After locking myself inside my house and switching to remote work due to the whole pandemic thing I decided to try my hand at writing a web novel in my spare time. Being undecided and unsatisfied with the quality of my ideas for a story I ended up delaying it for quite some time, but I've finally narrowed it down to two potential stories and would like some help picking one of them from the would be readers. Both stories are "borderline isekai", meaning there are no people transferring between worlds, but there are a few similarities to the genre. They are also litRPGs, but the systems are very restrictive and play more of a support role, meaning there is no level snowballing and smurf builds to rapid god mode.
Please note that these are not the actual synopsizes for the stories, just some rough descriptions of what they would entail.
Story 1:
MC is a 32 years old man with a good job, house, and car, a generally pleasant and successful person, at least on the surface. For as long as he can remember he has always had a different mindset from most others, being incapable of enjoying the same things they do or understanding their point of view. Unlike others in his situation, however, he was no good at pretending and repeated rejection has led him to develop a severe but functional form of social phobia, making him almost completely incapable of talking to others about any non work related subjects.
After the death of his parents and his realization that he will remain alone for the rest of his life he decides to commit suicide but refuses to die in a pointless manner. He ends up enacting a horrifying ritual from a supposed spellbook he got off the dark web involving human sacrifice that was meant to lead him to a higher plane of existence, despite not actually believing in the occult. To his surprise, however, the ritual actually works, granting him both knowledge and power he never would have thought possible. His joy is very short lived however as some form of divine being immediately descends and rips away all of his power and destroys his body, but ultimately fails to kill him. In his despair induced madness, he starts taunting the being and additionally gets himself banished from the world.
Waking up afterward as a disembodied soul on the brink of flickering out he possesses the closest person he sees which ends up being a 12 years old girl. What he finds out to his despair is that he doesn't get any control over her body and is just a passenger for the ride.
The story continues with him finding about the existence of magic, monsters, and a system, but realizing that this is not some other world, but the same Earth 2 millennia after the apocalypse. The apocalypse turned out to be the introduction of mana to the world, but instead of magic and elves what people got was cataclysmic destruction. Humans can not only not use magic, but mana is poisonous to them, much like a form of radiation and the process of mana binding itself to the reality of this world produced catastrophic natural disasters, wiping out entire continents and creating new ones. The appearance of powerful mana beasts and areas of dense mana poisoning then prevented the few human survivors from ever rebuilding modern society, making them instead hide like rats and barely surviving for a thousand years. Eventually, divinity took pity on humans and granted them the system to defend themselves. Said system, however, isn't available to everyone and is quite limited in application, allowing people just enough leeway to rebuild a medieval style society.
The story continues with the MC struggling to maintain his own identity and find a purpose in this new broken world, maybe even manage to put an end to his loneliness. Whether he succeeds in that or not, he slowly starts setting into his role as the demon of the new world, slipping ever further on the slope to insanity and dragging others along with him.
I eventually plan on having the MC eventually turn into something similar to a hive mind, alternating between the personalities of people he has possessed and coalescing the minds into a greater whole.
Story 2:
Earth has been marked by God as yet another failed project and work has started on the new world, now inspired by the fantasy genre developed on Earth. The memories of 12 people are copied into a member of each of the intelligent races created in order to preserve existing progress and boost the development of the still primitive world.
The 12 are brought into a conference room, given explanations and the titles of apostles. They are each given an eternal lifespan and a system which they are encouraged to spread into the world, but no actual obligations. If it sounds too good to be true, however, that is of course because it is. The systems are all empty and independent of each other, meaning all skills and system functions must be researched and developed separately by each race. And in the unfortunate situation that an apostle dies, to "prevent the loss" of all existent research the lost system is stripped from the entire race and offered to the apostle closest to the one who has died.
Before anyone can complain about the obvious deathmatch they are all returned and ready to be born into the new world, ripe with opportunity.
The rate of development of each race at the moment the apostles born differs quite a bit with some cultures having reached the level of building small settlements and even primitive metalwork, other still living as nomadic tribes. Then there's the MC's race: very beautiful, short humanoids that look like some cross between elves and dragons and surprisingly powerful and agile for their diminutive size. That, however, is about as long as their list of qualities gets. Vicious to the extreme and lacking any sort of civilized behavior, they haven't even developed a language, their methods of communication comprising of grunts, screeches, beating the shit out of each other, cannibalism and rape.
One would find it difficult indeed to call a bunch of naked child looking creatures running around screeching, attacking and eating anything they see and breeding like rabbits an intelligent race. Yet these are the people the MC must raise into scholars and soldiers if he is survive getting attacked by the other apostles and their respective races, that is of course if he can find a way to not get eaten by his own family first.
You can think of this story as a sort of cross between Mirai Nikki and Dr. Stone weaved into a litRPG. Don't expect the poor MC however to be anywhere as smart as Senku though, he's not an idiot but he's a normal person.
Please note that these are not the actual synopsizes for the stories, just some rough descriptions of what they would entail.
Story 1:
MC is a 32 years old man with a good job, house, and car, a generally pleasant and successful person, at least on the surface. For as long as he can remember he has always had a different mindset from most others, being incapable of enjoying the same things they do or understanding their point of view. Unlike others in his situation, however, he was no good at pretending and repeated rejection has led him to develop a severe but functional form of social phobia, making him almost completely incapable of talking to others about any non work related subjects.
After the death of his parents and his realization that he will remain alone for the rest of his life he decides to commit suicide but refuses to die in a pointless manner. He ends up enacting a horrifying ritual from a supposed spellbook he got off the dark web involving human sacrifice that was meant to lead him to a higher plane of existence, despite not actually believing in the occult. To his surprise, however, the ritual actually works, granting him both knowledge and power he never would have thought possible. His joy is very short lived however as some form of divine being immediately descends and rips away all of his power and destroys his body, but ultimately fails to kill him. In his despair induced madness, he starts taunting the being and additionally gets himself banished from the world.
Waking up afterward as a disembodied soul on the brink of flickering out he possesses the closest person he sees which ends up being a 12 years old girl. What he finds out to his despair is that he doesn't get any control over her body and is just a passenger for the ride.
The story continues with him finding about the existence of magic, monsters, and a system, but realizing that this is not some other world, but the same Earth 2 millennia after the apocalypse. The apocalypse turned out to be the introduction of mana to the world, but instead of magic and elves what people got was cataclysmic destruction. Humans can not only not use magic, but mana is poisonous to them, much like a form of radiation and the process of mana binding itself to the reality of this world produced catastrophic natural disasters, wiping out entire continents and creating new ones. The appearance of powerful mana beasts and areas of dense mana poisoning then prevented the few human survivors from ever rebuilding modern society, making them instead hide like rats and barely surviving for a thousand years. Eventually, divinity took pity on humans and granted them the system to defend themselves. Said system, however, isn't available to everyone and is quite limited in application, allowing people just enough leeway to rebuild a medieval style society.
The story continues with the MC struggling to maintain his own identity and find a purpose in this new broken world, maybe even manage to put an end to his loneliness. Whether he succeeds in that or not, he slowly starts setting into his role as the demon of the new world, slipping ever further on the slope to insanity and dragging others along with him.
I eventually plan on having the MC eventually turn into something similar to a hive mind, alternating between the personalities of people he has possessed and coalescing the minds into a greater whole.
Story 2:
Earth has been marked by God as yet another failed project and work has started on the new world, now inspired by the fantasy genre developed on Earth. The memories of 12 people are copied into a member of each of the intelligent races created in order to preserve existing progress and boost the development of the still primitive world.
The 12 are brought into a conference room, given explanations and the titles of apostles. They are each given an eternal lifespan and a system which they are encouraged to spread into the world, but no actual obligations. If it sounds too good to be true, however, that is of course because it is. The systems are all empty and independent of each other, meaning all skills and system functions must be researched and developed separately by each race. And in the unfortunate situation that an apostle dies, to "prevent the loss" of all existent research the lost system is stripped from the entire race and offered to the apostle closest to the one who has died.
Before anyone can complain about the obvious deathmatch they are all returned and ready to be born into the new world, ripe with opportunity.
The rate of development of each race at the moment the apostles born differs quite a bit with some cultures having reached the level of building small settlements and even primitive metalwork, other still living as nomadic tribes. Then there's the MC's race: very beautiful, short humanoids that look like some cross between elves and dragons and surprisingly powerful and agile for their diminutive size. That, however, is about as long as their list of qualities gets. Vicious to the extreme and lacking any sort of civilized behavior, they haven't even developed a language, their methods of communication comprising of grunts, screeches, beating the shit out of each other, cannibalism and rape.
One would find it difficult indeed to call a bunch of naked child looking creatures running around screeching, attacking and eating anything they see and breeding like rabbits an intelligent race. Yet these are the people the MC must raise into scholars and soldiers if he is survive getting attacked by the other apostles and their respective races, that is of course if he can find a way to not get eaten by his own family first.
You can think of this story as a sort of cross between Mirai Nikki and Dr. Stone weaved into a litRPG. Don't expect the poor MC however to be anywhere as smart as Senku though, he's not an idiot but he's a normal person.
