One of the rare weeks where I got to read quite a bit.
Read Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. A contemporary sci-fi thriller. It’s my first Blake Crouch book and I knew nothing while going on. A quick and very enjoyable read. Recommended for thriller fans, if they don’t mind sci-fi.
After that, read The Magician’s Guild by Trudi Canavan. It’s a first book in The Black Magician trilogy, though it does have a prequel book and a sequel trilogy after that, but I don’t know if they the follows same characters or if they are different stories, just in the same universe.
The whole book takes place in one city, and stakes are very personal instead of some world saving quest. It was also a quick and very easy to read book.
Finally, started the most read / mentioned book of these weekly threads, Dungeon Crawler Carl. The book is hilarious, it gave me some of that Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy feel in the start, but it’s a very different book.
It is very much a litRPG (have we finalised on litRPG now? what happened to Progression Fantasy? It was at least a better name than litRPG, or is there some difference between the two?), and one issue with the genre is there is rarely any feel of real danger (with some exceptions). This seems to be going the same way, but again, I am still in the start of the first book of eight book series, so anything can change. This isn’t a negative though, this is kind of why I like these books, sometimes you just want to read about good guy getting the win, without worrying about if they will win, but it is something to note if you are new to the genre.
Enjoying it enough that I have already ordered the next books, not sure if I’ll actually read them back to back, but I am definitely going to continue with the series.
What about all of you, what have you been reading or listening to lately?
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Almost halfway through book 6 of DCC, it’s around 800 pages >.<
After this it’s book two of Star Wars the Black Fleet Crisis, which is called Shield of Lies. The first book was good, although I wasn’t happy that they left all of the story lines open, usually one gets closed.
Fantasy genre doesn’t typically have the RPG elements like the Achievement popups, actual leveling with stat points, narrators, and stuff like that. Unless that’s the “theme” of it being progression. Atleast that’s my understanding, I don’t enjoy the fantasy genre too much myself.
Yeah, “Progression Fantasy” is a subgenre of fantasy, which deals with fantasy that has leveling up and things like that. Or at least that was my understanding.
Afaik, “progression fantasy” covers both litRPG and cultivation novels (and, I guess, anything else with a heavy focus on the protagonist getting progressively stronger).
How’s that different than a standard fantasy? Is it the rpg mechanics?
In the few fantasies (other than Star Wars) I’ve read, there’s always some stuff the protagonist needs to do before dealing with the antagonist. Get a sword, learn a spell, stuff like that type of thing.
So I guess where’s the line that it’s story progression vs character progression?
Hell even some stories in Star Wars can fall into that category, Anakins upbringing and progression to a Jedi “master”?
I’m maybe not the best person to answer this (it’s not a genre I read), but I’ll give it a shot. I think there’s definitely some blurriness about what counts as progression or not, but from what I gather, the main difference is the emphasis on “leveling up” like in games. Beating the big bad or becoming immortal or whatever is still part of it, sure, but you’re really reading it to see your favorite character training to become more powerful (usually across a very high page count/lots of volumes, since progression fantasy originally came from webnovels). Think, like, any popular shonen title ever (Naruto, Bleach, etc). LitRPG specifically includes video game elements like stats and loot (and I think setting?), while cultivation is a subgenre of xianxia (which is a whole other thing I know even less about, sorry).
The general public is the best. It’s the sum interpretations of people that define these “definitions” and they do change over time as well, that’s how languages should work.
So it’s always interesting to see people’s personal takes, even if it’s against the norms, but makes sense. Star Wars obviously doesn’t quite fit the “mould” so to speak.
Dragon Ball would seem to fit that area as well.