Small Town Hero – Walrus King

If you’re not familiar with the term ‘LitRPG’ it refers to books that explicitly use mechanics popularized in role-playing games (RPGs) such and Dungeons and Dragons and spinoff online games. That is, characters explicitly have classes (e.g. ‘wizard’) and numeric personal attributes (e.g. a character with a strength of 10 is stronger than a character with a strength of 5, a fighter of level 6 probably has better skills than a fighter of level 2).

A convention some readers find distracting is that characters may spend a lot of time interacting with their skills and attributes. This lessens the appeal of the genre for readers that don’t have at least a dash of game-nerd. A book is weaker if this interaction interferes too much with the story - and stronger if it fits smoothly and even adds to the story, as is the case in ‘Butcher’.

This book is rooted in two worlds. The ‘real’ world is a near-future dystopia. There are few limits to corporate excess, and most of the population barely scrapes by. The ‘game’ world is a virtual-reality world funded by corporations, in hopes that it will attract online business and real-world money. Most of the main characters are Contract Workers - effectively NPCs. They join the game world as workers, and their contracts are rigged so as to make it difficult-to-impossible to succeed in the game world as anything but workers. But the AI that runs this world has a plan to use this game to improve the world. And the contract works immediately start looking for loopholes in their contracts.