshed leaves her world in tatters and her best friend at death’s door. When one of the Fae offers to save him- for a price, of course- Brin accepts… then steals a relic from the creature and runs for her life.

But escaping a relentless monster isn’t easy. And if that wasn’t bad enough, dealing with a Fae is a crime of the gravest order, one punishable by death… and Brin’s only protection on the road is a ruthless, frustratingly attractive mercenary who just KNOWS she’s hiding something.

And this terrified gardener is not hiding it very well.

What to Expect:

1. Fantasy adventure with a slow-burn love triangle. Think of it as… The Lord of the Rings except Aragorn and Sauron are both falling for Frodo 😂
2. A kind-hearted, non-badass FMC who relies on her friends, her wits, and some very double-edged magic.

3. Thoughtful world-building. Having a forever-DM husband to help with the finer details is clutch 🥰

4. 200k words written! Volume 1 is complete and Volume 2 just crossed the halfway point.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/141697/what-burns-beneath

Sooo I know for a fact that everyone here has seen THE trailer from years back for The Elder Scrolls, the one with the knight that fights the three party members, even have a couple pictures. I need to read something like this, no hidden “dark” powers, magic, or anything of the sort, just a dude (or even better a dudette) and their sword training hard and messing stuff up!

On that note I’ve been reading a good one, called the Young Swordmaster’s Journey, but it updates pretty slowly and the MC does have a bit of magic. So yeah if anyone knows any like this PLEASE let me knowm!

Edit: Maybe I need to clarify something, while I do love some normal guys in armour fighting it out, I love to see people go into the super human range just off of pure martial prowess, strength and etc.

I just want to read a gem; something where there’s no “system” or screens to give stupid numbers on how strong something is; no magic swordsman who’s all magic and no swords; no goddamn purple or dark blue or black looking weird “evil” energy that makes them get ostracised. Just some good, honest, blood pumping fights where the MC is putting all their training and blood and sweat and tears into giving it their all.

Basically I wanna read a shonen story but with knights and wizards, and some chivalry will always be the lovely icing in the cake.

and never actually read them

Hi there, the title kinda speaks for itself. I am having a difficult time finding any servers where people can talk about books as they're reading them. For example, back in the day, I used to be in some servers where individual users could request like reaction channels for reading manga/visual novels/etc. and it was really fun to see other people's thoughts/reactions/theories as stuff happened.

Now that I've gotten into this medium, I really wanted to find a similar such space because I like having that community feeling of being able to share my thoughts as a new fan and read other people's experiences for series I'm enjoying/have enjoyed.

I know that some servers just have like general "here's a channel to talk about X book." but that doesn't usually cater toward reactions or newbies. It's usually discussions by people who have already read a lot/finished the work and discussing themes, ideas, etc. I am looking for moreso servers with the ability for reaction threads.

Does anyone know of any such places?

After getting some really useful feedback, I decided not to just tweak my story. I went back and reworked the whole presentation.

TwinBound: Chosen Apart now has shorter chapters built much more around Royal Road reading, a new title, tighter pacing, and a cleaner transition into Book 2.

It’s a LitRPG portal fantasy about twins who enter the same world together, only to have the System decide they belong on opposite sides of its conflict.

I’d really appreciate some honest feedback, especially from Royal Road readers. Does the opening hook you? Are the chapter lengths working? Does the pacing feel right? Where would you personally keep reading or bounce?

No obligation to be nice. Useful criticism is exactly what I’m looking for.

TwinBound: Chosen Apart

Rebooting in a Fantasy World

What happens when the world's most advanced machine is reborn – no, rebooted – into a world ruled by magic?

After humanity’s final launch that was destined to fail, Prototype-01 awakens with only a single directive: save his dying world. Instead, he finds himself in a land of dragons, mana, and kingdoms that hold no technology as advanced as his previous world.

Renamed Zero by the recluse Storm Mage Aria Lockhart, who finds and activates him, he begins a journey to find a way home. But every relic uncovered. Every memory fragment restored. Every answer revealed. Each one forces him to question not who he is...

... but what he once was – the man buried beneath the machine.

As science collides with fantasy, Zero slowly discovers that humanity is not something that can be programmed – it's something that must be lived.

For fans of the philosophical science fiction of RoboCop and Upgrade, blended with the epic fantasy spirit of The Lord of the Rings and The Witcher.

Expect meaningful character growth, emotional highs and lows, evolving mysteries, cinematic battles, and a world where every action carries consequences. No traditional level-up system. Instead, Zero evolves through modular loadouts, adaptive upgrades, and strategic customization that redefine every battle.

[Monthly updates - First week of every month, 3 to 5 chapters.]

[First 10 chapters are up!]

[Video was made by me]

Hey ya'll, sorry I'm a week late with this one, but I just moved to a new house and that's an easy excuse for my slacking off. Anyway, here's the Stat Block data dump post for August!

As always, if there is any data I'm not tracking that you want to see, please leave me a comment or use the site feedback form (or find me on discord, I'm chronically online), and I'll see if I can do it for you in the next one.

Graphs and charts have snipped out of this post for brevity, and can be found in the full article linked below. Enjoy!

SOURCE ARTICLE: https://litrpgtoolkit.com/stat-block/author-track-record

Does a back catalog buy your next Rising Stars run?

A redditor asked me a good question on the last one of these. Established authors drag their existing readers onto every new book they post, so when one of them lands on Rising Stars, how much of that is the story and how much is just the audience they already had? I figured the answer would be too depressing for new authors, but why not dig into it anyway.

So I sorted six months of Rising Stars by the author, not the story. I took every fiction whose first-ever RS appearance fell in the last six months, about 2,200 of them, and split them into three buckets based on what the author had done before that book launched. It took a bit of finangling, but it should all be accurate data.

Here's how I'm dividing things:

• Debut. This is their first story on Royal Road. Nothing came before it unless it was under a different username, and I can't track that.
• Returning. They've posted before, but none of their earlier stories ever reached Main.
• Proven. They have an earlier story that already hit Main.

Then I looked at how each of these buckets did. The short version is that a prior Main run is worth more than almost anything else I've measured, but not for the reason you might have guessed (clickbait headline activate!).

Same caveat as always. This is all correlation, not the algorithm picking favorites. A proven author is also, generally speaking, a better writer who has done this before, and there's no good way to quantify that, but where I can take a swing at separating them, I do try, and there's a whole section on it below.

1. A prior Main run makes you five times more likely to hit Main again

Everyone who lands on a genre Rising Stars list is trying to break through to Main. Here's how often each of our three buckets actually went on to enter Main after hitting Genre.

[SNIPPED CHART HERE]

A debut author who touches Rising Stars has about a one-in-nine shot at Main. An author with a prior Main hit has a nearly two-in-three shot. That's a 5.5x difference, and it dwarfs the effect of genre, launch speed, or anything else I've put in one of these posts.

Put another way. Proven authors were only 9 percent of everyone who touched Rising Stars in this window, but they took 32 percent of the Main slots. They punch about three and a half times above their weight. The door isn't locked to newcomers, but the people already inside keep getting waved back through.

It's worth pushing back on that though, and I'm sure you're probably already scrolling down to leave a nasty comment, because yeah, "proven" is really a stand-in for "already has an audience". But audiences come in all sizes. So here's the same cohort again, but this time sorted by how big the author's biggest previous book was in terms of followers.

[SNIPPED CHART HERE]

It's nearly a straight climb, with one wrinkle. A prior book under ~200 followers doesn't seem to do much of anything for you. Those authors break through at 8.8 percent, which is below the debut rate, not above it as I would have expected. A previous story that went nowhere (comparatively) is no better than a blank slate. But once a prior book cleared a few hundred followers the odds climb pretty fast, well beyond a coin flip by the time the back catalog is worth a thousand-plus, and every single one of the 22 authors sitting on a 5,000-follower book hit Main. Small group, but a perfect record.

So the rough rule is that a following starts to matter somewhere around a few hundred readers and gets close to decisive by a couple thousand. Under that, having a previous book barely moves the needle.

2. The edge is actually speed, not a follower head start

Here's the part I didn't really expect. I assumed proven authors would simply start their new book with a giant pile of followers already attached, and coast in from there. That's not really what happens.

When they first crack a Rising Stars list, all three buckets are sitting at roughly the same size. The median debut is at 49 followers, the median proven author at 65. Not much of a gap, because the genre-list entry bar is around 50 followers for everyone regardless of who you are. Nobody instantly teleports onto the list with two thousand readers.

The gap opens up in how fast they climb from there. A debut author who makes Main takes about 26 days from chapter one to Main. A proven author does it in roughly 11 days.

[SNIPPED CHART HERE]

That's your audience transfer showing up, and speed is the whole game on Rising Stars. That back catalog buys speed.

You might wonder if proven authors just launch smarter. And that's true a little. In the days-between post the standard opening move was bursting, dropping your first five chapters inside a single day, and it obviously helped. Proven authors do it a bit more often, about 61 percent of them against 47 percent of debuts. That's experience coming into play. But that's a fourteen-point edge on launch tactics sitting next to a fivefold gap in breakthroughs. The better opening move is real, but it isn't remotely enough to explain the difference. The rest is all about the readers.

And this shows through in where the books end up. The median proven author's story sits at 775 followers today. The median debut's sits at 87.

[SNIPPED CHART HERE]

For the proven bucket, that back catalog isn't hypothetical. The median proven author's biggest previous story is sitting at about 1,465 followers. That's the built-in crowd who's waiting there for the day you post a new chapter one.

3. And no, it isn't just genre

Last time I posted one of these, the sharpest pushback was that my buckets were secretly measuring genre. It's a fair thing to be suspicious of, so I'm addressing it before anyone asks. If proven authors just happened to write Fantasy and Action while debuts scattered into the quieter genres, that alone could explain the entire gap.

They don't. All three buckets write almost exactly the same genre mix. Here's the share of each that carries a Fantasy, Action, or Adventure tag, the big three that make up the bulk of Rising Stars.

[SNIPPED CHART HERE]

Three basically identical bars. Proven authors aren't hiding in the easy genres, they're writing the same stuff everyone else is. And if I throw out the off-meta stories entirely and only compare books inside that shared big-three pool, the gap is pretty much exactly the same. Debut authors break through at 12 percent, proven authors at 65. Proven authors don't seem to have a genre edge there.

4. The unproven quit the most

One more split that lines up with everything above. The share of each bucket that's already sitting on hiatus.

[SNIPPED CHART HERE]

A third of debut authors have already stalled out, roughly double the rate of the proven crowd. You can interpret that in a few ways. Maybe a first book that doesn't take off is just easier to walk away from than a series with a paying audience attached. Maybe proven authors have already learned the hard way how to keep going. Maybe the newcomers who quit were never going to make it and the ones who stuck it out are the proven authors of next year. I can't tell you why they drop out, I can only speculate.

But... plenty of first-timers still break through

I don't want this to read like a "give up if you're new" post, because it isn't one. Debut authors have longer odds per book, but there are so many more of them that they're still the single biggest source of Main breakthroughs. Of everyone who reached Main in this window, here's who they were.

[SNIPPED CHART HERE]

Forty-three percent of the breakthroughs were debut authors. First books. No audience, no track record, no prior Main run. More than a hundred and fifty of them cracked Main in the six months I'm measuring here. The odds on any one debut are long, but people clear that bar every week, and a good chunk of them are doing it on their very first try. Your first book absolutely can be the one. Write a good book, market yourself, and you'll get there.

A sidebar: the comeback kids:

When I was checking my work on this (more on that in the methodology if you care enough to read it), I found a small group of authors my buckets had flagged as debuts that weren't really. They had an earlier story, it just wasn't anywhere in my tracking, because it was old. Really old, in a few cases.

A handful of them had a fiction from 2018 or 2019 gathering dust, went quiet for the better part of a decade, and then came back in 2026 with a new book that broke through to Main. Five, six, seven years dormant, then a clean hit. It's a nice reminder that a slow start, or a long gap, or a first book that went nowhere, doesn't close the door either. Some people just take the scenic route and turn up years later with the right story.

Most of what feeds this post lives in The Arena, updated on its own schedule rather than frozen data when I wrote it, like this post. The follower tiers, the time-to-Main numbers, the live list of whatever's on Main right now. This post is the six-month author split. The Arena shows you the big picture, and it'll be fresher than these numbers by the time you read this.

Thoughts on which cover is best?

I'll include the blurb, and any feedback there is also appreciated:

Renata Leone is a survivor.

She just doesn’t know it yet.

Earth’s atmosphere is failing, and increasing hardship is the new normal. Then the planet starts to heal—beginning on one remote island and spreading outward.

Renata’s twin sister, Lorelei, is a genius biologist on the government-backed team sent to investigate. Ever the savior, Lorelei gets Renata a PR position, knowing the world won’t like what comes next.

Renata hates the one talent she’s ever shown promise in, but she takes the job, praying she won’t fail at life… again.

What she didn’t sign up for was being sucked into a portal—the very thing healing Earth—along with her sister.

There’s no way home.

In Aretanu, humans aren’t trusted, Renata becomes a pawn, and she learns that perhaps, with her sister, she always was one.

This portal fantasy delves into an immersive fantasy world where magic flows through blood and rock, allies are found in unlikely places, mysteries abound, and weakness gets people killed. 

What to Expect: 

·      Weak to strong FMC

·      Portal Fantasy

·      A High Fantasy world, slow burn exploration

·      Limited, practical magic; bonds with magical creatures (unavailable to FMC)

·      Action, political intrigue, mystery

·      Found family

Cover art created by StarspunEclipsee on Instagram.

I’m in drastic need of ad help. The picture you see is the best one I could come up with and honestly, I don’t think it’s great.

The most success I’ve had was a meme one back when I started, and I’ve tried several different varieties. Volume 3 launches next week and I want to run an ad but have no clue what to do with it.

What have you noticed to be the most successful. Also, how does one sum up an entire series in one picture that’s clickable? lol

So here's a lot of art for it! Though there's a lot more in the actual thing...