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I finished the fifth and currently last Shadow Sun book, which wraps up a major story arc making the series reasonably "complete," though there is absolutely room for sequels. Willmarth does a great job expanding on his worldbuilding and raising the stakes at a satisfying pace, and his monsters, magic and battles are very solid. His characterization is less so; every good guy is more or less the same jocular go-getter with a different name and job, and every human villain has ALL the character flaws. Nevertheless, the characters are adequate to the narrative. The MC's righteous encounters with sniveling, freeloading murder-rapists are an early clue, along with rampant gun fetishism, of the author's skew on reality, which is occasionally confirmed in later volumes, but isn't overpowering or ubiquitous overall.
I poked my head into some other litRPG on Kindle Unlimited without doing any real research, which so far confirms my impression that Shadow Sun is likely as well-written a litRPG as I'm going to find, as well as my fear that the militaristic Sad Puppies vibe is going to be a common theme. Despite both those issues being obvious right off the bat, I am sticking with Dean Henegar's first Derelict book for now, because the setting interests me. Really it's the same setup as Shadow Sun: all of our myths, fantasy stories, and video games reflect hidden knowledge of a galactic civilization where dwarves, dragons, etc are real alien races and leveling systems, character classes and dungeons are part of a legal system enforced by nanites or <insert handwave here>. This one is a space Navy captain whose consciousness becomes fused to his wrecked ship in a first contact with the DnD aliens, and he now has to level himself up as a space dungeon (i.e. Derelict).
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