What Writing a System Apocalypse Taught Me About Being an Author on Royal Road

Source Credit

Original Author: rocarson

Original URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/royalroad/comments/1pawqn6/what_writing_a_system_apocalypse_taught_me_about/

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I’ve spent the last year writing inside the system apocalypse corner of LitRPG, and for the last eight months I’ve been posting that writing on Royal Road. I’ve learned a few things that might help anyone who’s thinking about diving into the subgenre. I’m going to flair this post as self-promotion since I’ll be discussing my experienes from the perspective of my two series heavily.

WARNING: This is going to be a long post.

First, I love LitRPG and GameLit in general, but I’ve always gravitated toward system apocalypse stories. Authors like Tom Larcombe made it look so effortless. End the world, drop in monsters, put in a blue screen, sprinkle in power progression, and off you go. Easy, right? Yeah, turns out I was wrong.

Here are a few things writing my series taught me the hard way.

The system apocalypse looks simple, but it’s secretly a world-building nightmare

When I started writing, I wanted an apocalypse that let me combine magitech, steampunk, and a hint of hopeful collapse.

In hindsight, I believe I accidentally chose the hardest path.

If I had it to do again, I would have kept modern technology functional, then explored how infrastructure slowly breaks as monsters and battles destroy roads, transfer lines, etc. Instead, I shut everything off at once. That forced me to juggle:

- Rebuilding a society from nothing

- Introducing a system from scratch without info dumping

- Adding steampunk innovation in a world that had to reinvent tools

- Ensuring characters weren’t inventing or discovering technology too quickly or slowly

- BUT I also hosed over my characters because there was no way to knowledge share or communicate. I'm not sure if this one is a pro or a con, but it certainly impacted the writing.

- Because of the way I broke the world, mundane items that stopped working too like oil lamps. This is because I didn't want gun powder to work. I feel good about how I explained that in the novels, but there were some side effects there that I had to world-build around later.

I wanted to focus on the question: “How do communities respond when everything falls apart?” There are real studies showing that in disasters, people often help each other more often than not unless resource scarcity takes over. That ended up shaping the early tone of the series far more than I expected. Some readers wanted something super gritty, but overall system apocalypse readership seems split on if they want grimdark or hopeful apocalypse.

Another issue I ran into is that people have a perception of the world. When I write about locations within the series that are actual places, I got several private messages informing me of incorrect details or places where I had taken creative license with certain locations. One of the main ironies being that I had intentionally moved a train museum to a city further up so that I could increase travel time if anyone bothered to look at an actual map and got called out for it. Take away here is make sure you do your homework. I keep google maps open off to the side when I'm outlining so I know where my characters are at.

Turning a bit here to the phrase system apocalypse, having spent a good part of my professional life in and around trademarks and not knowing the current state of the system apocalypse trademark. I was terrified to call my series a system apocalypse. So I needed to come up with another name that readers would identify with a LitApocalypse story. Enter… simulation theory and the cataclysm.

Simulation theory sounds like a great explanation… until you have to explain it.

I thought simulation theory would be a natural fit for LitRPG readers. It has roots in popular science, philosophy, and the same “coded universe” vibe that LitRPG latches on to. Plus, it would give me some ancient aliens conspiracy theory hooks that I could layer into the story. What actually is the Black Pyramid…. Oooo spooky. Also, it would be a workable reason that there even is a system without getting too hand wavy.

I figured readers would know about simulation theory and be excited to explore why the system turned on. The reality? Most readers want just enough explanation to feel confident that I know what the heck is going on, then they want you to move on.

Readers will suspend a surprising amount of disbelief as long as:

- The rules are consistent

- The progression feels rewarding

- The characters stay grounded

- The world doesn’t contradict itself

They don’t need a dissertation on world-building or actual simulation theory. They just need a story that feels like it knows where it’s going.

The simulation concept still fuels my universe, but I’ve learned to keep the curtain mostly closed.

I also think that naming the series Surviving the Simulation may have given some readers the idea that it is a VRMMO story instead of a system apocalypse.

If I were going to do it again, I would just avoid trying to come up with an alternative, but I still wouldn’t say system apocalypse. I’d let the blurb and tags do the lifting to describe that it was an apocalypse story. This is one place where I think I really over thought the business of writing aspect of things.

While I may have over thought the trademark issue around system apocalypse, I under thought the logistics of multiple ongoing series in the same universe at the same time.

Running multiple LitRPG series in the same universe is chaos on a whiteboard

I originally had a clean, multi-book outline for The Grand Crusade. One protagonist and his companions along with a three-book journey. Then leave enough room at the end of the trilogy to start a second trilogy with the same protagonists and a new journey.

Then, while drafting, I kept having ideas that didn’t fit the direction of that story. The mind, it does wander, and while I was writing The Grand Crusade, I remembered a story that a family member in the Navy had told me once about their ship losing power at sea (please don’t ask me if it was a true story or not, I’m not a Navy person and would have no way of knowing if that is a real situation). But that got me thinking, what if a military ship had been out at sea when the system asserted itself? That rabbit's hole leads to, what if the U.S. Coast Guard’s Age-of-Sail training vessel was out of port when the system took over?

Those ideas didn’t belong in The Grand Crusade. So I wrote Tides of Ruin. A completely separate series in the same universe, following a totally different protagonist and exploring the military’s collapse from the ocean side. Remember, no power, thus no communication, and the modern military depends on global communication. Now you have a ship at sea cut off from command.

Keeping things in the same universe solved several creative problems but created new challenges:

I have to maintain a private wiki via World Anvil that feels like it belongs to a small technical product for my day job. The more the world grows, the more rigid the rules have to be. While I think everyone should keep a story bible, I believe that trying to maintain the overhead of a connected universe takes up time I should spend on writing or marketing.

Both series keep growing and getting stronger because they’re influencing each other indirectly. The amount of follower overlap I have between both series is actually pretty significant, so I'm not losing any ground here by keeping two ongoing series. However, here are the conclusions I came to:

- I don’t think running two series at the same time was the best idea, but I think if they were separate systems I’d be in real trouble.

- I go back and forth on what approach to take if I started a new series. Keeping it in the same universe deepens the world, but starting an entirely new series in a new universe will let me take some exciting new directions that I have closed off with the Surviving the Simulation Universe.

- I recommend creating a schedule of what tasks to do and when, which is what I had to do. It might be a bit ‌more business and less artistic in its approach, but it is what works for me. I have separate times set aside to outline, write, market, and do maintenance (which is all the other aspects of writing such as updating World Anvil).

- From the perspective of building a following. Having two series that are running the same time in the same universe has contributed to cultivating a strong fanbase so far as there are four chapters per week dropping in the universe.

Why I’m Sharing This?

While I certainly am not a subject expert on system apocalypse, I have learned a lot about writing in this genre, and I figure other LitRPG/Roayl Road authors might run into the same pitfalls. One of the things I love about the Royal Road author community is that they're extremely helpful and supportive. I'd like to do my part to pay it forward a bit. If I'm being honest, I'm also procrastinating actually writing a bit today too.

If anyone’s curious about the world that came out of this chaos, my series Surviving the Simulation: [The Grand Crusade](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/115532/surviving-the-simulation-the-grand-crusade) and [Tides of Ruin](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/123996/surviving-the-simulation-tides-of-ruin) are on Royal Road and both are ongoing. But whether or not you read them, I hope this helps someone avoid the mistakes I walked face-first into… repeatedly.

If you’re working on a system apocalypse story of your own and want to talk about your system, there is a channel over on Immersive Ink dedicated to system apocalypse. It’s not super active, but the folks that watch the channel are other system apocalypse authors.