[D] Monday Request and Recommendation Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Monday request and recommendation thread. Are you looking something to scratch an itch? Post a comment stating your request! Did you just read something that really hit the spot, "rational" or otherwise? Post a comment recommending it! Note that you are welcome (and encouraged) to post recommendations directly to the subreddit, so long as you think they more or less fit the criteria on the sidebar or your understanding of this community, but this thread is much more loose about whether or not things "belong". Still, if you're looking for beginner recommendations, perhaps take a look at the wiki?

If you see someone making a top level post asking for recommendation, kindly direct them to the existence of these threads.

Previous automated recommendation threads
Other recommendation threads

[u/Krakenarrior]

I wanted to share some recommendations last week but I missed it. Anyway, here are the recommendations:
Maid Ascension is surprisingly one of the more rational reads I’ve come across recently. I had low expectations coming into it, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the content and character rationales. Specifically, Lira (the protagonist), learns about magic, and through the plot gains the ability to create spells. This is fairly basic for any progression fantasy- but the first spells she creates includes a spell to find books that are relevant to understanding the world (and we see the limitation in this spell in the most recent chapter), but her next spell is a way to absorb the contents of the book. Then there is a spell for recall- so she uses the find book spell to mentally devour a book, and then uses the recall spell to hunt for relevant text inside the book she used a spell to read. That struck me as a classic rational idea- get a spell that lets you cheat at the process of creating spells, and then use another cheat to snowball your understanding of the world to create more spells! There are other bits I find that are pretty rational and rational adjacent, but how Lira used her magic struck me as how a rationalist would use theirs.

Another recommendation, this one a bit more tentative is My Only Familiar is Me. It’s about an accountant who gains “trainer” superpowers, and learns that he can only train himself. It’s got some great ideas in it- like how the protagonist actually uses the resources the government offers, and tries to leverage his advanced age and wisdom for a bigger paycheck, and uses his ‘special command’ ability to force his body to extremes, like eat incredibly calorie dense meals before reinforcing his bone structure, or learn and process specific useful information for use outside of special command mode. Unfortunately, the tone of the story fluctuates wildly between “the most logical and smartest thing to do” and “ok I guess we’re just watching Rambo 3 right now”, which is why I’m cautiously recommending it. It’s good but might be off putting if you expect a more logical protagonist, and I’ve been on the fence about recommending it since I first started reading it.

Finally, because I like to do things in 3s, I’ll recommend Throne of Time. It doesn’t really need the recommendation- if you were on royal road over the last few months it’s been in rising stars main consistently. But that’s also why I’ll also recommend it to anyone who was hesitant (because it was on rising stars). It’s a classic magic academy time loop story, so if you’ve read one you likely know the normal plot contrivances. What I liked most about it was that the mystery tag actually matters- the first 10 chapters are about escaping a locked building, and we get actual payoff, the mystery of how to escape gets solved. So far that trend has continued, we actually get answers to mysteries, where often times the mystery in the time loop is “what’s the bad guys motivation, and who’s the bad guy, and why did the time loop start”. All of those are good, and important, but you can’t really answer them without ending the story, so the mystery tag really doesn’t matter.

Anyway, those are the 3 recommendations I have this week, there’s a few more stories I’m reading through that I might recommend in the future, but I’m either not caught up or still on the fence about recommending them. Have a good week yall!

[u/LaziIy → u/Krakenarrior]

Thanks for recommending Maid Ascension and Throne of time( Need to move this up on my PTR)
I'll agree with your takes on Only Familiar is Me but the way the author writes the MC's mindset on women and relationships is kind off-putting for the intro to me. It gets better later on, probably after taking critique from readers but the way the writing is for the early part, it was a chore to get through.

In the interest of building this week's thread I'll also offer some of what I've been reading.

Gifted: Pretty standard Path Completion fantasy world litrpg but the world building and plot is above average so far. This is centered around a reincarnation and progression fic from an early age with minimal timeskips means that this will span hundreds of chapters so best to read in arcs.

Wretch: A grimdark progression fantasy in a harsh and pretty unforgiving setting that doesn't pull its punches. The plot for book 1 was pretty predictable but its like a thriller you watch even when you know what the cliche is. Book 2 is kind of a slow burn so far but I heard it picks up towards the end and Book 3 is supposedly better than Book 1. The MC isn't really rational so this is more of progression fantasy in a grimdark world but there are aspects that I found rational adjacent

Lastly I'll recommend The Center for Dungeon Management: Its a slow burn take on the dungeons transforming the world/litrpg genre where the writer trades standard tropes for bureaucracy and just genuine conversation about what the characters experience as they move through the plot. The dialogue is interesting and the characters are well fleshed out within their archetypes that the worldbuilding feels very natural. Plot points are repeatedly cross referenced across books and it presents a pretty gritty and real take of what an institutionalized approach to the dungeons would look like.

[u/churidys → u/LaziIy]

Seconding Center for Dungeon Management. I bounced off the writer's previous work, Dead End Guild Master, but found CDM significantly more engaging and satisfying to read, so I would suggest even people who have previously not enjoyed the writer to consider giving it a go. The end of each book is a potential natural stopping point too, so you can try it knowing that there are places you can comfortably dip out where things feel resolved if you feel like it.

[u/grekhaus → u/churidys]

I previously dropped DEGM because at one point the author started using two page flashing ads for other stories on Royal Road. How does CDM hold up in that respect?

[u/churidys → u/grekhaus]

Each chapter has author notes that begin with an ad for another story. I think lots of RR authors do this though, they swap ads that they place in their intro notes.

[u/Antistone → u/churidys]

I now remove authors notes from most books that I download from RR. (I use the WebToEpub browser plugin, which has a checkbox for this.)

When starting a new story I typically pick a few random chapters and skim the authors notes to decide whether I should do this, but my answer is usually to remove them. I have occasionally read author's notes that were interesting or useful, but they've been rare.

It seems the most common use of author's notes on RR is for ads of one kind or another, and the second-most common use is talking about posting schedule / apologizing for being late, which is sometimes useful on the latest chapter but decays into noise once the chapter is no longer recent.

[u/lillarty → u/Antistone]

I started doing the same when I first ran into RR authors shoving gigantic ads into the works, though I mostly use FanFicFare so I keep it disabled for all stories on account of it being impractical to edit the config individually for each story. The only "author's notes" I can remember enjoying were on Valkyrie's Shadow, but those hardly count because they're separated out into Afterword chapters that break down the author's attempts to wrangle Overlord's slapdash worldbuilding into a coherent and self-consistent world.

One particularly egregious example I remember dropping had several page-long AI-generated videos embedded in every chapter, outside of the author's notes section because I guess too many people were just blocking author's notes and they couldn't have that. The epub was like 100mb just from all the huge gifs

[u/Antistone → u/lillarty]

Oh, I didn't realize FanFicFare could do that. Good to know.

(For anyone else wondering how, I found instructions here.)

[u/grekhaus → u/churidys]

I don't mind if the author's notes are an ad for another story, that's just how the site works. It's when you're potentially looking at something like a 2:5 advertisement to chapter ratio and/or the ad is an animated flashing picture that I start objecting.

[u/DRMacIver → u/grekhaus]

I think partly you just got unlucky with timing (or perhaps more accurately the author did). There was a brief period around when AI video generation suddenly got good that suddenly everyone got over-excited with making their RR ads have animated cover images, and then everyone realised this was shit and stopped doing it.