Many of the LitRPG books I’ve liked have had “Millions of readers on Royal Road” in their summary/blurb. I’ve never checked it out. I received a link to one the other day, so I checked it out (royalroad.com).
It has a number of interesting things.
The “Mature Content” tags. I think I need them all, except maybe “Profanity”. There is a little, but it’s not “moderate or high frequency”.
I would say that there is no “explicit sexual content” or “descriptive sexual scenes”. This is the most explicit sex in the series (and it’s in the Prologue to purposefully drive away anyone offended by it):
The bed was shaking madly when Luke shouted out, “Make me your bitch, Alpha!” Tom wasn’t a werewolf, but with his hairy, muscular body the fantasy worked.
“You want to be in my pack, boy? Then you’ll take it like a big dog,” Tom played along.
However, there is a reasonable amount of implicit sexual content. For example:
Tom and Luke chuckled as they fell asleep. Werewolf hearing was better than Pete and Eileen thought. Or maybe they didn’t care.
“Disturbing Content” definitely applies. Murderers and potential rapists (same people, not different categories; no “on screen” rape) are thrown into the dungeon to be consumed. Reilly is tortured.
“Graphic Violence” definitely applies. The eating prairie dogs quote with the split infinitive has already been posted. Then there’s this:
One evening, in the corner of Wyoming, they got a bit carried away. Tom won their nightly battle when Luke tripped over his own intestines.
It’s not that graphic, is it? I don’t describe any details. Of course, there’s the “never live it down” scene in which Tom bites off a griffin’s nuts. I don’t even put any blood in it, though!
OK, so all the tags except Profanity.
This (bottom of the linked page) is distressing:
The minimum word count per chapter is currently 500 characters. We recommend keeping the chapter length to less than 10,000 words. 2,000 words tend to be a good stopping point as this is not too long, nor is it too short to tell a part of your fiction.
I think book one survives the “chapter less than 10K words” filter. Book two most definitely does not. It’s also driven by the “must be 12 chapters” constraint. I don’t think anything but the Prologue (at 765 words) is less than 4K.
The middle of that page – all about using tables – is terrifying. I’ll have to try pasting what I’ve got into their editor to see what it does. If it accepts them even reasonably well, I might proceed. If it does not, game’s over.
Meanwhile, I’ll at least sign up and start building a reputation.
Update: I need an image with a URL, so let’s try this:
