LitRPG universes generally survive due to Mutually Assured Destruction. When you’ve got people – and “not that many” is literally billions in a multiverse of any size – who can sterilize planets and blow up stars, something needs to keep them in check. The answer is usually “a coalition will gang up on you and stomp you flat”.
This was the theme of a fun HFY story:
Note that this is also an argument against the Dark Forest solution to the Fermi Paradox: If anyone (not just us) stumbles into alien life, it’s only reasonable to assume that if you’ve found one, there are others, some of which will be as, if not more, powerful than you. Light speed is not fast, but light is very, very long lasting. If one starts enslaving or destroying nearby aliens, it’s only a matter of time until one is destroyed in turn because you can’t hide the fact of what you’ve done and you’re a menace that needs to be eliminated.
For whatever reason (I have not needed to make one up, yet), Earth is on its own at the moment. The initially over-powered will face very little opposition simply due to communication difficulties. It’s hard to arrange a coalition if one cannot easily speak with others. That means that any “coalition” that gangs up on someone must be local.
This isn’t really a problem for our intrepid heroes because they’re the good guys. However, there will be OP bad guys, too. Book Two will have some initial introductions of potential coalition members. Book Three will be a coalition forming and fighting bad guys.
I’m not sure how fast I want to push time versus page count. Book one is about five months (some undefined “summer” time until first snow in South Dakota, so June through November at most). Book two is intended to be “winter”, which will be about the same amount of time. Book three is completely undefined.
If I follow the trilogy of trilogies plan, book three needs to be Werewolves Save America. I don’t really want to be that dramatic, although perhaps in book four. Instead of hitting trilogy/three-act play beats, maybe I should be hitting Hero’s Journey beats. Our intrepid heroes do not start as heroes but end up that way. Four books to set that up seems reasonable.
It’s also possible that the currently planned books two and three will combine. Book two is basically planned as a training montage. With the “no plot” problem in book one, perhaps that’s not the best approach. It can still be a training montage, but it needs to have conflict running through it. Now that I think about it, pretty much all of Fire From the Sky is training. It’s not the “subject” of the books, but it’s constantly ongoing. That’s more realistic.
So, three possible ways forward:
- Continue as planned. This is certain for book one, at least in scope; I may add more plotty things.
- Combine books two and three to be able to trilogy-ize it in formerly book four.
- Switch away from the trilogy model completely. This heads into continuous chapter numbering territory. It’s one big story chopped into publishable pieces.
I’m leaning toward the latter, but without continuous chapter numbering.
BTW: I’ve started on short stories that fall between Pack Wars and Pack Ascendent. While our intrepid heroes are still getting started, I do have thoughts about where I want them to end up. Tentative title: Weakling God. The idea is that ending the pack wars pushes at least Tom over the brink to godhood and he gets stuck in the pack bond. He bounces from person to person. The title is because he helps the weak ones; the strong ones don’t need help. If only I were better at short stories. I dislike them and also cannot write them. The latter is probably related to the former.
Marked Up 