Deadworld Isekai

A quick warning:

This is not a chapter. It's more of a loose collection of my thoughts after writing the first book. There won't be any spoilers, though there is additional explicit context to the earlier chapters.

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The reason I wanted to write this author's note is because so often, we see LitRPG novels just progress through different stages of growth. You start off killing some rats, get to level 10 so you have your core skill set in place, somehow offend some greater threat, and then climb the power ladder until you can put down a demon lord. It’s easy to fall into the trap of writing a story like it’s resolving a formula and just tweaking a few variables until a story pops out.

But behind every story is an author. Someone who's putting in time, energy, and effort to build a world that we can get lost in. Too often, we, as authors, spend too much time writing without thinking about the craft or asking why we've done something. If we do that, you, as readers, suffer through worse stories. For a story to be any good, the author has to get lost in their own world too. They have to have a bunch of things they aren’t telling you, the reader, so they have something to draw from for the things they do make explicit.

This was supposed to be an appendix. Instead, it morphed into a long series of thoughts about how I approached different parts of this book. It’s how I thought about characters, how I thought about Gaia, and just generally a window into how I went about putting together the story so far.

Readers should be forewarned that this document isn’t fully edited - I wanted it to be fairly raw, and it’s very long and I didn’t want to subject Dotblue to editing it. Buyer beware! Here be typos!

I doubt this will be everyone’s cup of tea, so feel free to read as much or as little of it as you’d like. Either way, there will be more story tomorrow. Enjoy!

The Basic Setting

Empty Worlds (generally)

I’m fascinated by the idea of being alone. The first real, adult novel I can remember reading solo was Robinson Crusoe, which you probably know involves a guy getting shipwrecked and surviving alone on an island. As a kid, the idea that there was this guy who suddenly found himself with a whole kingdom in which to build treehouses and farm grapes seemed like a lot of fun.

It still does, in a way. Occasionally, I’ll jump on YouTube and watch videos of a guy making primitive tools and mud huts, or of some rural guy using a creek that runs through his property to set up a tiny hydroelectric dam made out of spare parts, bicycle chains, and moxie.

But as I’ve gotten older, that fascination with isolation has been tempered by how much I know I need relationships. I need to have people to tell about my wins, or to commiserate with my losses. I need to know people will have my back. I need to know that people will live through parts of me that are imperfect and choose to forgive me or work with me instead of choosing to hurt me.

So there are elements of empty worlds I find fascinating in a fun way, but that I also think tap into a really primal fear. I wanted to write about that in a way that didn’t try to grind the sorrow into you at every turn, but still gave you the impression of, you know, waking up alone and in danger and not having anyone to rely on at all. And not being some huge, capable guy, but just a normal sort of person who is vulnerable in the normal kinds of ways.

Gaia (specifically)

While Matt is still on Earth, he grows a garden. Because this happens chronologically before he gets sent to Gaia, you might think that the character of Matt drove the creation of Gaia. But at least as far as those elements of what he’s doing, and his personality are concerned, it’s the other way around. Matt was made for Gaia.

I don’t garden, but my mom did, and my wife does. And I think for both of them and other gardeners I’ve known, gardens are a place of healing. It’s a place you can pour in work and see growth in visible, quantifiable ways. Where you can put in effort and then COUNT your rewards.

You may or may not know this about yourself, but that’s probably why you, me, Dotblue, all of us, like LitRPG. It’s that idea that when you work, you will not only be rewarded but able to watch the rewards roll in. We live in a world where that isn’t always true - where you often work without reward, and where sometimes the rewards you do get are invisible or unclear. With LitRPG, the results are almost guaranteed. The plants, you might say, are working too. And when they succeed, you can see it.

That’s why we escape there. That’s why it’s a good place to escape to.

Now imagine that you’ve had one particular escape, this idea of LitRPG, that you’ve run to for years and years. It’s comforted you with its presence. It’s made you feel good when you felt bad, and it’s made you feel better when you were already in a good mood. It’s what you trust. In some ways, it’s where you want to be.

When Matt meets the truck, he knows exactly what’s going on, and very little in the way of sales is required to get him to accept it. It’s rest. It’s a place where his effort means something and growth happens in a way he can see. It’s where he wants to go.

And it’s not the planet of plants, or the planet of forests, or vine planet. It’s the garden planet. Gardens are tended. Imagine a whole planet so dedicated to making things grow - to life - that it ends up named The Garden Planet. That’s what Matt expects. That’s what he’s promised.

And then he gets there, and Gaia is the Gaia we know. It’s danger and stress. It’s starvation and getting hurt. It’s lonesomeness and work that maybe, just maybe, lets you survive but with no guarantees or likelihood of ever getting ahead.

If you were Matt, landing on Gaia doesn’t just mean “find water”. A promise was broken. He doesn’t freak out that much, since this is a guy who used to work for Janice. Some powerful figure breaking a promise isn’t new to him. The only unusual part is that he got his hopes up.

Outside the psychological part, I wanted to create a planet that not only is post-apocalyptic but also doesn’t have that much going on in general. The basic model (as many have guessed) is the surface of Mars. It’s red dirt and rocks. I’ve gone to pains to try and remember to say it’s red AND burnt, that something happened to the soil to make it this way, but the overriding thing about the dirt is that there’s a lot of it. It’s everywhere, and if you’ve seen one patch, you’ve seen all the other patches.

The idea here was to focus on characters and feelings. That turned out to be writing on hard mode.

To the extent there are other things on Gaia, they are sparse. There are occasionally ruins, most of which are empty. There are dungeons, because the story has to have them, but mostly the rewards they yield are fundamentally simple things he needs to survive.

So his first dungeon gives him water. His first ruin gives him (very limited) food. At some point, Matt has completed several dungeons, and he still doesn’t have a magic sword. He can’t teleport. He’s a bit stronger, but far from super-human or invulnerable. And it’s only when he starts pushing back on the promises - when he says “no, I don’t trust your model anymore. I’m doing my own thing, taking my own risks, and doing what I want to do” - that things start to turn around for him.

Does the system try to kill him? Of course, it does. It wants control and it doesn't want to screw things up. It’s risky, but it’s the only way forward. And almost immediately, he has growth, in every sense of the word.

Characters

Matt

Matt’s a relatively normal dude until he is Isekai’ed to a world to save it. Spoiler: It’s too late.

Some fun stuff that doesn’t necessarily come through all the time about Matt is that he’s traumatized in a number of ways that aren’t necessarily that obvious, even to him. Before he left Earth, he went through the process of dying with cancer, and one thing we see about that is that he does this mostly alone. There’s nobody going on trips with him, or helping him with his garden. He just turtles up and deals with it all, mostly on his own.

In some ways, landing on a dead, lonely world when death is just around the corner is cruel precisely because it’s a continuation of Matt's life. It’s now obvious that he’s all alone, with nobody to help him and nobody he trusts. But the biggest lie for him, probably, wasn’t that the world was dead or that it was empty, but that he’d be alone again.

He likes kids, he’s done lots of retail and low-level clerical work, and had a bunch of bad bosses (See: Janice).

In terms of pre-Gaia abilities, he’s nothing special. He’s the kind of guy who was probably in little league baseball, but otherwise hasn’t pursued sports.

Lucy

Lucy is a system guardian, which more accurately might be something like a “System Assigned Reincarnator Guardian/Guide Entity” (SARGE) if I was less lazy about typing really long things, and liked acronyms more.

When we meet Lucy, she’s coming off the trauma of a long period of isolation and now dealing with the shock of it suddenly ending. Both these things combined are just enough that she, an inherently helpful little jokes-and-mischief person, doesn’t feel like helping much at all.

She’s relieved Matt is there and wants him there, but feels highly betrayed by him, even though she’s aware that it's not his fault. When Matt forces her to answer questions for him and come along (something, incidentally, she would have had to do anyway because she’s tethered to him after their initial meeting) it makes her much, much angrier.

The thing that turns this around is that Matt is essentially a nice guy. As soon as she starts supplying the very, very minimal amount of information he feels is necessary for him to even probably survive, he never orders her to do anything ever again. She’s the kind of person who likes to give people shit, and he’s the kind of person who understands that and smiles when it happens. They are an excellent match, meeting under really bad circumstances. Eventually, he wins her over just by being likable and not anything bad outside of what he feels he has to do to survive.

Lucy’s interface with reality is a bit weird. Since I don’t want to write “Lucy appeared to sit in a chair, but let me assure you this was an illusion, and she can’t actually sit because she doesn’t actually have a body, but it very much seemed like she was sitting” every second paragraph (and because you probably wouldn’t like it if I did) you will catch a lot of instances of “Lucy sat on the ground with Matt” as you move through the story.

You should always read these as “She sat on the ground, but that’s only what it looked like!” but I think it’s also useful to know that in my head, she’s very eager to look as real as possible. She’s making decisions and plans, all aimed at making any observer (read: Matt) forget that she’s not quite there in the same sense he is. It makes her feel less lonely.

The System Instance

More than other system clones, System Instances are mini-versions of the Main System. They have the same basic personality. The big difference is what kind of resources they can draw on. They know pretty much anything the system knows, and dole this information out sparingly. They know a lot about the universe generally, but this information gets really foggy and general as it gets less relevant to the reincarnator they serve.

At the beginning of the story, the System Instance doesn’t like that he’s working all the time, but he’s pretty much okay with Matt and doesn’t mind helping him succeed. As his character progresses, he develops two significant problems that make it hard for him to do this:

He's cut off from the System for the most part, and can’t do anything substantial about that. This means he can’t call for help in most ways, can’t download any more information than he already has, and is forced into acting independently in a (from his perspective) hard situation that a higher-level system clone should be working on. Matt starts messing with things that he really, really doesn’t want Matt to. This means he’s a house set against itself, which, as we all know, cannot stand. Everything he does has to have a veneer of helping Matt grow and learn, even when he’s trying to put Matt down permanently as soon as possible.

This conflict and lack of help means the system behaves pretty erratically. A lot of stuff is happening that he is ill-equipped to deal with, and he’s working with a ruleset that says to help the guy. At the same time, the exact same ruleset (or just his own desires) says he should also kill the guy.

Like the main system, his understanding of humans is pretty superficial, not because he’s incapable of it but because outside of System Instances, the main system can’t be bothered to care that much about its reincarnators.

The Truck

The truck was an early character I still love who appears in exactly one scene, because he has exactly one job. He’s essentially a system interface whose sole purpose is explaining that reincarnation is a thing, that it’s happening to you, and that you are now going on a fun ride to another planet to do some form of dangerous-but-fun adventure.

There has been some question whether or not he’s the same person as the System Instance. He’s not. He’s a mid-level System-clone that is, by nature of his “father”, really lazy and doing the bare minimum to get though his days.

He might appear again, since I like him too, but I don’t yet know how or why that would make sense.

Barry

Barry is a fun character for me. He’s an ancient, ancient infant. He possesses a vast intellect and access to tons of information (Including everything a dungeon system needs to know AND everything about Matt) but he’s only been online since Matt showed up and “woke him up”.

The first way this is important is that there are good reasons to think we can trust Barry. If he was just helpful without any reason, you might say, “Well, so was the system once. How is this different?”. There has to be an underlying reason he likes Matt. And when we look at their earliest conversations, we see that the very first thing he ever did after waking up was scan Matt’s brain to see what he was frightened of.

It was clowns, for the record.

But in a very odd way, the first world Barry ever knew was Earth as seen through Matt’s eyes, and the first person he ever met was Matt, who he knows every piece of. He’s seen the cancer. He’s seen the bad jobs. He’s seen Matt watch his siblings’ kids. He’s seen Matt, more recently, desperately want to comfort a crying kid who was at that time trying to kill him. And if the sum of all that is good enough, we can see our way to believing Barry is loyal.

And so far, he is.

One thing to notice about how Barry talks is that he’s relatively formal when Matt talks to him in person. He talks like a doctor talks, like he both has education but also is carefully selecting his words. That’s because he is. He’s still getting the hang of everything because he’s only a couple of months old. He doesn’t want to make mistakes.

But when he communicates in writing, he’s significantly more casual. He makes more jokes. He tries things out. He adopts a more casual tone because when he writes things down, he gets multiple tries to get it right, and that makes him feel safe enough to take bigger risks.

And he does all this because he wants the person who is reading to laugh, to feel good, and to like him better. I can’t make promises about what Barry will or won’t end up being moving forward, but I really, really like the Barry we know today. He’s a good dude.

The Main System

The main system is, well, the main system. He’s so reluctant to work more than he has to that stating that “the system is lazy” is one of the two main things people say about him. The system’s own rules say he has to work, however, and he gets around this by assigning clones to do it. He has to give up “computing power” for this to happen, but in return, he doesn’t have to be consciously aware of most of the work he does.

If you imagine a person who is sitting in a room alone playing Fallout while their wife gets the house ready for a dinner party alone, and who acts annoyed whenever she asks him to do anything, you have a pretty good handle on the Main System.

Note that we don’t know that much about the main system yet, for the same reason he knows just as little about Matt’s unfolding story. We see who he is from reflections of his characteristics in his clones, but any individuality he has apart from that has mostly not been revealed yet.

Asadel/Derek

It’s never explicitly stated, but Derek is supposed to be 15. Specifically, he’s the kind of 15-year-old who thinks it’s stupid that 12-year-olds can’t get driver’s licenses. He feels ready to be an adult, and is frustrated that he’s not allowed to. This frustration is amplified because he knows a bunch of adults who are both A. Really Cool and B. Doing Really Cool Stuff, and he thinks he could and should be handling the same kinds of situations.

Like most 15-year-olds, Derek has never really contemplated his own mortality. Since Ra’Zor’s juvenile hero educational program keeps him mostly out of the path of real danger, he’s never had to face it, either. So you have this super-powered teen who isn’t truly allowed to use those superpowers and has no concept that this might actually be a really good thing for him.

Derek is not a cool, deliberate thinker. He’s basically elemental ambition. He likes anything that helps him get to his goals, and hates anything he perceives as standing in his way. With that said, he doesn’t steal magic swords or break many rules on Ra’Zor, specifically because his ambition is to have everyone recognize that he’s a hero, and heroes don’t do bad stuff.

Derek is set up as a villain, and I intended for you to not like him much. But I also specifically wanted to make a character who you’d root for if circumstances were different. If Derek had been set on a planet and cut loose to do hero stuff, he would have saved the world or died trying. He would have taken big risks and chased big rewards. If the System Instance’s quest had said for him to protect Matt at all costs, he would have jumped in front of a Gaian Ape to keep him safe.

Or at least he thinks he would have. By the time Matt gets done with Derek, he’s tasted mortality, and he’s been immersed in a significant amount of fear. This is changing him, and we only have hints of how.

One last thing: One of the elements that makes people not like Derek is that he’s a glutton - he eats more than he has to. He chose a class that would LET him eat a lot in pursuit of that. But I do want to point out that despite this being sort of a real flaw, it’s not that atypical of 15-year-old boys. Whether Derek would be a glutton after his bone plates harden is, for now, left to the imagination of the reader.

Brennan

Brennan is the kind of guy who volunteers at youth centers or works at camps because he’s a nice guy and wants to help. He is possibly the only person who actually likes Asadel. He really does, if for no other reason than he just likes kids and wants to help them.

Note that he wouldn’t have actually done any of this on Earth, since he would have been too young. He’s just that kind of guy.

I have a cause-of-death head-canon for every character who we know died (i.e. all the reincarnators). For Derek, for instance, it’s getting a cramp while swimming further from the shoreline than he was told was safe at the beach. For Brennan, though? It’s protecting someone else during a horrific dodgeball mishap.

Brennan isn’t a very focused person when he doesn’t have a task to work on. He mostly gets his work from Artemis, who he is also (surprise) involved with. In the short term, this means high-level hero stuff meant to hold back the teeming hordes of demons. We are just now beginning to see hints that he might have plans beyond that.

Artemis

Artemis is a born-and-bred native Ra’Zorian. She, like all Ra’Zorians, can make excellent soup. Like very few Ra’Zorians, she has trained herself up to an impossibly high level of combat efficiency rivalling that of reincarnated heroes.

She works as a trainer for younger heroes, but also seems to work with Brennan when she can.

What I like about Artemis in terms of how I think about her is that while everyone she works with eventually gets stronger than her, they do that by using a fast-track, cheater version of the system. Most of them are just statistically not going to be ultra-hard-working uber-alpha personality types. She’s different - she could have been a bartender or a shopkeeper and nobody would have blinked.

Whatever else she may be, she’s the kind of person who chose to put herself in harm’s way and then trained really, really hard to make it happen.

If she was at the same level as Derek during his combat with Matt, she would have absolutely eviscerated Matt.

Unlike Brennan, she hates Derek. This is probably a combination of the fact that Derek doesn’t like to train (which makes her job hard), and thinks she’s hot and doesn’t do a great job of politely hiding it.

The Old Blacksmith

The Old Blacksmith exists because, by federal law, at least one Old Blacksmith type character must exist in every Isekai novel. He’s old, he’s gruff, he’s super strong, he brooks no bullshit, he’s made of callouses and scars, and he’s hiding things. Deep, dark things about his past. Like every character of his type, he’s also essentially nice, particularly to kids, and even though he’d never admit it, particularly to kids like Asadel who seem to need a firm hand to help them find their way.

Like all native Ra’Zorians, he’s capable of making incredible soups.

Janice

Janice is only referenced, never seen. She’s incredibly unlikely to ever appear in the novel, but she almost certainly has appeared in your actual life in some form or another. So a quick story:

I was once working a trash temp job that, despite being a trash temp job, required that every employee had intimate familiarity with a hundred-page legal document. Out of a couple of hundred temps working this job, I was probably one of two people that actually had read the thing during the two-week training. Out of sheer boredom, I had basically memorized the thing. I was younger then and thought it might lead to a better gig.

Anyway, one day I get an email from an address I don’t recognize, and it says something like this:

“Hey, to anyone copied on this email, please correct my understanding of this particular rule from the 100-page legal document….”

And then proceeds to state a relatively simple error that would have, if run with, cost the company something like $10,000 per transaction of that type, where they were doing dozens-to-hundreds of that transaction a day. I say “Well, so, easy error to make - please refer to such and such paragraph for the reason why, and in that context understand that it says this other thing.”

The next day I get pulled into an office by one of my managers (one whom I liked, and who was decent to me the whole time), who explains that the person I corrected was a person who was known-to-be-stupid but was also suspected to be immune to criticism due to various relationships she had fostered in the company.

She had called my manager and, to paraphrase, said that it would be a very good idea if I and everyone else on the project didn't get themselves fired by disagreeing with her in any public way, ever again.

It turned out that she was leading our project, and just hadn’t fully flown into town to actually take control yet. And she did this kind of stuff ALL THE TIME. Multiple people missed the subtle, unspoken memo to always agree with her, but never to do what she said. They did what she said, and were fired. She did not, so to speak, have their backs.

There being mercy in the universe, I have since forgotten this woman’s weird Canadian-rich-people name. But it started with a J. Thus you get Janice.

My theory is that eventually everyone gets a Janice in their lives. The peter principle states that people get promoted to the level of their incompetence - that most people are in jobs they are just good enough at to not get fired. When that job is flipping burgers, you just zone out. When it’s management, you ruin people’s lives.

Mama Clownrat

Mama Clownrat is important in a stealthy way. Is it smarter than a normal rat? No, it’s about as smart as a rat. Which is to say, it’s reasonably smart. It probably has some rudimentary emotions, especially as concerns protecting its young. The reason that might be significant is because it gives you an idea of how granular the system is simulating the minds Matt finds himself fighting.

If you have a system that’s powerful enough to, say, materialize a dagger out of midair, it probably has enough processing power to simulate a mind to some degree. And that’s the last thing you actually want because it means you can never really learn the rules well enough to be completely safe.

So when Mama Clownrat gets royally pissed, Matt almost dies. It’s not completely out of left field, but she chases him harder and faster than he expects, and he ends up winning at the very end of his rope and using the very last of his contingencies.

Rohan Anand

Rohan Anand is Matt’s oncologist, the man who gave him the news that he has cancer. He’s barely in the story as himself (much more often as Barry’s chosen appearance). Besides a few lines of dialogue, I think I tried to make there be an impression that Matt actually liked the guy pretty well - he found him sort of weird in a charming, casual way.

Sometimes I’ll see a scene of someone finding out they have some terminal disease on a TV show or in a movie, and often it’s this really touchy-feely sort of scene with a really apologetic but overall very formal doctor. I think if I ever do have to get that kind of news, I hope it’s a guy like Rohan, one who I sort of like and who understands me well enough to know that the way to soften the blow in my particular case is to make jokes, not to apologize.

The general setting

The Dungeons

The dungeons are a detailed simulated environment of the planet Matt was promised but denied. There are trees. There are oceans. There is fruit. Matt goes there because he has to, sees things he can’t have, and walks away with meager rewards.

Of course, this changes. But at the beginning, dungeons were supposed to be terrifying to Matt. And even though they are terrifying and awful, he mostly has to pass on the rewards he wants for the things he needs. But he does get the things he needs, even in the form of companionship of a sort when he meets Lucy. As soon as he thinks he’s safe, the dungeons turn out to be less predictable than he thought. This terrible thing he came to trust changes, and he’s suddenly being slowly eaten alive.

The point is that they weren’t supposed to be NICE places. I think they necessarily end up being more interesting than the outside world, but the idea initially was to reinforce how alone and vulnerable Matt was. I think they do a good job of that, before they turn into something different entirely.I actually tried really hard to limit the amount of influence Barry has on the dungeons, despite being an apparently nice guy. This was possible because, as a system derivative, he’s similarly bound by rules, at least for now. In that way, Barry is a bit like a GOOD manager, one who can’t change everything in your favor but at least has your back and will make sure you get what you were promised for your time.

Gaian Nullsteel

Early in the book, we find that dungeons survived. In a genre-sense, this sort of fits; Dungeons are kind of magic. They belong to the system. We aren’t surprised when we find out they are durable. But everything else, every building, every monument, every vehicle, is gone. Not just broken, but gone.

The exception is Gaian mystery metal. Matt first finds a lockbox of it, and eventually a bunker made out of it, both built and enchanted to resist the effects of time. Along the way, he finds chunks of it that seem more mundane but have nonetheless lasted.

I wanted there to be some remnants that got left behind from this once-great society, and if these remnants survived something that wiped literally everything else out, it has to be pretty extraordinary stuff, essentially the best, toughest material they were able to create. And because it’s that, and apparently rare, I think it matters a lot what they chose to build it for.

So it’s telling that the three biggest pieces of it Matt found were for either food storage, preservation of life, or a shovel, which for the Gaians is likely about creating and encouraging life in better times.

The Ruins

Gaian ruins are mostly empty. To the extent there’s anything in them, we find a few scattered bricks, and some (but not a lot) of Gaian Nullsteel. Whatever got the planet, the ruins say, got it pretty good. There’s almost nothing left.

Yet, this was an agricultural planet, a planet all about growing plants. There were countries and governments. There must have once been a lot of people, but now it’s gone, and all that remains are a few bricks that beat the overall statistical trend.

The other thing I wanted for the ruins was that they weren't buried that deeply. If you have ruins on a planet that’s active, they tend to get buried, sometimes ending up pretty far from the surface. When Matt digs on Gaia, it’s rarely very deep at all. Given that everything else on Gaia seems to be stopped - down to the rotation of the planet and the weather - that’s probably meaningful in the sense that whatever happened to Gaia happened all at once as opposed to over hundreds of years.

Ra’Zor, Realm of 1000 Bleedings

Ra’Zor is a combination of two things I think are funny: Having a planet with an edgelord name in the options of places Matt could get reincarnated to, and having that same planet be mostly known for exceptional soups.

Later on, both of those things got fleshed out more. The edgelord name is justified by Ra’Zor being a horrifying world, but only in parts. There’s a “good side of town” that the good guys protect, and a sense that the border is constantly held in a delicate equilibrium by the dedicated efforts of a lot of heroes and organizations. The good guys don’t seem to be winning, but they also don’t seem to be losing. It’s a balance.

Basically, to have a name like Ra'Zor, you need the danger. But to have really good soup, you need agriculture and civilization. So Ra’Zor has both.

When I decided to make Ra’Zor a setting, I made a decision that we would hear about but not see the threats to the planet. The things we would see would be nice things, either the kind of things we want for Matt, but that Matt either can’t have without paying for in blood and sweat. And we’d drive home how wrong that seemed by building a character (Derek) who got all those things essentially for free, and didn’t appreciate them at all.

Essentially, Ra’Zor would have been a good choice for Matt, and a place he could have been happy. It’s manga-town, a place where one can have fun dangerous-but-not-too-dangerous adventures, learn to shoot fireballs, and fall in love. But it’s not a place he’s allowed to have. That's probably why we have so much anger at Derek.

The Build

Matt’s build has always been weird, and that’s because power creep is real. If you take a guy and put him on a death world, that starts to matter less and less the more and more powerful he gets. A Matt that can travel at 60 mph while sprinting and who can easily, without danger, clear most of the dungeons is a Matt that gets self-sufficient much quicker. I wanted that to take time.

The solution for this was to pick a class that would NEVER get that powerful, unless something weird happened. It had two tools that would help him survive the very early stages of his journey (traps and basic competence at survival) but that would also have a relatively low ceiling. It allowed him to have basic combat training, but nothing that would really allow him to compete with the sheer physics of big, scary monsters.

Even with that, there were still problems. If Matt was solo-clearing a bunch of dungeons really quickly, that meant that under “normal” LitRPG rules he’d be leveling pretty quick as well. Normally, that isn’t a problem because you would just increase the difficulty of the dungeons and threats he faced relative to his strength. But if you did that, the rewards would get better and better as well. It would be very easy to fall into reward-creep, get him to the point where he could clear low-level dungeons danger-free due to his enchanted weapons and armor and improved stats, and have a character who essentially didn’t have to be in danger if they didn’t want to be.

The solution that made the most sense to me here was to limit Matt’s leveling to things related to his class. In the same way you’d expect a crafter to level from exceptional crafts, Matt gets rewarded for exceptionally unlikely survival. Every big power jump he goes through is after something that really should have killed him. That means that a sane version of Matt can’t grind; even if he wins against the odds most of the time, it only takes one loss to kill him. He’s incentivized to be very careful, avoid danger, and grow slowly.

The Arsenal

Matt has a knife that’s suitable for combat. He later on has a spear that’s a bit better. He barely uses either because if he does, eventually, he’s going to die. There are multiple occasions where Matt actually passes on superior equipment not because he doesn’t want it, but because the kind of behaviors that the equipment encourages aren’t sustainable for him.

Instead, he gets stuff that’s functionally more boring. He gets better trap poles. He gets (I don’t talk about this outright, usually) more rope. He gets repair stones. But what he doesn’t get is a ring of force ablation that increases his damage thresholds.

That’s the kind of thing Derek gets, because that's the kind of story Derek is. It would end with him being world-shatteringly powerful and killing a demon lord. Matt’s immediate story ends in him having ready access to root vegetables and at least one reliable friend, so he doesn’t go insane. It’s a different kind of progression.

Towards the middle of the book, that starts to change. He gets better armor. He gets the spear. He begins to get trap components that don’t necessarily make sense outside specific situations (I’m looking at you, trap springs).

As time goes on, his arsenal will grow and change. But for the first book, there was a very specific limit: Everything that I write him doing is something that I could also convincingly have him do with sticks, rope, things he could find anywhere (like rocks), ingenuity, and sufficient whittling time.

The only exception I allowed for this was during the Mole saga, where he used the compressed-gas cooking fuel to make an explosion. But I tried to do this in a way where, essentially, any sane person would say “Well, that went poorly, I’m not doing that again”. I wanted him to be incentivized to be as careful as possible, and to still have to prioritize survival above anything else.

The Shovel

I’ve talked about this a little bit, but I did allow him to have one “overpowered” item. That’s the shovel. It’s a very, very good shovel. It’s possibly the best unpowered shovel in the universe. It will never wear out. It’s reasonably light. It does its job very well.

But shovels are fundamentally bad weapons. They aren’t balanced. They are heavy, but the weight isn’t distributed near the tip like weapons. They aren’t particularly sharp, and they taper too slowly to be particularly good at stabbing.

Matt responds to this like a normal person; he mostly uses it for digging, and uses his actual weapons to cover his limited need for weapons. When he is able to use it to beat Derek, it’s not because he’s trained with it as a weapon; it’s because he’s used it for good-old-fashioned digging so much that he’s able to use digging to create an opening he otherwise wouldn’t have had.

The reason for all of this is that I really wanted to highlight the differences between Derek and Matt as much as possible. Derek has a sword made of the very same stuff. He has better stats, better armor, and better skills. When Matt wins, I was hoping it would feel earned - that it would be clear that hard work was what carried Matt through, that all the bullshit and pain had at least helped him to grow.

Last thoughts

I know this was a long, long ramble, and that long-winded author notes aren’t for everyone. I initially intended this to be a short glossary. I told Dotblue (my editor) that it would take me about an hour to write. Instead, I’m several hours in, trying to remember how everything came about.

This is the first novel I’ve ever completed. The furthest I’ve gotten with anything else would have five or six thousand words; this was 100k words in a little under two months. When you write that fast, the stuff you’ve already written fades to a blur pretty quickly. It turns out it’s really fun to sit around for a while and remember how each part of it came to be.

I don’t know about other authors, but I write best when I know people are reading. And, listen, you guys have been incredible at letting me know you are reading. The engagement has been one of my favorite parts of all this. There was never a point past the first week or so where I felt like I was writing to thin air. That made it possible for me to grind this out, and I’m incredibly thankful.

Book two will start tomorrow. I hope it meets your expectations, and that it helps make you happier than you otherwise have been.

I’ll see you then, and thanks for reading.