LitRPG

It is.

So book one- Which dropped back in 2020, covers floors one and two of this dungeon, and it operates on the rules of LitRPG.

Literature meets role-playing game.

Right.

Like, how do you make reading about stats and health bars interesting?

It is a common hurdle for newcomers to the genre, for sure.

The trick to a successful LitRPG is making the mechanics tangible and consequential to the narrative.

Okay, how so?

Yes, written by Charlie Ridgely, and he is a 10-year veteran of the entertainment industry, so he covers everything from like huge blockbuster movies to really deep cut fandoms.

And Ridgely's article points to this unstoppable rise of a genre called LitRPG.

Right.

And you know, for a long time, LitRPG was treated as this highly lucrative but largely invisible niche internet phenomenon.

Totally invisible to the mainstream.

Right.

Which is a huge deal.

It's massive, and because of that, Dungeon Crawler Carl has effectively become the face of this entire genre.

really.

Just put in, you know, visit the LitRPG tools to find more content like this or whatever, right? Like it's...

Pretty, pretty agnostic.

Yeah.

It will feed directly in here and you can customize your space to your liking.

When these are posted, they'll come up in the conversations list so people can discover a podcast just like this one.

They can go to your Richie's Player Guild or whatever your thing is and see all of your stuff that relates to LitRPG.

Then you can manage that content yourself.

And people – Man, the Living Dungeon, I tell you, I have not seen – that is by far – that was our first free product as an April Fool's joke to make it that you can play Living Dungeon, which came from TTRPGs.

Sorry, sorry, LitRPG, which no one knew about.

I love – I was reading LitRPG since, like, the beginning.

I love LitRPG.

And now everyone knows about it because of Dungeon Call of Cards.

Like, oh, now everyone knows about LitRPG.

But – I just love lit RPG, but one of them is the living dungeon is one of the books.

And so we came up, we was like, Oh, let's make that into an ancestry.

Okay.

It is extremely fun for me, personally, to learn about the emergence of a new form of participatory culture, especially one that is coming of age in the post-platformization internet like LitRPG is.

At every level, Lit RPG is a perfect example of transmedia storytelling.

It emerges from video games, one of the major participatory media, has transnational and born-digital origins, is rooted in fanfiction and self-publishing, and has found much of its popularity via independent audiobook productions.

Like, if this was a movie, I have to do just the, the biggest, best opening I can do that will set the tone for the rest of the book and get people to start reading.

'Cause once I, I can get them to start reading, I've got them And, um, so that's my number one concern when I'm starting a book, and in my LitRPG in, uh, Death Has Joined the Party, I open with a guy who's stuck in his apartment because he's allergic to magic, and he lives in a super magical world.

So he literally has to live in a lead lined box, and where he only interacts with the world through basically his sending stone or his television, and then he gets a knock.

And actually, the opening line is, "Nothing good ever came of a knock at 3:00 in the morning," where a...

And this possession, of course, goes wrong, and we're off to the races.

So the opening is, what would happen if a lich failed to possess you, but you got the lich's powers? And, and, you know, that's fun.

That's a fun question, and I think for LitRPG in particular, this is a genre about situations.

It's a genre about what would I do, about playing the game of the book, which is why it's so fun because you're kind of not a pa- LitRPG readers are not passes, passive passengers in a story like you would be in a lot more, a more traditional fiction.

Let's, let's wrap it up there.

Thank you Matt Dinman for exposing me to LitRPG.

I don't think I'm gonna go for this again unless somebody says, "Oh, no, this is really done right." But-

Yes