Worth the Candle
Alexander Wales & cthulhuraejepsen
From the age of nine, Juniper Smith began filling notebooks with his worlds, at first places of fantastical imagination, but later with each as an expression of some theme or idea that momentarily grabbed his interest. Over the course of eight years, he shared these worlds with his friends through twice-weekly sessions of tabletop gaming. Now at the age of seventeen, he finds himself in Aerb, a world that appears to be an amalgam of those many notebooks, stuck trying to find the answers to why he's there and what this world is trying to say. The most terrifying answer might be that this world is an expression of the person he was back on Earth.
Progression: Aerb operates on explicit LitRPG / tabletop-inspired advancement that is central to the entire narrative. Characters gain levels by defeating hostile entities and completing Dungeons, which allocate stat points (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, etc.) and skill points each level. Skills are discrete perks (e.g., Bone Magic, Blood Magic, Gem Magic, Entad Binding, Soul Magic) that can be leveled and combined, with exclusions that force specialization. Magic systems are tiered and learnable — blood magic augments physicality, bone magic modifies stats/body, gem magic provides ranged effects — and require deliberate training and experimentation. Dungeons are engineered narrative challenges by the world's Dungeon Master, rewarding adaptation and meta-knowledge; advancement is quantified, tracked via a system interface, and drives every arc's power scaling and party composition.
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