Bottom Rung

 Tibs is a street pickpocket and break-in artist caught and sent to ‘run’ a dungeon over and over until he dies, or gets strong enough to be a ‘useful’ member of society. It’s a harsh world he now lives in, harsher than the one he thought couldn’t get worse. And is he uses all the tricks at his disposal, and discovers new ones, he finds that becoming stronger doesn’t always make things easier, and that making friends comes with costs and rewards.

 Especially when one friend he makes is the same dungeon he was told was out to eat him.

 Bottom Rung, and by extension the whole Dungeon Runner series, came about after reading yet another Dungeon Core book where absolutely everything went in the Main Character’s favor. They’d found the dungeon and everyone was bowing at their feet to gain the favor of braving the dungeon. I can accept this out of a book here and there, but it felt like everyone was copying the ‘method’ of the original (or so I was told) book in this subgenre of LitRPG books.

 As with many of my books, I had a “No, let me show you how it would really be’ idea and wrote the original draft of the story (90k words) in about 20 days. Then I expanded it into this version. And it was a much darker version of the world, where dungeons were controlled by one organization and they made use of the power that gave them.

 My plan was to make it LitRPG, but that quickly fell to the wayside as I couldn’t work out a ‘system’ within the ‘rule’ of the genre. And since I knew from the start I wasn’t giving the dungeon a PoV (as the dungeon core subgenre calls for) this became a straight up fantasy story set in a dungeon core type world, with some element of progression stories.

 And before I was done writing this book, I knew this was going to be a long series. The plan is 10 books, and the hope is that I’ll be able to pull it off.

As usual, comments and questions are welcome.