Goblin Summoner
Tracy Gregory
When an accident claims his life, Gareth is reborn on Acamida, a world where sorcerers draw magical power from a deck of cards - summoning monsters and flinging spells - and where experience points and levels are very real. Stuck with the weakest cards around, goblins, Gareth sets out with a fallen goddess, a deposed demon king and a surly local to grow stronger card by card and level by level. Across four volumes - from defending his adopted home and competing in a grand tournament, through the destruction of Wildermount and a journey to the smoke-ridden undead city of Thot-Ankor, to reactivating a world-spanning ancient weapon - Gareth hunts new cards, skills and levels in a quest to topple the gods themselves.
Progression: Card-deck summoning sorcery fused with explicit LitRPG advancement: sorcerers channel power through decks of monster/spell cards, and experience points and levels are literal in-world mechanics. Gareth climbs by earning levels, completing quests, discovering new and rarer cards (goblins through chimera-class summons), and acquiring skills; each volume stages the growth around power-gated challenges (city defense, grand tournament, cross-world expedition, desert tournament) with weak-to-strong scaling verified across all four blurbs.
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