I have a confession. I quit Dungeon Crawler Carl. I got a little way in, decided it wasn't for me, and put it down. But people kept telling me how good it was, and I started to wonder if I'd missed something. Two months later I reloaded it on my Kindle. And you know what? I'm really liking it.
That sent me down a rabbit hole, because I realized I couldn't actually answer a basic question: what is LitRPG? Where did it come from? What was the first one? And how is it different from GameLit, progression fantasy and all the other labels that get thrown around? So I went looking. Here's what I found, as a fantasy writer who's still fairly new to this corner of the bookstore.
What is LitRPG, exactly?
LitRPG is short for "literary role-playing game." It's fantasy or science fiction where the rules of a game are part of the story itself. Characters have stats. They earn experience, level up, unlock skills and pick classes, and the reader gets to see all of it, often as little pop-up notifications right there on the page.
The important part is that the game system matters. It isn't decoration. If a character puts their points into the wrong skill, that choice has consequences fifty chapters later. If you ever spent a Saturday afternoon agonizing over a character sheet, you already understand the appeal.
Where did LitRPG come from?
The name is newer than the idea. Stories about people stuck inside games go back decades. Andre Norton's Quag Keep (1978) dropped its characters into the world of a Dungeons & Dragons game. Dream Park (1981) by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes imagined a future where live-action role-playing games are mass entertainment.
Then East Asia ran with it. Taiwan had ½ Prince by Yu Wo, starting in 2004. South Korea had the long-running The Legendary Moonlight Sculptor. Japan had .hack//Sign in 2002 and, most famously, Sword Art Online. Anyone who watched anime in the 2010s has met this genre without knowing its name.
The name itself comes from Russia. In 2013 the big Russian publisher EKSMO launched a line of game-world novels and called the project LitRPG. According to Magic Dome Books, which translates a lot of Russian LitRPG into English, the word was coined at a brainstorming session late that year between author Vasily Mahanenko and editors Dmitry Malkin and Alex Bobl.
So what was the first LitRPG book?
It depends how strict you are. If you mean the first novel in the modern style, with the stats and the leveling on the page, the usual answer is Clan Dominance: The Sleepless Ones by Dem Mikhailov, which first appeared on a Russian self-publishing site in 2012. Russian bestsellers like Play to Live by D. Rus and The Way of the Shaman by Vasily Mahanenko followed, and their English translations helped light the fuse for English-speaking readers.
If you count the ancestors, you can go back to Quag Keep in 1978. Which means LitRPG is technically older than a lot of the people reading it.
LitRPG vs GameLit vs progression fantasy
These three get mixed up constantly, and honestly even the fans argue about where the lines are. Here's the simplest version I could put together:
- GameLit is the big umbrella: any story with a game or game-like world at its heart. No stat sheets required. Ready Player One usually lands here.
- LitRPG sits inside GameLit. The game mechanics are visible and they drive the plot: levels, classes, skills, loot. The handy rule is that all LitRPG is GameLit, but not all GameLit is LitRPG.
- Progression fantasy is about a character getting steadily stronger, with or without a game. The term dates to 2019, when author Andrew Rowe and Will Wight (of the Cradle series) adopted it for books that didn't fit the other labels. No pop-up windows needed, just training, breakthroughs and the next tier of power.
If you like knowing how the magic works, this whole family of genres is basically hard magic systems taken to their logical extreme.
The LitRPG subgenres you'll run into
- System apocalypse. A game system arrives on Earth without asking. Monsters spawn, everyone gets a status screen, and ordinary people have to adapt fast.
- Dungeon crawl. Go down, floor by floor, and try to survive each one. Dungeon Crawler Carl is the big name here.
- Dungeon core. The twist: the main character is the dungeon, building traps and monsters to deal with the adventurers.
- Tower climbing. Same idea as the dungeon, pointed the other way. Every floor up is harder than the last.
- Portal and isekai. Someone from our world lands in a world that runs on game rules. It's a close cousin of the portal fantasies a lot of us grew up on.
- Cultivation. Borrowed from Chinese xianxia stories, where characters meditate, train and refine their inner power on the way to immortality. It's usually counted as progression fantasy, but it overlaps with LitRPG a lot.
- Cozy and slice of life. All the leveling, far fewer explosions. Running an inn, a farm or a shop, with stats.
Why Dungeon Crawler Carl finally got me
If you haven't met Carl yet: the series is by Matt Dinniman, and it follows a man named Carl and his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, after Earth is turned into a giant dungeon that's broadcast as an alien game show. The eighth book, A Parade of Horribles, came out in May 2026, and a TV series is in the works at Peacock.
I think what put me off the first time was the humor, which struck me as a bit smarmy. But even that has grown on me. And what I'm enjoying most now is the nuance he's bringing to the villain. Regular readers know I have a soft spot for villains who steal the show, so maybe I should have seen that coming.
I played Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, so maybe that helped?
What's on my LitRPG to-read list
I'm new here, so I went looking for series that sit close to the kind of books I write and love: magic schools, found family, a bit of heart with the danger. These are the ones I keep seeing recommended. Fair warning, a couple of them are really progression fantasy, which shows you how blurry the lines get.
- He Who Fights with Monsters by Shirtaloon. An Australian named Jason is pulled into a world of magic and adventurers. It's the other series, along with Carl, that everyone seems to mention first.
- Mother of Learning by Domagoj Kurmaić. A student mage at a magic academy gets caught in a time loop and has to live the same month over and over. Since I can't resist a fantasy academy, this one's high on the list.
- Sufficiently Advanced Magic by Andrew Rowe. A magic academy and a deadly tower to climb, from the author who helped name progression fantasy.
- Beware of Chicken by Casualfarmer. A man lands in a cultivation world, takes one look at all the fighting, and leaves to become a farmer instead. Cozy and funny, I'm told.
- The Wandering Inn by pirateaba. A young woman from our world ends up running an inn in a land of levels and classes. It's famously enormous.
Where my books fit (and what I'm plotting)
To be clear, none of my current books are LitRPG. Nobody in Moonshifter Academy has a status screen. But I can see why the genre appeals to me. In Before the Moon, Kat spends the whole book wanting one thing, a place at Moon Shifter Academy, and school stories and leveling stories scratch a similar itch. You watch someone earn their power. If you'd like to meet her, Before the Moon is free when you join my reader list.
All of this has planted an idea. Should I tackle LitRPG myself, with my own spin on it? I love a good cross-genre experiment, so I'm tempted. Would it have mermaids? I'm leaning toward no. But I am considering another, as yet unrevealed, fantastical creature. Can you guess? I doubt it. 🙂
So tell me what I'm missing. Have you read any LitRPG? Which series should jump the queue on my to-read list? And if you've got a guess about the creature, leave it in the comments.
Happy reading, MSK