Book picks similar to
Awakened by C.M. Carney


litrpg
cultivation
fantasy
progression-fantasy

Ragnarok Rising


Edmund A.M. Batara - 2017
    Revised and Edited. July 2018.With bonus content - "In Ymir's Halls" (short story)*********************************************************************An epic fantasy on another world. With a modern twist.What if you fell through a crack in reality? Like those people disappearing in plain sight you have read about.What if you find yourself in a strangely familiar world? A world full of Earth’s mythological beings, lost civilizations, and people from its primitive and brutal past? Where magical energy still exists. Where gods play games among themselves, with the fate of mortal men as pawns. A land where a sword is deadlier than a five-inch thick contract drawn by a hotshot lawyer. Would you survive?That's Tyler West. Alone, lost and bewildered, the three moons in the sky made it clear he wasn’t on Earth anymore. It is not a game. It’s real. And there's no coffee, pizza, fries, or his favorite show on HBO.

Clear Sky


Patrick G. Laplante - 2018
    A simple brush painted all of creation. The Clear Sky Brush vanished for countless ages. And now it’s back… Life for Cha Ming is a daily grind. A rat race where people don’t make any real decisions. When he asks the universe for something more, fate itself answers his prayer. A talisman brush older than time itself sends him to another world, where magic, fortune, and danger await.Now, the world is at his fingertips. He has a new life, a new body, and can wield the five elements. It’s too bad his new home is a place where might makes right, and immortal cultivators and demons fight at the drop of a hat.A game of universal proportions is unfolding. The Clear Sky Brush is at its center. The power to choose comes at a heavy price, and creation itself will pay it.

Caesar's Shadow


Anthony Wright - 2020
    Now he can. The newest VRMMORPG Gods & Kings is the closest thing to a time machine he’ll ever get.With the powers of his Warrior Priest class Matt must build his army, level his followers, and discover new battle formations that will help him defeat his enemies and become a true Roman general. More victories means more glory and more men – so Matt must use all his knowledge of history to give his fighters the edge in battle, as well as buffing his troops with ancient magic and even summoning mythic beasts to fight alongside his men. It’s awesome!But his carefree attitude soon earns the scorn of a serious competitor who has made it his mission to rewrite history and see Matt and his allies destroyed. To see the version of Rome he loves come to life, Matt must use all his skill to defeat his nemesis and save the empire.

Shadowcroft Academy For Dungeons: Year One


James A. Hunter - 2021
    Slay Heroes. Survive Finals. Wounded Army vet Logan Murray thought mimics were the stuff of board games and dungeon manuals… right up until one ate him. In a flash of snapping teeth, Logan suddenly finds himself on the doorstep to another world. He’s been unwittingly recruited into the Shadowcroft Academy for Dungeons—the most prestigious interdimensional school dedicated to training the monstrous guardians who protect the Tree of Souls from so-called heroes. Heroes who would destroy the universe if it meant a shot at advancement.Unfortunately, as a bottom-tier cultivator with a laughably weak core, Logan’s dungeon options aren’t exactly stellar, and he finds himself reincarnated as a lowly fungaloid, a three-foot-tall mass of spongy mushroom with fewer skills than a typical sewer rat. If he’s going to survive the grueling challenges the academy has in store, he’ll need to ace the odd assortment of classes—Fiendish Fabrication, Dungeon Feng Shui, the Ethics of Murder 101—and learn how to turn his unusual guardian form into an asset instead of a liability.And that’s only if the gargoyle professor doesn’t demote him to a doomed wandering monster first…

Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon


Matt Dinniman - 2019
    Paint a mural. $15,000. How could Duke not jump at the chance? But it came with a catch, as these things often do. He had to first see what his client wanted him to paint. A private server. A digital playground. An alliance of the world’s most sadistic, most depraved minds. A place to bring their prey, to hone their skills. Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon. Survival horror. One of the most brutal, most terrifying full-immersion games ever made. A place where fantasy characters such as elves and dwarves clash with technology, where giant monsters roam the hills, entrusted with protecting the gates of heaven from the demons who would tear it all down. A game where one plays the last of the battlefield surgeons: a healer tasked with keeping the behemoths alive at all costs. But on this server, they don’t care about the game. That’s not why they’re here. They’ve come because of the game’s most unique feature: Full pain. Realistic anatomy. The ability to bring their victims well beyond the body’s normal breaking point. And most importantly, the ability to bring them back and do it all over again. Trapped in a bloody, merciless nightmare, Duke only has one goal. To survive. And in order to survive, he must play the game. He must win the game. And to do that, he must become the most cruel, most ruthless monster of them all. This brutal, 200,000 word, standalone LitRPG novel features the following: A co-op survival horror game where fantasy-type characters and technology clash. Medium-heavy stats. Lots of violence. Stomach-churning gore. No-holds-barred kaiju battles. Torture-happy, paladin dwarf toddlers. 22 individual races, each with their own magical system. A pet tapeworm named Banksy. Dozens of kaiju, each with their own distinctive form and abilities. Demons and angels, and you can’t trust a damn one of them. About 200,000 words--the length of 3 books! No harem.

The Beginning


Vasily Mahanenko - 2017
    They are unusual: it’s the real world in which you have lived all your life. The enemy, craving to destroy you. Your own class who couldn’t care less about you. Are you still sure that survival is easy? Then welcome to THE GAME! It will prove you wrong.

Entriss Online (Watson's Worlds, #1)


David J. Pedersen - 2021
    The game was his life — by day, as one of their lead developers; by night, gaming as the accomplished Mandorf the Wizard. After years of leveling up, both professionally and personally, everything he had worked for was going to end. His goggles-and-gloves virtual reality MMORPG was being replaced with Everyworld Online, a next-gen game that provided full immersion so players could experience a world that looks and feels real.After stumbling on an unknown quest that kills anyone who approaches, Ian discovers an enormous amount of orphaned code that had never made it into the game. Moments before being fired, he checks in the code, enabling The Left Hand of God quest chain, an unexpected world event, and the frightening reality of a fully immersive Entriss Online.

Memories


Stephan Morse - 2015
    All he wishes for is a distraction from the thoughts plaguing his waking hours. He dives in headfirst, unknowing of the AIs intentions. They offer him the chance to play as one of their own, a NPC deserving of a proper send off. What he discovers during the journey shakes Grant to his very core.

Enter System


Tom Larcombe - 2021
    When a message appears in his line of sight, blocking out absolutely everything else, he nearly freaks out. The message warns that the world has been in a variant Natural Laws beta test for millennia and that it's about to revert to the norms.Deciding that even if he is insane, it's not going to hurt anything to try to prepare, he settles in to do so. Despite the atrocious lack of skill the System has with the English language, he manages to work his way through enough help files to get a clue of what's coming. After sharing his discovery with a few friends, they all start to prepare together.Once the change begins, the small group races to create a Safe Zone, an area where monsters will not spawn and where they can gather other survivors in an attempt to rescue as much of the town as possible. Along the way they discover that the new System can award classes that resemble those of the games the group has played, as well as magic for those capable of grasping it.With monsters spawning throughout the town, everyday animals being mutated into dangerous creatures, and a System that desperately needs English language lessons, they'll do their best to save as many of the local residents as they can.This story is approximately 155,000 words long and DRM free.

First Sorcerer


Kyle Johnson - 2020
    When programmer Jeff Lawing gets the opportunity to join Singularity Online, the world's first realistic VRMMO and the testing ground that will lead to the Singularity, he leaps to accept.Singularity is much more realistic and darker than Jeff had imagined, though. As a Sorcerer, his arcane magic is limited only by his imagination, but will it be enough to see him through the deadliest training quest he's ever encountered, or to protect him in a fallen realm filled with undead? Does the have the courage and passion he needs to sieze the mantle of First Sorcerer?This book does not contain harem elements or sexual scenes. There is some profanity, and adult situations are alluded to but not detailed.

Tree Dungeon


Andrew Karevik - 2019
     The gods should have agreed to fight the giants and let Ragnarök run its course and bring about the end of time. For a new world could only rise from the ashes of the old. But because the gods prophesied to die refused to take part, Yggdrasil—the World Tree—was forced to act before the stalemate led to the annihilation of the nine worlds and its very existence. And so I was born. One of the many seeds dispersed by the mighty World Tree, I was teleported through different planes and universes to find a new home where to settle. Eventually, I landed in a strange forest known as the Feverwood. However, this place is nothing like my home world. Here, there are no mighty Vikings or Valkyries, but humans, elves, orcs, and other strange creatures. If I want to flourish and carry on the World Tree’s legacy, I will have to grow my roots and expand my branches towards the sky. But if, at first, I rely on the ambient magic to power my growth, as my Mother did before me, I quickly learn that there’s a far more efficient way… This is the story of how I find how to attract adventurers into my mouth and absorb their raw essence as they succumb to the challenges I pit them against. This is the story of how I make the acquaintance of many a friend and foe, both mortals and gods. This is the story of how a stranger in a strange land must face many a peril to ensure its own survival. This is the story of the Tree Dungeon.

Survive Week One


Apollos Thorne - 2017
    The government must accelerate their super soldier program. They have pushed beyond what was thought possible and developed a new Virtual Reality system; the perfect tool to weed out and train recruits. There is another problem. Every soldier has already been sorted and those found to possess the “talent” are already in training. There just aren’t enough. That is why Codename: Freedom has been developed. It’s time they looked outside the military. Failure is not an option. Against all odds, Lucius, a semipro gamer who was raised by his Artificial Intelligence Bot named Destiny, is selected to participate in Codename: Freedom, a VRMMO that promises to push Virtual Reality to the ultimate level. The Game Developers are kind enough to hide a key feature. 100% pain. There are no pain dampeners. He finds himself among the other participants of Codename: Freedom who are thrown in with hardly any time to get their bearings before the entire player city is under attacked. With the world watching live, Lucius is faced with the opportunity to gain a following and impressing sponsors. After years of hard work to move up in the gamer ranks, this new game will challenge Lucius to the point of breaking and beyond. Will he quit, go mad, or find the motivation to fight when it becomes painfully clear that this is far from just another game?The Epic LitRPG from RRL has finally arrived!

River of Fate: The Jade Scripture


David North - 2020
    The River of Fate twists through the universe, holding the course of all lives and destinies.A chance event causes three souls to collide within the River, memories from each coalescing into one individual, who is reborn by a command so powerful it warps reality itself.Finding himself alone, Verse must discover who he is and develop the strength to survive in a world where cultivation is the only law.Fortunately, he's good at that.*In this story, you can expect Xianxia-style immortal cultivation, reincarnation, a focus on jade and sunset magic, sects, alchemy, formations, ancient races, and a hero who is evolving and changing to become more than he was before.

World of Beasts


Tinalynge - 2018
    These beasts were ferocious, bloodthirsty and overwhelmingly powerful, but even so, the humans managed to prevail in the face of despair. As the human race grew stronger the Primordial Beasts fought back with relentless fierceness, rousing beast hordes to engage in frenzied battles over the land. Every single child on the continent was taught martial arts for the sake of fighting these Primordial Beasts, yet many of them were sent straight to their death. In this world filled with constant battle, a young boy was born. This young boy was hoping to become the most outstanding cultivator, but who would have thought that his talent was so poor that he could not even cultivate? As the boy was filled with despair over his unfortunate situation, a life changing event occurred which would forever leave a scar in his mind, pushing him to transcend his limits and grow to become a legend.

Clan Dominance: The Sleepless Ones 1


Dem Mikhailov - 2020
    He had no specific plans for his new character. Little did he know that his new nickname Rosgard would become the game's next greatest legend.Even the game's Crèche zone may contain items of interest if you're observant enough. Rosgard's find didn't just change his own life drastically — it enveloped an entire game world in a turmoil to boot! The adventuring player becomes a valued prize for Waldyra's leading clans. Our hero has to conceal his real name, since he's in danger in real world as well, and that's no game anymore. There are millions at stake — and the currency in question isn't Monopoly money. Rosgard holds the key to wealth and power in both worlds.Should you play your own game or throw in your lot with the strongest? This is the question that needs to be answered by the protagonist, whose luck is incredible. Whose side does one take without becoming a pawn in anyone's game?Clan Dominance: The Sleepless Ones is a perfect example of a classical LitRPG novel. The events in the virtual world and the events in the real world mesh closely together as the plot thickens and becomes more and more dynamic from one book to another. The series has thousands of diehard fans in Russia! Now in English — for every true fan of the genre!