Butler to a Core Lord was my first full story published on Royalroad, so I thought it would be fun to do a little review of the story writing process.
(There are mild SPOILERS ahead. I don't think there's anything big enough to ruin the story, so if you are curious about my thought process, there's really no reason to hold back. Just letting you know.)
I'll start with what went into the story's inception. I was originally looking to write a short (ha!) warmup story before going back to work on what is supposed to be a trilogy. I originally picked a butler character because butlers are kind of weirdly cool and tie-in with my interest in social classes.
From that starting point, there were a bunch of different ideas and desires that came into the mix. One idea was to write a story with time magic, sort of like a time loop, but a bit more complicated. I have a very simple graph that I turned into a Royalroad ad that explains this.
Butler to a Core Lord [https://www.paulperk.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/adrr.png]
In short, I wanted to be more like the movie Primer. If you've never seen it, Primer is to time travel movies as Delve is to crunchy litrpg. Xkcd, unsurprisingly, has a relevant comic.
xkcd comic [https://www.paulperk.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/movie_narrative_charts_2x.png]
(Image courtesy of xkcd. License terms here.)
I always felt like you could do more with time travel than just looping. Initially, I tried out some really convoluted time plots, loops within loops, all sorts of craziness, but I quickly realized that the complexity would just kill the story before it ever got started. It's not an issue of the reader being smart enough. It's the issue of having to explain things clearly and in enough detail for the reader to understand, a.k.a. a ton of infodumping when this genre already suffers from infodump syndrome. This was always going to be a plot-centric versus character-centric story, for better or for worse, but even then, I didn't think I could get anything close to the level of Primer and not bog down under the weight of it all. Basically, there are stories that cannot be plotted on two dimensions. Maybe next time.
However, even cutting back on the loopiness, I do feel like I managed to come up with an original, slightly more complex use of time travel without getting too far out into the weeds. I especially liked the idea from the last chapters of spending one scene in a particular time, going backwards in time to spend another scene, then going backwards again to spend another scene. I wanted to invoke a continual sense of traveling backwards in time, kind of like Merlin living backwards, and this was the only narrative way I could figure out to do that.
Planning the exact time travel mechanics and restrictions was a bit of a pain. Going back in time arbitrarily raises all sorts of issues and exploits. Once I figured out the card magic system with the cycle draws and levels of cards, everything else kind of fell into place. Keeping track of the Return availability and timing of a one cycle reset was a bit cumbersome on my end, but it worked out in the end, I think. There were a few points where I had to keep counting cards and running through scenarios to see what kind of infinite exploits might be occurring.
Pacing was a bit of an issue. As soon as Taylor figured out how to go backwards in time for good, like really backwards and not just once every three days, I knew things would ramp up smoothly. Setting everything up and bringing him to that point was more bumpy.
The next idea I wanted to incorporate was some kind of turn-based card magic system. The reason for this is my love of the Pokemon online card game. For a while, I was a junkie of Theme Deck play on the Pokemon servers. I could go on and on about how Theme Decks are the perfect balance for casual play, but the main point is that the Pokemon Company decided to shut down the older servers and start up a new service without Theme Decks. I don't like the overpowered modern decks where each turn involves a player drawing his entire deck in one go. Kind of lame, with far less tactical play, in my opinion.
ampharos [https://www.paulperk.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/ampharos.jpg]
(Above, one of my favorite cards. There's nothing like coming back from 1-5 to win 6-5 using Unseen Flash.)
There are a lot of card-based litrpg books out there. I haven't surveyed them exhaustively, but from what I can tell, most generally treat cards as skills placeholders, where it doesn't matter if they are cards or not. You could replace the cards with magical bracelets or power orbs with no difference. A minority like Card Mage and Goblin Summoner (haven't read it) involve actual card games. I wanted to have something more like the latter, but without having an artificial game imposed on combat. If you just use cards to cast spells while fighting, it devolves into the former case where cards are just skills placeholders. If you require characters to pause everything and abide by very restrictive rules, combat becomes a game, which feels forced. I wanted it to feel like a card game without requiring combat to flow through a game.
To me, there are two distinct aspects of card-based mechanics that distinguish them from generic magic systems. One is the idea of deck drawing, where you pull cards out of something. You might already have a defined set of cards, and you can only pull cards out of that set randomly. Or there might be a large slush pile and you pick a card from the top each turn. Whatever the mechanics, there is some concept of drawing cards.
The other mechanic is the turn-based system, which coordinates the actions of drawing and using cards between players. The idea of drawing cards isn't too hard to implement, but the idea of a turn-based system that is compatible with real-world combat is a lot trickier. You get into all sorts of wonky situations if you try to implement arbitrary chunks of time that serve as turns. You can always have skill cooldowns and such, but the point is that those skill cooldowns have to be synchronized between different characters. Why should the usage of skills by one person have any impact on the usage of skills by another?
To have natural coordination between players, I couldn't think of many options other than a global environmental variable. You could have different elemental affinities waxing or waning, or rapid mana cycles, and so on. In the end, though, I opted for a simpler system. In the same way that I had to back away from Primer levels of time loops, I had to back away from zany, forced implementations of a Pokemon card game. The story's theme of time travel, however, synergized well with a slower synchronization cycle--the daily twenty-four hour cycle.
I had my basic card system now, which involved drawing cards from a Core once per day, synchronized for all characters, with free play of those cards in the intervening time. It was a decent compromise between card-like mechanics, the need for normal combat, and the theme of time travel. You can think of it as a very slow card game, with each turn lasting for a whole day.
However, the fact that this was supposed to be a story about time magic meant that I could go even further. I was starting to realize that time magic and card mechanics were a natural combination. Card games are really about controlling the tempo of play through artificial turns. They are about structuring time. Since I have a time-based story, it's not entirely outrageous to alter time in some manner. You can freeze time, slow time, or accelerate time. And when you speed up time by a lot, those daily cycles of drawing become something resembling an actual rapid-paced card game.
I finally figured out a way to have my cake and eat it, too. I could have something resembling actual card game mechanics while still having real-time combat. For most of the story, the turns take place once a day. It doesn't feel like a card game at all. If you speed up the daily cycles a lot, like say ten-thousandfold, you get something more like a turn-based card game.
In the end, everything gets toned down to make sense within a prose fantasy novel, but the last fight was kind of the entire point of the magic system. That fight could have (should have) been shorter, but in some ways, it was the reason I was writing this particular card-themed story. I let that chapter ride out as far as it wanted.
I think the card system mostly worked for its intended purpose. There are a lot of ways it could be improved, of course, but I didn't have the mental bandwidth to deal with it further. Currently, the system is a bit "anything goes". I think a more defined or structured set of Cores and monster cards would help a little so that things don't feel like they are popping up too randomly. For something like Pokemon, there are a zillion Pokemon cards, but you still have Pokemon types, and Trainer cards tend to have certain effects. That sort of thing. (By the way, the cards combining to forge higher level ones is a carryover from Pokemon evolutions, another example of how Pokemon adds structure to their card sets.)
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Counting cards was a colossal pain at times. I didn't always show deck inventories, but I was keeping track of cards in the background. Dealing with time travel plus cycle and bonus draws had me running in circles at some point. I liked the fact that the numbers mattered, but I think I could have done a better job of conveying that to the reader. Like why go through all the hair-pulling and notepad number crunching if no one even knows you did it?
The one downside of a discrete, consumable magic system like cards is that you can use up all your magic quickly. You don't want characters sitting around waiting to draw new cards to do stuff. I tried to counter this with cantrips and monster cards. On the other hand, limits make magic systems interesting, and you don't want the system to devolve into the same "anything goes" I mentioned above. Consumable and low number magic systems are something I'm interested in, but I didn't get to play around with that further here.
The third and final motivating idea for the story was the concept of a fantasy thriller. Fantasy thrillers are essentially a nonexistent genre. I've wondered why and bugged a few people about it. The closest answer I can get back is that the fast pace of thrillers is at odds with the ponderous nature of fantasy worldbuilding.
Below is a comment from pretty famous fantasy author Mark Lawrence responding to someone else's interest in fantasy thrillers a long time ago.
fantasy thrillers comment mark lawrence [https://www.paulperk.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/marklawrence-1.jpg]
(Original comment on reddit here.)
In retrospect, I think that's a pretty good point, but it was something I wanted to try anyway. Thrillers cover a broad spectrum of story styles, but in general they have fast pacing, suspense, and a focused plot. As examples, Jason Bourne is an espionage thriller and Jurassic Park is a technothriller.
Even though I don't read thrillers too often, whenever I start one, I always finish it. That's coming from someone who drops a ton of Kindle and Royalroad stories. I've been kind of fascinated by what makes thrillers work and why I personally find them so easy to read.
At a surface level, thrillers seem fairly compatible with litrpg. Thrillers are pulpy, adrenaline-fueled popcorn fiction. Litrpgs are pulpy, dopamine-fueled popcorn fiction. Different hormones, but somewhat similar ideas. I wanted to read more fantasy thrillers, and since they don't seem to really exist, I thought I'd try to write one.
The closest example of a fantasy thriller I can come up with is Death Note. There's the thriller cat-and-mouse chase element mixed in with the fantasy concept around a magical notebook. Death Note has a couple of advantages compared to what I tried to write. It takes place in the real world, so there doesn't have to be much worldbuilding. Butler to a Core Lord takes place on Earth after a litrpg apocalypse, which is halfway to a second world fantasy. That automatically adds a ton of infodumping. The concept in Death Note is also very clean and developed carefully throughout the story. In contrast, litrpg magic systems are typically complex. Again, that leads to more infodumping. I guess I could have tried to use a simpler fantasy element, but I strongly prefer having very high levels of magic. I want magic to appear on every page, or close to that.
I think the fantasy thriller concept sort of failed, but the failure itself was still instructional. Setting up the thriller idea at the very beginning and towards the end of the story was okay, but keeping a thriller concept throughout the middle of the story, when fantasy novels tend to expand and develop the worldbuilding, turned out to be very tough. I found myself having to set up various things or trying to motivate certain plot points. The story kept getting bigger and bigger, which is the opposite of what you want for a lean thriller. In principle, I think I could turn the story into a proper fantasy thriller, but the story would have to go through many, many rounds of editing until it was less than half its current length. At that point, you're essentially writing a completely new story.
Having twists and reveals is also mandatory for thrillers and that also kind of worked, kind of didn't. Given the overall story, like the purpose of the story from a thematic and character angle, the twist was sort of set in stone. Once I start building parts of the story, it seems like there is only one way to go that combines everything properly. Everything organically develops into a particular form, and I don't feel like I can change something arbitrarily without starting from scratch again. However, I always considered the nature of the twist to be dangerous since it skirts close to a couple of taboo topics from a litrpg power fantasy perspective. I'm avoiding too many overt spoilers in case someone uninformed is reading this on my blog, but I tried to ameliorate anything potentially negative to such audiences while staying true to the story that had to exist.
Another drawback of the particular twist was related to both the characterization and plot, where the buildup may have been too slow, frustrating, or confusing. Again, I think the story could have been refined so that the twist works while avoiding the negative issues, but it would have taken a ton of editing and rewriting across many drafts.
So yeah...fantasy thrillers are hard. They don't exist for a good reason.
That doesn't mean I've given up on them yet. I'm still going to try to write a fantasy thriller, or the closest approximation to one I can manage, because it's the type of story I want to read. (At least that's what I believe.) I kind of have an idea of what worked and what didn't work in this attempt, and I'll try a couple of different things in my next approach. Regarding that, I wrote a manuscript for book one of a trilogy and set it aside before working on Butler to a Core Lord. I'll call that story Human Heroes as a placeholder title.
It's been over a year since I touched Human Heroes. I recently reread the manuscript, and I actually binged the whole thing. It's kind of weird, because when I work on a story, I tend to think it sucks, but going back I found that it was surprisingly effective at holding my very fickle attention. Human Heroes is currently a typical progression fantasy in terms of the overall feel or emotions it brings out. It's sort of YA, hits most of the right notes for a more mainstream story. I mean, I had specific ideas I wanted to implement in Human Heroes that I haven't seen other people do, but I'm talking about the market fit. It's not bad.
However, after rereading and enjoying Human Heroes, I think I will change it up quite a bit. I'm basically killing the current progression fantasy story because I want to see if I can make it into more of a fantasy thriller. Obviously, the market fit will become worse, but oh well. When I wrote Butler to a Core Lord, I knew it wouldn't align with the market exactly. I've written up a post on my site, but to summarize, in my opinion, one of the primary emotions of mainstream litrpg is a sense of absurd glee. I don't want to get into that here, but suffice it to say, absurd glee is not the primary draw of Butler to a Core Lord. It's a combination of fantasy thriller and intellectual itches.
burning book [https://www.paulperk.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/burningbook.jpg]
(My personal hobby: burning baby books. Source: pexels.com)
Going into Butler to a Core Lord, I knew it would be off-target, which is why I tried to make everything else as deliberately vanilla as I could. We have elves and dwarves. Another litrpg apocalypse. Mana. Levels. Cores. The terminology was meant to be as stereotypical as possible, because the story was already a bit weird in terms of what it emphasizes.
This is a good point to mention what else will change between Butler to a Core Lord and Human Heroes version two. The weakest part of Butler to a Core Lord is the characterization, particularly in some of the earlier drafts. I've updated maybe the first 14-15 chapters on Royalroad, so people who stumbled across the story later didn't have to suffer as much, but the characters are still by no means the main draw of the story.
When writing Butler to a Core Lord, my emphasis was on plot. This writeup is already getting pretty long, so I'll rant about it another time, but plotting is one of those things that no one explains. Yes, I know about 3-Act structure, the 21 or 24 story beats, the snowflake system, etc. etc. While there are tons of instructional resources about plot skeleton, no one talks about the meat that hangs on those bones. A plot is a lot more than plot structure, and I've found very few resources that actually discuss what goes into a story beyond plot structure. And, yes, I've read most of the popular books.
In any case, I had a eureka moment that was kind of obvious in retrospect, where I finally felt like I understood the basics of how to plot a story. By no means have I mastered plotting, but at least something finally clicked in my slow brain. Butler to a Core Lord was an exercise in working out a plot. As such, characterization was a secondary point. You could say that I was trying to write an "airport novel", which typically lives purely on plot. Think Dan Brown. That type of thriller, not some deep psychological exploration.
In Human Heroes, I want to build upon my practice plotting quasi-fantasy thrillers and start focusing on characterization. Human Heroes has bigger character arcs. Relationships, which are barely present in Butler to a Core Lord, are supposed to be more important. I've given examples of what I think about when choosing to write a certain story, and one of the main reasons for writing Human Heroes was a character-based reason. I don't want to spoil anything further at this point.
Since this debrief is getting long, I'll be winding it down now. I've tried to focus mostly on interesting, or plausibly interesting, points. There were a lot of other things I learned after finishing Butler to a Core Lord and editing it, but those issues are probably boring for the general reader. For example, holy smokes was the writing a lot worse in the first half of the story. I'm not talking about plot or characters but pure writing. Going back to edit, I found sentences like "he put the cookie in his mouth and he ate the cookie." Why would I even write that? Just say "he ate the cookie." I am forever grateful to anyone who blasted through the novel to reach the ending.
There were also issues about the time I spent writing and being productive. The slog of the middle. More boring stuff. I don't really care about playing the Royalroad-Patreon game, since most of my stories will be structured as novels, but I didn't want to be too sporadic posting as that's annoying for readers.
To summarize, I wrote Butler to a Core Lord to play with time travel and card mechanics while practicing my plotting skills in the form of a fantasy thriller. I didn't quite manage to pull off a proper fantasy thriller, but the result was still somewhat interesting. The largest deficiencies like characterization are what they are, at this point, and I'll continue my quest of trying to create a fantasy thriller in the style that I envision.