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I hadn't read any litRPG when I started this thread, but I'm most of the way through Dave Willmarth's Shadow Sun Survival series, and it's both less absurd and higher quality than anticipated. If you're not familiar with litRPG, it's a genre where, through one plot device or another, the rules common to tabletop and computer roleplaying games become a literal reality: every character has attribute stats like Strength and Intelligence, levels up, picks a class, learns spells from scrolls, fights RPG-style monsters, etc. For me, that setup did not create high expectations - I was expecting glorified fanfic. Still, I do play lots of those types of games, so it had some appeal.
Shadow Sun Survival is a loose fit for this thread, but shows a lot of influence from these types of books, and in particular has a ton in common with Stirling's Emberverse. Partly it's just that they both use an apocalypse on Earth to set up their new world, but the results are also pseudo-medieval, except that Willmarth's world includes extreme sci-fi elements along with the swords and armor. It's also a different sort of expertise that comes to the fore: the protagonist is not an engineer, chemist or soldier, but an experienced gamer, as are many of the survivors who recognize and adapt to their new world. Battle tactics are also drawn less from historic warfare and more from World of Warcraft dungeon raids.
It's pure escapist junk food, to an even greater extent than most of the series in this thread, but if you have any affinity for DnD or RPG games, it's tasty junk food. It's also competently put together in terms of prose, plotting, pace and dialogue. The characters are... kind of all the same jocular, go-getter personality type, with different jobs or pets or traumas. There are a lot of characters by book four (where I'm at), and I can generally sort out, "Oh, you were at this or that battle, married to so-and-so, or joined with this or that group" as they come up, so it's not like they all run together, but if I were to tell you about them, it would read more like a CV than a biography.
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