Check In, Chapter 500 Edition (Patreon)

I just want to say thank you for everyone's support to get all the way up to 500. That is (and feels like) a lot of chapters. It took a year and three months, but I got here. I am, of course, continuing. I think I tentatively projected that LoRG (Part 1, but I'll get to that a bit later in this) would be 700-800 chapters, which means we are over halfway.

Or somewhere there abouts. I believe we are into the deep meat, and now things need to unfold.

Announcements first, then some spoiler-y stuff.

First announcement: I'm going to be dividing up May by weeks, and setting goals for each week. This is much more for myself, because there are a lot of administrative stuff for LoRG that I have put off for writing more content.

I don't regret my dedication to content, but your dedication as fans to me deserves the normal Randidly chapters to be delivered in a prettier format.

So, by 5/12 I want to have a discord set up.

5/19 will be me nailing down the deal with the artist I've been talking to.

5/26 will be part of my off time, for my birthday. Don't forget, no releases between 5/23-5/27

End of the Month: I want to release a beta version of a side product that I've been working on during my off Mondays and Fridays.  Before I reveal what it is, I'd like to talk a bit about why I write.

I'm a rather avid reader. Usually on a daily basis, I'll either listen to a few hours of audiobooks, or read about a hundred pages of fiction. Imagine my delight, in January of 2016, when I discovered a strange new story online called Coiling Dragon.

My progression went from Anime to Manga to Japanese Lightnovels, until I finally arrived at the true drug, the Chinese webnovel.

I'm not sure why I was so fascinated by the form, but it delighted me. They were so palatable and short in terms of chapters, but their length made them still weighty. Instead of tension, webnovels managed excitement. Some might say they are a more immature format, and perhaps that is true, but it is still an exercise in empathy and imagination. I think they are wonderful.

Although I find its story problematic, and the translation inconsistent, I remember reading the first 100 or so chapters of God and Devil World, and being enthralled by this post-apocalypse System. I got pretty deep into LMS machine translations as well. As a player of RPGs, pushing these Systems onto the real world was fascinating.

But I think the real inspiration for LoRG came from Change: A New World (my main hommage being that I NEVER use the phrase "the Change" even though it is tempting).

I had two goals when starting LoRG: To finish it, and to have fun. As some of you may or may not know, Randidly Ghosthound was a name a friend used for a long time, and I used it to make him smile. To those of you who struggled with it, I apologize.

The apocalypse system genre was so fascinating to me because there is a lot of things you can do with the social instability that results. As a writer, and as a reader, you can put strange characters into positions of power, and have strange new cultures spring up on the graves of our old world.

Plus, the beginning of the System is best, because everything is fresh and new. That's why I love making up Systems. The level ups come fast, and the twists are novel.

Of course, now I can't read any of it. All I can think is how I would do something differently, and I become frustrated with reading. It doesn't help that I think a lot of the current writers on Royalroad came into their ideas with LoRG existing; it casts a long shadow.

Well, perhaps that's my own vanity. But LoRG will never be the genre defining work of apocalypse RPGs, mostly due to how haphazardly I began, and also due to all the experimentation I have done over the course of the story. 

I think that we are getting close to the point where some work of lit-rpg focused in this area will come and blow the rest of us away.  Threadbare was likely the closest, but it wasn't truly in the same genre. But it is an exemplary litrpg.

Oh, sorry, I'm rambling now. Before I conclude, I want to thank all of my donators for supporting me. It's absolutely humbling to know that so many of you care to read what I create, and are willing to pay for it. It's forced me to reevaluate my life. This summer, I will be making some career decisions based on all of your support.

Oh, finally! As I said earlier, I think the great part of an apocalypse system story is that juxtaposition of fantasy and the social realities we live in. The branching series of decisions an MC makes there are some of the most interesting, and far reaching. So I wanted to make a replayable version of that for y'all to enjoy.

The conclusion I eventually came to was to make a text based game based on the LoRG System. Over the past two weeks, I've basically taught myself enough of a coding language to be confident in doing everything I need to do. The goal is to have a beta version done by the end of May, that will let the players progress in a normal System environment (no starting in a Dungeon) to being at the founding of a Village and obtaining a Class, where the Class.

I'll be looking for some alpha testers later in the month, so be on the lookout for that!

For those of you who read all this, I thank you.

For those of you who are active in the comments and have supported me, I double thank you.

-Puddles