Howdy all y'all, sorry for the tease of a second chapter coming up today. Just wanted to say thanks to all of y'all reading, commenting, rating the story. I've posted some of my writing in the past, but I've never really gotten a good reception like I have here on Royal Road. Part of that is the platforms I've used, a lack of consistency on my end, and the fact that a lot of my early stuff really was hot garbage. I didn't expect to get any traction at all with this story, but I wrote the first 15 Chapters up to Frozen Coast before I started posting. It surprised me the other day when I checked the follower count to see that we'd jumped from ~50 to 81, now it's sitting at 109 as I'm typing this.

With that being said, some of the lateness with chapters lately has been me scrambling to write, edit, go back and re-write, edit again to get the chapters out when I said they'd be out. Not to criticize any other authors on the platform, but I do write bigger, more substantiative chapters than a lot of the other stories get. Keeping up with 2500-4500 words twice a week, working 40 hours, and running a table top game on the weekends hasn't left a lot of time for anything else to be honest. I'm enjoying writing this story, so this isn't some sort of soft disclosure that I'm going to up and disappear, just that sometimes the chapters will be late. That leads into the other thing I want to get at.

I kid you not, I've written well over two million words in the past four years of writing. I started off with a very rough, crudely planned, shitpost of a sci-fi story called Shadows In The Belt back in 2020. I had posted that on here right about whenever my account was made, but deleted it before posting Iceborn. It really wasn't reflective of my writing quality, or the universe it was supposed to be set in anymore, because I've mostly finished a second story in that universe, Hard Knock Life. That story isn't as good as Iceborn is either, but it's miles, miles above Shadows or any earlier writing. I've got six or seven different variants of LitRPG story with a big chunk of words (50K-100K) written on them, I've got three more traditional Sci-fi/Fantasy stories, I've got two of those LitRPG's converted to not be LitRPG's, it's a whole dumpster fire in my writing folder.

With all of that writing just kind of sitting there, I want to try posting some original work that isn't confined into a fan-fiction of a 14 year old game. There's plenty of variety in what I've got to touch something up, and I've narrowed it down to a short list of work that I think can be salvaged into something worthwhile. There'll be a poll down at the bottom of this chapter with a few titles and keywords, whichever one gets the most votes by the end of the month will get back on the docket for a re-write and a chapter every so often. All of these stories have a substantial amount of material already, anywhere from 50-100K words. Below is a short summary of each story's introduction.

Hard Knock Life (Non-LitRPG, could be described as a Progression Fic, but not too similar to the stuff on this site, weak to strong MC)

HKL is set in my own original soft sci-fi Black Skies universe. It follows a 19 year old Richard Dunbar, freshly graduated from Space Mechanic™ school, as he signs up for his first job, along with his best friend. Things seem to be looking up for him, he's got signed on for a big contract, he's doing what he always dreamed of, and the new guys he meets on the ship are pretty cool. Sadly, as the title suggests, things are not to be so upbeat for long. His ship and crew are ambushed when they arrive at a derelict mining station, leaving Ricky as the sole survivor. Alone, stranded, with nothing but the corpses of his friends to keep him company, he sets to work, determined to escape. He may have survived the ambush physically, but something wrathful starts building in his mind.

The Blood Games: Corporal Wayland or The Blood Games: Dayne The Deathless

A bit on the setting here, then we'll get to the story specifics. The Blood Games are my take on a sort of battle royale LitRPG. Strange entities, some may call them gods, others call them patrons, or a thousand other titles, bring the dead to compete in what can only be described as the Murder Olympics. The Red Handed God, Cane, calls those who have killed a sapient being to his arena when they die. It doesn't matter if it was an accident, a job, a duty, a crime of passion. The Champions of the Blood Games are killers one and all. The games vary in size and scope, with most being a relatively small affair, but not the games of Wayland and Dayne. They've both been called to the Ten Thousandth iteration of the Blood Games. A hundred million champions, fighting it out over twenty thousand years, on a world hundreds of times larger than the earth. They aren't the only poor souls trapped there though. Monsters, demons, and civilized fodder from a hundred thousand realms of reality have also been slammed into the Games. Only the best five million champions can win, woe to the rest.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Corporal Wayland (FPS / Tactical RTS inspired LitRPG, Relatively High Powered MC)

Corporal Wayland is a soldier from far into our future, trained to fight in an environment saturated with high technology. He finds himself dropped into a ruined city, overrun by murderous machines. His training kicks in immediately, Survive, Escape, Evade. It doesn't take long for him to make contact with the enemy, nor does it take long for the drones to be rendered to smoking wrecks. He meets other champions from a time long before his, before the humans of Terra had taken to the stars. Neither of the men he meets are soldiers, just unfortunates dropped into the rubble strewn hellscape with one goal, survival. Slowly, more and more Champions begin to rally around the future commando, seeing a worthy, if callous leader. Fortunately, Wayland can do a lot more than just pull his own weight, provided those other champions make themselves useful.

Dayne The Deathless (LitRPG, Totally not a rip on Shadow of War, promise. High Power MC, major drawbacks)

Dayne Reed, a wanted fugitive that was never caught. Before being summoned to the games, he was a man that had wanted to live a normal life, but government bureaucrats pushed him one step too far. When a large construction project was planned to run right over the top of the land his family had lived on for centuries, he refused. A man in fancy slacks and an expensive tie told him it'd be an offense if he stayed, so he shot the paper pusher, and the government agents that came after him. Go big or go home, words that Dayne seemed to live by from there on out, not that he lived very long. A string of assassinations and one bad accident in the woods later, Dayne finds himself brushing dirt and dust off strange clothes, in a deep, dark forest. Psychotic terrorist, or hero against government tyranny, none of that matters anymore. Dayne was raised in the woods, and quickly sets off to find the nearest settlement. Along the way, he comes across a girl, a gnome girl, who turns out to be from the same time as he is, if a little younger. Dayne gets the pair of them to the nearby settlement, and fulfills a very similar role to Johannes in Iceborn, but his dungeon dive goes horribly, horribly wrong.

Ngl, I lifted a lot of my plot beats for Iceborn from Dayne's story, and the next one down. If you want more of this kinda stuff, from a different perspective, Dayne and Bastion have you covered.

Bastion of Malice (Fantasy Isekai, lots of dwarves, diggy diggy. Weak MC with unlimited potential, if he's willing to kill for it)

One of the first, if not the first, fantasy stories I tried to write. A man with an unknown past finds himself in a pitch black cavern, stinking of corpses, in a body with strange proportions. He takes a weapon from one of the dead, and realizes it isn't strictly human. There's no sign of what killed the band, but that doesn't seem like a worthwhile thing to investigate. Wandering through the tunnels, our intrepid hero comes to a grand staircase, a true marvel of engineering. It goes up and up and up for what seems like miles, and no sound came back from the rock he kicked off the side. There is a little glimmer of light, the scent of smoke rising up from a deeper level. With the evidence of civilization, there doesn't seem to be another good path forwards. More than just dwarves are lurking the staircase though, a lesson that the hero learns when he turns in at an abandoned tavern for the night. He doesn't have a book yet, but the first grudge is made.

Those are the four stories that I think have legs to stand on their own. They do all kind of bounce off each other, I re-used good ideas from some to reinforce others. Bastion and Dayne influenced a lot of Iceborn's story so far, distilling those elements into something that fit Skyrim's setting. A friend of mine told me I've been trying to write the same fantasy story for four years, and he really wasn't wrong. If you've read down this far, thanks for stopping by, and I'll be doing my best to get the next chapter out on Friday. Have a good evening.