In the year 2045, an MRI mishap transmits Tabitha Moore's mind back into her body in the past. Now it's 1998, she's thirteen years old, and she has to confront her long, miserable lifetime of failures—and once again being trailer trash—all over again.

...Or, does she?

/// A re-do story, everyone's guilty pleasure. Updates every month.

The saying goes that when a man is born the Fates weave his destiny and swaddle him in it. Then one day the man dies, and the swaddle becomes a shroud. Heaven moves on.

It is audacity to question the Fates. Olympus is Olympus. The land of men is the land of men. To transgress that, to cross the line of divinity and scale Olympus Mons? To defy the Fates and cast off their threads?

That is hubris. It’s a mark that every philosopher bears plainly on their soul.

[Virtuous Sons updates every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday at 8pm EST.]

Hello. I am a sunflower.

Are you a sunflower too?

Well, it doesn't really matter. Today is a calm day. The wind is warm. I do not know why I am alive, but do you want to look at the sun together with me?

- I am a sunflower.

[Updates Sundays]

In the wake of the Battle of Katze Plains, the banner of Ainz Ooal Gown flies proudly over the city of E-Rantel. The Sorcerous Kingdom has entered the world’s stage to the clamour of death and devastation; the surrounding nations fearfully prepare even as they reel from its calamitous debut. Within the borders of the newly annexed realm, its Human subjects cower in their homes as the Undead openly walk the streets and stalk the lands. Yet, when a destitute noble finds herself under the auspices of an unlikely benefactor, events are set into motion that will resound over the world for ages to come.

A kingdom builder based on the events and setting of Kugane Maruyama’s Overlord. In a fantasy world where beings of matchless power are transmigrated from the arbitrary existence of a game, Valkyrie’s Shadow chronicles the lives of the natives whose reality has been turned upside down by their advent. It is the tale of a nation created by the whims of a supreme sovereign, and his unstoppable servants who each have their own, often twisted, interpretations of their Master’s Will. 

There is no victory in strength; no miracles wrought from magic that will save them: only the inexorable advance of a new world order where those who secure a place of service within will find themselves turned against the world that they once knew.

[Slow buildup. Methodical storytelling with a focus on well-rounded kingdom building and character development.]

The world is wild, untamed. Humanity thrives, but only in isolated, well defended cities, ever shrinking as the wilds slowly reclaim all that was taken. The most capable magic users are raised up as Mages to serve mankind, further their cause, and defend them over the course of millennia.

Tala is freshly graduated from the magic academy and determined to make her own way in the world. She hopes to pay off her massive debts, quickly, but still plans on living each and every day to the fullest. Too bad the Academy left some glaring holes in her practical education. Loath to let that slow her down, and with no patience for a standard, low-paid apprenticeship (intended to fill many of those knowledge gaps), Tala strives to learn and improve as rapidly as she can on her own. Her unorthodox methods for preserving her own life allow her to take greater risks in search of profit and advancement, much to the surprise of those around her.

I do hope you enjoy this tale, but let me know what you think either way! Critique, both positive and negative, is welcome.

Release schedule is weekly: M-W-F

Thank you for your time and for giving this story a try.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: If this is found on a site other than Royal Road, or the linked Patreon, it was not posted by the author. Please find this tale, here:

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/47826/millennial-mage

A monster is born in the depths of the wilds, but she isn't like her siblings. Curiosity colors her every thought, and a hunger for understanding grows within this little creature. The world is full of wonders just waiting to be discovered! She's not just hunting for her next meal, her prey is something far greater: knowledge. But as wonderful as it is, discovery alone is missing half the point. After all, what joy is there in finding the next amazing thing when there's no one to share it with?

Aiming to update Monday and Friday!

Cover art by the amazing Kailey!
Twitter @kbearart 

Full-size cover here.

Full banner pic here.

Gore tag for some somewhat graphic fight scenes.
Profanity tag because there may be some explicit language, it shouldn't be excessive.

A normal guy gets hit by a truck and isekai'd.  Why?  Because trucks are apparently some cosmic loophole.  He decides to be a dungeon, because it sounds weird and interesting to be one.  Is it?  Let's find out.

Updates Monday and Thursday.

Cover by the talented and very cool Vitaly S Alexus

Valor and Violence is a series of short stories following different, yet all equally colourful, characters set in the same world.

Birth of a Legend, the first short, follows Captain Erskine Erwell, a newly promoted Captain in the Calandorian Royal Navy, charged with protecting his people from all who would do them harm. Great news for the Calandorian citizens, bad news for the Skjar reavers that ravage the shores in search of slaves. But when a small reaver fleet slips the net and escapes to the southern jungles of Marduk, Erwell must fight a war on two fronts; one against the raiders, and a far more difficult war against the hostile landscape. If he can't find allies in this strange land, he may end up being the one in need of saving. 

Story two, The Calling, follows Ferez Ahud, an aspiring young battlemage charged with the unsavoury job of 'terminating' a rogue member of his college. But how this nobody of a mage became a fugitive remains a mystery, and when the answer is discovered, the tables are turned and the hunter becomes the prey.

The coming story follows a young woman named Elizabeth. She's a simple young gal; sweet, charming, and with a heart of gold. She loves her family, she loves fun, and she loves making things and people explode! Watch her work in A Family Dissassemblance, uploads of the six part story will be weekly commencing on the 23rd of July!

Content Guidelines: course language and violence.  

QUICK PSA: I'm gonna be 'out of the office' for a few weeks soon. Chapters have been scheduled for upload so there won't be a disruption to Elizabeth's ongoing story, but if you leave a comment or send me a message, please don't be offended when I don't reply immediately. I'll get back to everyone as soon as I can when I'm back on deck!

Cadence Lee thought she was a normal girl, perhaps a little well to do, but not exceptionally so.  She had her college classes, she had her job that her uncle gave her, and she had a nice boyfriend who was sweet if a little awkward.

Except, when a mugger accosts Cadence and her boyfriend attempts to wrestle a gun away from the criminal, Cadence ends up shot.  A normal girl, with the kind of wound Cadence had, would die.  Cadence managed to do that part.  But a normal girl wouldn't then open her eyes again and learn that death is not as permanant for her as it is for other people.  She can be reborn again, and again.  Each time stronger and with new abilities.

The catch?  Any world she is born into, she can never return to.  She has infinite lives, but only one life for each.

So begins The Many Lives of Cadence Lee.

[participant in the Royal Road Writathon challenge]

[I died and was accidentally reborn as an angelic monstrosity, so now I’m building a holy dungeon-tower that is tall enough to reach the gods; so that I can complain about it! But the humans think that I am trying to destroy the world.]

[Dungeon-Core] [litRPG] [Base-building]

WELCOME TO THE RETROFUTURE!

The Future That Never Was is an extended universe where Mars was terraformed before the Beatles sang Penny Lane, the Soviets colonized the asteroid belt and pirates plundered the rings of Saturn. In this alternate space age, humankind couldn't dream of a brighter future. Alas, the minute Earth turned into a nuclear wasteland, shadows already conspired from the heart of the Moon to the mysterious Planet Nine—and maybe beyond...

The book series includes numerous R-rated titles. All of them will be uploaded on Royal Road. Check the Index or the list below for the main stories.

🐈  KITTY KITTY - START READING

Join sassy space cat Lee and his Desert Eagle-toting, soda-swigging human partner, Ali, in a future stuck in the late 80s/early 90s. Board the dynamic duo’s ship, the mythical Kitty, as they bounty-hunt their way through a dystopian solar system—so lock and load, and shout Cowabunga! because it’s crime-fightin’ time! 

🪐  PACHINKO BLUES - Fall 2022 - LEARN MORE

Amid the chaos of the Rings Civil War, a disgraced pilot called Miles finds itself tangled in a vast vendetta involving a Lunar corporation, android mercenaries and data-cartels. From Saturn’s Plastic Fields to the fringes of Kuiper, Miles’s violent redemption is an 80s-esthetic space western filled with tears, blood and... ducks?

Other stories related to the first arc of The Future That Never Was:

• RADIO FREAK - Standalone biopunk short story featuring Ali Koviràn, the Data Maiden and Bill Murray

• STELLAR PATRIOTS - Special episodes with Braun Kamirov, linking KITTY KITTY to the upcoming DATA dilogy and CYBER MACHO

• DATA ONE & DATA ZERO - 2023

• CYBER MACHO - TBA

Do you want to support our work or simply read in better condition? Visit our amazon shop and Patreon!

Kate is a firefighter near Falstadt, living her life in the Alps between her demanding work, wandering, and enjoying the sanctity that is coffee. She's dealt with flooding, fires, and cats, but nobody is really prepared for the sudden appearance of bow wielding goblins, strange magical powers, and a game like system. Thankfully she won't be alone to face this new and strange challenge. Trying to survive in the forests and towns she thought were theirs was certainly not the plan, but she won't go down without a fight.

Genre: Fantasy Litrpg Apocalypse on Earth. Focus on action and slice of life.

Cover art by bacon: https://baconstrap.carbonmade.com/

August 18, 2018. Earth is at peace.

Then the sun explodes, and the world changes forever.

Sen Salazar, a third year in Dubai's renowned Belmont University, is thrust into a world where only monsters are found aplenty. Resources are dwindling, survivors are scarce, and safety is nowhere to be found. And when it's combined with an otherworldly system designed to bring out humanity's hidden potential? Sen's watched enough movies to know what to do:

Survive.

...He just has to figure out how to stop himself from turning into one of the monsters, first.

Discord link here.

The universe was a vast, empty, dark, and uncaring place. Then life happened, and the universe was changed forever. Only a teeny-tiny bit, but definitely different. Then again, the universe changes a teeny-tiny bit every second of every day. For instance, if someone were to get off the couch and randomly drink a glass of milk? Bam! One less glass of milk in the universe. Changed forever. Well, excluding any time-travel shenanigans, but anyone who puts a big old hole in the time-space continuum just to un-drink a glass of milk should really reevaluate their priorities. Unless, of course, they were attempting to prevent some massive catastrophe vis-a-vis said glass of milk. Such a scenario is by no means impossible, as one should never underestimate the importance of calcium.

Another important tip for any life forms out there is to keep things in perspective. Some look at the vastness of creation in relation to themselves and go, ‘Man, this sucks!’ These people really need to narrow their focus. Sure, they will never affect anything happening on the other end of the galaxy, but so what? That’s way the heck over there, where it doesn’t matter. Therefore, in order to maintain a healthy mindset, it is important to narrow one’s perspective to the things and people that affect them, and that they can affect in turn.

But what happens if one is an unfathomable cosmic being from beyond the veil of reality? What happens when such an existence is capable of influencing entire swathes of the universe just by its presence? A creature such as Magh'rathlak the Observer? That particular entity is only about average as far as reality-warping creatures from the dawn of time go, so its influence over the fabric of reality is rather limited. And it still struggles to keep things in perspective. That, among other things, is why it decided to narrow its worldview a bit by compressing the maddening vastness of its being into a single corporeal form. Magh'rathlak had never tried such a feat, but that wasn't about to stop it.

After all, how hard could being human possibly be?

The world called out for a hero to purge it of a great evil. It received Broccoli Bunch, explorer, expert cleaner, occasional ghost-buster, and full time Cinnamon Bun. 

Features include:

Talking enemies into becoming friends
Hugging menu boxes
Awesome overpowered skills (such as Cleaning, and Gardening)
And more adventure than you could shake a stick at! 

 Follow Broccoli on her personal quest to make all the friends. All of them.

Updates: Monday, Wednesday, Friday!

Now Available in ebook and paperback formats here:

Volume One - Amazon

Volume Two - Amazon

Life is rough. Jobs are non-existent. And far too many people live in poverty in the real world and can only find work online in VR worlds. And it's getting worse. The old internet is unusable and hacked to pieces. The new system needs AI to run things, but most of them are destroyed. Now everyone is scrambling to get into the GENESIS ENGINE, as it becomes the new global market place

Everyone wants a piece of the new game. The guilds are competing to be the first to find the dungeons and kill the biggest monster. The corporations are claiming land and putting in their online market places. Ozzy and his friends just want a paycheck.

Four friends find they are locked into five year contracts as virtual serfs in a small village, and can't go adventuring at all to gain money and buy their way to freedom. They don't have many choices. They can work as a blacksmith, barmaid and shepherd for all those years....or they can cheat and find ways they can take advantage of the system.

When they give you a mop and not a sword, you have to find the loopholes and change the rules.

If you're one to travel the roads, you may have heard of me. You may have heard my Names in the stories, the songs, and the whispers of the road. Perhaps you've even seen me during my travels, speaking to a bird of blue light, or on a city street, performing small acts for coin and repute. Or perhaps you may know me as the Skystrider, who walked with the wind. Or the Voiceless, a man of song without speech. You may know me as the Tutor, who taught the Lion of Summer how to fight, or the Traveler, who has walked all the roads of the earth. I am all of these things.

And people have branded me a myth.

But people don't understand what a myth is. They haven't heard the songs lost to our tongues, nor have they seen the things I've seen. They haven't gone to the places I've gone.

My feet have walked the plains, the seas, and the clouds. I have spoken languages unspoken; tongues lost to time. I have sung to the earth, held the moon in my arms, and walked the roads that your heroes hesitate to even mention. I have outwitted Demons. I have danced with the Fae. My songs have been heard by lords of wind and ash, and my steps have echoed in the bellies of gargantuan beasts the likes of which you have never seen.

These are what real myths are. And me?

I'm no legend.

I'm just the bard stupid enough to poke the real ones with a stick.

Discord link here.

[Disclaimer: Book 1 of this story will likely be published in KU by around the start of 2022, so please keep that in mind. Book 2 and onwards will continue here until they are published as well.]

Why survive the apocalypse when you can become the apocalypse?

Nature is dying, but perhaps before the world is turned into an industrious machine nature itself can play one final trump card to save itself.

Summoned to a new world, a mushroom loving mycologist needs to grow up and grow stronger in order to accomplish the goal which brought them to this new place: to save nature from the system that the sentient races have created.

Stats, levels, classes and skills are all well and good, but when you’re a Child of Poverty in the slums of City Nineteen, there’s little you can do to change the world. Not unless you’re willing to think outside the box!

This story contains lots of cute stuff, but also some tragedy. If you’re expecting it to be as light and carefree as Cinnamon Bun or Heart of Dorkness, you might find yourself disappointed.

When Yao Shen, Patriarch of the Heavenly Sky Sect, ascends and regains memories of his past life on Planet Earth, he realizes that he can no longer allow himself to accept the cruel and violent ways of Eliria, the realm of cultivation. 

So he decides to change it. 

It was time to found a new sect. One based on the values of honor and equality over senseless violence and discrimination. A sect where all, from the mortal farmer’s son to a sect elder's daughter, were held accountable to the same rules. 

Welcome to the Modern Sect.

Copyright © Daoist Enigma.

Cover by the Talented Vitaly S. Alexius

This Used to be About Dungeons is a comfy slice-of-life adventuring story that occasionally features dungeons. Updates Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Mostly it's about walking in the woods with a friend, looking for mushrooms to put in your soup, or haggling with the guy selling squash, or taking care of a neglected garden. It's putting some jam on shortbread biscuits. And yes, sometimes you go down into the dungeons with your friends, and you kill monsters there, or disarm traps, but when you come out, you realize you've found the perfect magic item to give to one of the local kids that helped you out when your cat was sick. Look, the dungeons are always going to be there, and sometimes you need to make a journey to one of the Spirit Gates, or make a pilgrimage with the local Cleric of Symmetry to a holy shrine. Your tour through the local dungeons can wait. You'll have rivalries with other groups, and find some dungeon eggs that need to be carefully incubated in case they turn out to be something valuable, and help a friend to build a fishing weir. There's a big world out there, a mostly tame place with lots of magic, and even more to do and see. Join me, won't you?

The cover image is Morning Sunlight Effect, Eragny, by Camille Pissarro.