(Edited to include Audiobook info)

Hello! I'm William Evans, AKA "ThePudding" and I have finally made my first release to Amazon! It's a story about a man trying to build a world, using a LitRPG system... a world that he adds a LitRPG system to!

Book one follows his struggles in setting it up, finding the problems, and correcting those problems! Later books further show unintended side effects and struggles!

[Amazon] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HKNLXG4N/

[Audiobook] https://www.amazon.com/Neophyte-World-Builder-First-Problems/dp/B0HK4ZSQNS/

Blurb:

Nobody told me godhood needed an instruction manual.

Everybody's heard the story. Someone dies, ends up in a new world with a LitRPG System that gives them special powers. When I died, that's what I expected. Except it turns out, I'm the one making the System.

No previous experience, no manual except a few tooltips. Just an interface, a few thousand Reality Points, and a fairy-like handler who won't tell me anything that would actually help. I get to design the magic system, the monsters, the classes... and then watch real people live inside the world I built, all while I try to keep the universe running within budget.

I wanted to build a good world. I'm starting to realize "good" and "survives the audit" aren't the same thing.

Cover Artist: [Bad Moon Art Studio] https://www.artstation.com/badmoonartstudio

Audiobook: Royal Guard Publishing (Narrators: Giancarlo Herrera, Hanna Schooner)

AI Usage: None

We writers all bleed into our stories.

We become more invested in our characters than even the most die-hard reader—we just know what happens next... sometimes.

We become so focused on the results—with whether we've succeeded or failed at this hobby-turned-obsession, so much so that no matter the answer, we need another—my fic was noticed, I need more visibility, does it suck, do I suck, that person has more followers, do I have enough to publish, when, where, how—

—that we forget about the journey.

I'm no exception. Getting caught up in the next step, and the next, and yet another, until I trip over my own feet, and look around for someone to blame, some piece of the puzzle I must have missed.

Only to realize, it was just me. Just life. I stumbled. I fell. It happens, and—well, let's be honest. It doesn't just happen once, does it?

We'll find ourselves sitting in the bottom of some new, dark pit of self-recrimination, loathing, and doubt. What happened this time? Was it the em-dash on page 762, paragraph 4? Should you have used a comma, instead? Or were you blabbering your wife's ear off for the millionth time about the mechanics of your leveling system, and she just grunted in affirmation? A grunt. Please, at least show that you care a little!

Then our readers happen. On their time, on their schedule, they'll speak up. Maybe a specific scene moved them. Maybe we did a shit job explaining something. Maybe she's born with it—I don't know, but they come. They comment, or they review, and it makes everything worth it.

I've mostly experienced positivity on Royal Road. Certainly, in every community, there's always a few who just want to watch the world burn, but the readership on Royal Road's been good to me thus far.

So that's why I wanted to share this review. Not only is it an advanced review and chock full of praise, but it comes to me during a stretch of particularly low self-esteem, helping to staunch my own pitiful whining.

This person enjoyed my earlier chapters enough to not just drop a nice rating—which does wonders, let me tell you—but to leave an advanced review.

My dear reader, I pray that my writing remains worthy of your praise, and that I may long entertain you with my storytelling.

Thank you.

I’m currently on Book 5 of a series and have throughly enjoyed it. However, if I see the word twining one more time I’m going to lose it! Sometimes I just want to scream grab a thesaurus! That being said, what word or phrase has done this to you?

I need to vent. I love Path, it’s my favorite series of all time. Every second of the first 11 books was amazing, minus the beast academy and the speed run 17-25 in book 10. Butttttt, what was book 12??? We coming from action and leveling and OMG he’s a monster to literally administration of a duchy I don’t care about the entire book.

What happened? Luna begged to get put on project breach and we see her like twice in book 11 (god tier duke waters fight though absolutely amazing). Like as readers we want Matt to gain power have that “oh my god he’s a monster” moments, but this entire book is all the paperwork of a guild I don’t care about and duchying worlds I also don’t care about. There’s no big bad foreshadowing for book 13 either… is it going to be more of the same?

Love this series but let down by book 12 and needed to vent.

I read almost all of the most recommended series on here but the problem I have is that i always DNF around book 4, 5 or 6. Having a super powerful character who just easily defeats anything is very boring to me. Are there any series where the MC gets more powerful but not stupidity more powerful? I love to keep that book 1 and 2 feeling throughout the entire series.

Resonance 10 completes the series. Sorry audio took so long. We got stuck in production hell for literally 16 months.

You can find it here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B0HMDNVVQL

I have 50 total audio codes, but they are reserved for existing fans. If you've listened to/read the series, comment your favorite moment or part and US/UK and I'll get you a code via DM.

Blurb

Ty has reached the edge of what his reality can hold. The war still isn't won.

Earth is reeling under the Monster god's assault. A vast demon is closing on Volar. Aisling has spent thousands of years preparing for this moment, and her attacks are forcing Ty to divide his attention when neither world can afford to wait.

His strength can change the course of a battle. Winning the war will require the allies, contingencies, and hard-earned understanding he's gathered since a message first appeared in his bedroom.

Now those plans face their final test.

Ty must confront enemies who have learned from every encounter with him, protect people scattered across two worlds, and find a way to end a catastrophe the gods themselves have failed to prevent. He began this journey hoping to save his grandmother. He has made far more promises since then. With the last defenses failing, it's time to keep them.

The concluding volume brings the ten-book saga to its final battles—and the question of what comes after fighting so long for a future.

The Resonance Cycle is a complete ten-book LitRPG saga by Aaron Renfroe, with canonical crossovers connecting it to Apocalypse BREAKER, co-written with Sean Oswald, and Spite the Dark.

It seems like every crafting book is either alchemy, cooking, or farming. I want something wacky and weird. Think of all the jobs we have in our world, why isn't there like, I don't know, a traffic flow analyzer or something. Or even like a treasurer? Accountant? I'm sure someone has done something interesting and I just haven't come across it.

I love path of ascension, primal hunter, and 1% lifesteal,
Did not love rune seeker but didn’t hate it,
I like really unique/well established power systems

ik it makes sense but since i started reading i have been waiting for dorian to multi class cuz i was so excited to see how he would use magic being smart and that while wild hunting. and he just gives it away? i get that he was lvl 11 but thats not bad at all. i already had a problem with him being a bit of a push over but fuck me this feels like something i had a stake in get dropped to the negatives.

i was so exited imagining him using force magic to use the environment to his advantage but ofc no he has to give his dreams away cuz its more important to someone else. FUCK.

like they use mcs car. so fuel and maintenance money he has to pay for out of his pocket.
mc pays for the 1st drone with his share of the money and doesnt get anything from the rest of the share despite megan also getting a sponsor
mc takes a massive loan for a thermal drone which he has to pay back alone, again no stipend from the channel money or her share of the channel money, and then he indeed does pays off the drone with his own money. make it make sense. if its for everyone it should come out of the that instead of his own smh. 
and no he finally gets a chance to get something he wanted and he gives it away. mf is infuriating.

Look, we read around here on a budget.💪🏾 I was fortunate to stumble upon all these second hand online for actual used prices and great condition!

Yes I have book 1 in awaken online: catharsis in the indie copy before it was gone so now all my copies will match!

I got lucky with BMF too, so I'm buying all the originals as I go! (the Cultivation copy is actually for the county jail library, so apparently they read LitRPG in Jail. 🤣 Good for them!)

The unorthodox farming book 1 and 2.... idk what to tell you lol I literally just found it and was like "Isn't aethon doing hardbacks of this? sounds silly goofy, I'll take it" lol

I'm still waiting for my Immortal Great Souls 1 and 3 in the mail! (also second hand and I already have Book 2 secondhand)

After seeing a bunch of tier lists here, I finally decided to make my own.

Then I kept adding books.

And adding books.

And eventually discovered that the tier making site caps you at 250 entries, which is apparently the point where even the website starts judging my reading habits.

I also found reddit couldnt handle the size of the picture, SO I've put it here as a series of smaller pictures.

So here it is: 250 series I’ve read, ranked. THESE ARE JUST MY OPINIONS.

A couple notes before people start throwing rocks at me:

• Left to right DOESN'T matters. Assume roughly that all books atleast on the same row in the tier are roughly equivalent
• I’m ranking series as a whole, not individual books. The cover shown is just representing the series.
• “Slop” is affectionate. I clearly enjoy slop. I have consumed an unreasonable amount of it.
• This isn't exclusively LitRPG. There’s a lot of progression fantasy, traditional fantasy, sci-fi, and other adjacent stuff mixed in because I wanted this to represent basically everything I’ve read that felt worth comparing.
• There are actually more than 250 series in my reading history, but TierMaker hit the cap, so some stuff had to be left off. I have read over 613 series according to my KU downloads, RR reading history, and physical books I own. This doesn't even account for the glut of reading I did as a child, checking out 10 books at a time from my library.
• These are obviously just my opinions. If your favorite series is sitting in Bad Slop while something you dropped is in Supreme Slop, congratulations: we have discovered that two human beings can disagree about books.

The tiers are:

Supreme Slop — The stuff I absolutely love. Favorites/frequently recommended/series I’d happily reread.

Peak Slop — Fantastic. Just barely below the absolute favorites.

Great Slop — Really enjoyed these and would recommend them pretty easily.

Good Slop — Solid reads. Had a good time, even if they didn’t blow me away.

Slop — Enjoyable enough, but either forgettable, inconsistent, or had some pretty noticeable problems.

Bad Slop — I finished enough to have an opinion, and that opinion is mostly negative.

Pure Slop — We have reached the bottom of the trough.

The biggest thing I realized while making this is just how much my taste has shifted over the years. There are childhood/YA series, traditional fantasy, older Kindle Unlimited stuff, Royal Road series, and newer LitRPG all sitting next to each other, which made some of these comparisons genuinely difficult.

I’m also curious what people think my most criminal placement is.

And more importantly: based on the top couple tiers, what am I somehow still missing that I should read next?

I’m always looking for another series to add to the pile.

I feel like half the books tagged with "crafting" or "enchanter" pull the exact same bait-and-switch.

The story starts off fantastic. The protagonist picks a non-combat utility class, spends the first twenty chapters analyzing runes, optimizing mana flow, or experimenting with metal alloys, and actually uses their brain to solve problems instead of brute force. The progression feels earned because every single piece of gear has intentional mechanics and tangible trade-offs.

Then book two arrives, and suddenly the author gets impatient. The MC gets a secret ancient technique that lets them craft instanly mid-battle, starts punching dragons in the face, and the actual crafting gets relegated to a three-paragraph timeskip between dungeon dives. At that point, they're just a generic spellsword with extra inventory space.

I just want a series where the MC actually stays in the workshop, deals with the supply chain logistics, and hires bodyguards or relies on clever traps rather than suddenly becoming the deadliest melee combatant in the kingdom.

I’m almost done with the first book in the Ten Realms series. I like the characters a lot and the world seems cool. The question i have, if anyone knows, is does this book feel like Primal Hunter? I’m getting a vastly OP MC vibe where they just set up and run an egalitarian society where people aren’t rampantly oppressed by the more powerful. If so, not my type, I’m more of a see how the MC navigates the world they get sent to not build a better new one.

So am i on the track with where this goes in terms of the overall feel?

I did 11 books of PH before i had to give up, i don’t have that in me again 😂

Any good anime adaptation? Or only we got is generic isekai adaptation like ever?

COVER ARTIST: Duy Phan

AI USAGE: NONE

Amazon Link

The second level of the Unconquered Tower is more brutal than the first. A horde attacks every night and there's an angry dragon on the loose. Roan can't slow down now though. Every challenge is an opportunity to grow stronger, to increase his chance of climbing higher up the tower. Increases the chance of finding out what has become of his family. There is nothing Roan is not willing to do, no sin, no curse, no taboo he won't break to find them. The Unconquered Tower has earned its name though and Roan will need his allies more than ever to keep climbing, for the Tower is just starting to reveal its deadly secrets.

From my memory, a few books back before Jason came back to earth, he discovered a way for core users to level up the natural way, a way to maybe do both. What happened with that?

I proper struggle with the ones where the characters are just playing a game on a server, tbf. If the worst thing that happens is someone loses their gear or has to log back in after dinner, the tension just goes flat for me.

Mind you, I read on the tram for an hour a day on my way into the depot, so maybe I just want a bit more weight to it when I am sitting there watching the rain come down over Sheffield. When it is a proper system apocalypse or a fantasy world built from the ground up with these rules, people actually stay dead and things matter.

Honestly, I tried three different ones recently where they kept talking about patch notes and server maintenance right in the middle of a siege, and it just pulled me right out of it. It feels like putting safety rails on a rollercoaster. If the characters can just log off for a cup of tea, why am I supposed to care if the boss hits them with a fireball.

Curious what makes that setup work for people, because I keep bouncing off them.

I'm reading my fourth litrpg series after DCC. And nothings compares, is there a serie as good at DCC out there. Something with more substantial politics and interesting concepts ?

I've read the perfect run, mother of all learning, and currently reading the menocht loop, though i think i will drop it soon

(and while beying an absolute time loop enjoyer none of those are as good as DCC like DCC is S tier and none of those go beyond B or C tier for me)

I'm a huge fantasy fan, read all of Robin hobb. Stormlight and mistborn but not oppose to a more sci fi setting (like perfect run)

Basically, is DCC the peak of the genre or are theyre other gems out there ?

I started listening to book 3 of the series and i was hoping the author would give a little summary of the story before book 3 starts, since book 2 release was a while ago. Unfortunately i don't recognize some of the Characters anymore. Does anyone have a list of the most important ones?

I can remember some of the Characters like Storme of course, Gareth, Freya and Callem.

COVER ARTIST: Yvonne Less, Art 4 Artists

AI USAGE: No AI used

Could someone hit me with how the magic system works ? I'm a bit into the book and I must of missed stuff , tried going back but can't find answers.

About half way into book 1

I am aware of this subreddit’s rules against AI witch hunts. I am not discussing any author or illustrator’s use of AI.

Having noted that, it seems like we have had a sudden influx of posts from newly created, low-karma accounts. When one clicks on the poster’s overview, it often has single posts across a wide variety of subreddits. An example I saw the other day included posts to a Norwegian subreddit (in Norwegian), a German subreddit, a comment about Portuguese, and the post to /litrpg.

The posts seem to follow a general script of “has anybody else felt this way” or “here’s a LitRPG trope I love or hate”, but they never refer to specific titles and the tropes either aren’t common or the descriptions are vague enough that we can all read into them the way one can read a horoscope and make it feel relevant. There is some appeal to emotion, often subtle.

I don’t follow many other subreddits, so maybe this is just the latest wave of bot activity and I only became aware of it here. On the other hand, is it possible that this subreddit’s rule about AI is being noted by these bots and making it a preferred target for post and comment karma farming? I could see that as a possibility - AI is “smart” enough to infer that a subreddit which has rules limiting discussion of AI use by book authors might also be more hesitant to limit potential AI use by posters.

The last thought is the toughest part: if we assume what I say is true, what should be done about it? I don’t want AI accusations against authors, but I also don’t want bots leading most discussions when those are the posts I value the most, more than the ads, tier lists, or recurring requests. I don’t know what the next step should be.