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The rushed ending of Derelict book 2 and one of the two major storylines of book 3 were pretty underwhelming. Henegar was extrapolating more from his beyond-cartoonish views of present day politics and human nature, the result being an odd combination of absurd and boring. There was still fun to be had in the sci-fi / fantasy mashup, but the series was a 2.5 star experience overall.
I kept the litRPG train rolling with probably the most popular title in that category on Amazon, He Who Fights with Monsters. So far, it's easily the most original and imaginative of the three series I've read. The pseudonymous author, Shirtaloon, goes with his own monsters (mostly chimeras and elementals), magic/attribute systems, and races rather than a straight DnD stable. He uses a transported-to-another-world setup, and the video game interface is a power-slash-coping-mechanism mostly unique to the protagonist. Characterization is a big improvement over the other two series, making it fair-to-middling. The prose is a little clunky, but it gets across what it needs to.
Politics are probably about as much a low-key presence here as in Shadow Sun, but more in keeping with my own - the protagonist, Jason Asano, is aggressively secular, anti-authoritarian, and into helping the poor, and wrestling with how those values work in a world of hereditary nobility and very real gods. Rants happen, but the author routinely hangs a lantern on the fact that Jason is probably not as clever as he might think he is. So, it's nice that the whole genre isn't a weird off-shoot of right-wing military fiction, but odd how much politics seeps into so many of these books (based on a limited sample).
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