What do you get when you mash together role-play games (RPGs) and literature? For the longest time, nothing. Then, a scattering of fragmented stories published for little-to-no profit on forums. As of 2024, with the print release of “Dungeon Crawler Carl”, arguably the most commercially successful new subgenre of science fiction. And yet, strong chances are, you have never heard about LitRPGs. Let me change that.
Back in the mid-2010s, LitRPG was not yet called LitRPG. Back then, it was a niche subgenre of an already niche subgenre — the webnovel (or, if printed, light novel), a literary form coming in translation from China, Japan and South Korea. The Japanese ones were by far the most successful in the West –they were the only ones to get published and translated via official channels, occasionally even getting an anime adaptation. Think “Overlord” or “Sword Art Online”.
Chinese and Korean novels were trickier. More often than not, there was no official translation — a foreign reader could only ingest them if someone, somewhere on the internet became a bit obsessed and decided to unofficially translate. The most popular genres were a so-called Cultivation or Wuxia/Xianxia novel (imagine a combination of a martial art movie with medieval Chinese mysticism) and portal narratives. This was the era of typos, “jade-skinned beauties” and long side notes explaining the translator’s choice to just skip a section, because none of the jokes made any sense. These novels were thousands of chapters long, often incomplete and borderline unreadable. But still, people read them. 2I Shall Seal the Heavens”. “The Lord of the Mysteries”. “Seoul Station Necromancer”. Not only did people read them, some were even inspired to write in the genre.
Besides not requiring translation, Western web novels had another advantage — instead of being scattered all over the internet, they were mostly published all in one place, the Royal Road website. It made it easier to gather an audience and, more importantly, commercialise. RR currently hosts thousands of novels, the authors of most of which support themselves via Patreon or other direct donation services. LitRPGs are by far the most popular, but there is a fair dose of Cultivation novels too, as well as smaller genres like time loop, romance and cozy fantasy. The reason I’m writing about LitRPG specifically, is that it was the first to break out of those online spaces, achieving such commercial success that other webnovel genres followed. A few months ago, I saw a copy of the brand-new, official translation of “The Lord of the Mysteries” in a Waterstones bookshop. On paper. Insanity!
This brings me to Matt Diniman’s “Dungeon Crawler Carl”. The golden child. 14 million sold, a Universal Studios adaptation currently in the works. I’m not going to spoil it, but for those curious — it’s a post-apocalypse narrative in which Earth is transformed into a giant, game-style dungeon into which the protagonist, his cat, and millions of others must descend for the entertainment of alien masses. Eight volumes have been published in the last two years.
Although “Dungeon Crawler Carl” was not the first webnovel to reach mainstream (look only at isekai anime or Webtoon’s adaptation of “Solo Levelling”) it opened the gates for anglophone webnovels into traditional publishing. “He Who Fights with Monsters”. “Wandering Inn”. Legal translations of “The Lord of the Mysteries”, and many others. It’s a breakout — a sister companion genre to the romance overhaul coming from fanfic forums. It’s easy to look down on web-based media, but at some point we have to reckon that the next big book will have come from the forums.
