Synopsis

DREAMER's DREAMLand Afterlife program offers the terminally ill a new beginning. Using our patented Ship of Theseus method, we transition your consciousness to a world full of new challenges and possibilities. Best of all, every subscriber starts fresh from the same place.

You carry nothing into DREAMLand but your own baggage.

Arthur McCaslin is a young veteran on his way to a boring, lonely death. He is accepted into the DREAMLand Afterlife program and finds himself with a new start. But where he expected to find a quiet life of adventuring, he finds a world filled with familiar patterns and familiar atrocities. How will DREAMLand change him, and can he change DREAMLand?

Concept

I am writing this story for two reasons:

1) I wanted something specific out of the genre I wasn't getting enough of, so I tried it myself.

2) I wanted to see what came up personally while I wrote it.

Where most popular LitRPGs explore man v. system and man v. god conflicts, I want to explore a man v. man or man v. self story. Arthur McCaslin is not trying to bring down the system, nor is he going to obtain unbalanced power. He's looking to belong somewhere.

The point of this story is to explore how the main character views himself and how human patterns carry over into this new world. All of the "player characters" who populate the world walk in with their own history, many of whom lived a long time before transitioning. Everyone expresses their past, their death, and their identities differently. Much of the conflict surrounds that dynamic.

I did not create a noisy system because numbers are not what I'm good at. There are no levels, no stats, no systems reading item descriptions. DREAMLand provides perks. Those perks are revealed and discussed at irregular and infrequent intervals. That puts this story somewhere between progression fantasy and LitRPG.

About the Author

I am a veteran myself headed for a career in law. I love fantasy and LitRPG and want to see if I can contribute something new to the community. More than that, I want to see if I can find out something about myself while I write this story.

Thank you for reading. If you leave a rating, I hope you'll leave a comment. I want to make this a good story. I need your help.