alexanderwales
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Avant-Garde Autopilot Rotogravure Express: System-Go!
🕑 Added 2025-07-05 21:20:54 +0000 UTCI shared in the update five days ago that I was working on an idea that had taken me, that of a litRPG that's written from the point of view of the System. It has a long name now, which is never to be referenced: just call it Agares or AGARES if you must (the "Go!" is a directive, like you're throwing a Poké Ball).
I wasn't sure whether I was going to write more of it, but I wrote another 32K words in the last five days.
And you can read them right now! This is "Release 1" of Agares.
(This is the link if you want to offer typo corrections.)
We're doing things a bit different here. The plan is to have at least a chapter a week for Thresholder, and then this (or possibly other projects) will be on their own weird non-schedule that follows my whims. This will be Patreon-only, with no other way to read it. Releases will probably be in chunks, similar to how I did Worth the Candle for most of its run.
I'm trying to do this one as much "for me" as possible, which also means that editing will be relatively minimal. The only way that it could be more "for me" is just not posting it at all, and several people have made the good point that posting unfinished, unpolished stuff is part of what a Patreon is for (though I don't think that this reads as particularly unfinished and unpolished). This might go on RoyalRoad at some point, I don't know, I'm trying not to have it live in that "frame". The discord has a channel for discussion, spoiler-scoped to the latest release, #agares, open to the public though you can only read the thing here. (Culturally speaking, it's better to put spoiler tags on things just after release, when people are still reading things. If you want to liveblog, make a thread.)
This story currently has two blurbs:
1. What if the protagonist is not the player, but the System? Agares is a meditation on creativity under constraints, a flipping of the litRPG script that goes into the backrooms of the genre and roots around for the spare parts to construct thematic meaning. We follow our architect and narrator as he chafes under both the whims of his genre-savvy munchkin protagonist, the blandly inoffensive Autopilot, and the Auditor who only wants a bog standard isekai.
2. System showed up ahead of Player with two minutes to create as much of the world as possible. Anything not in eyeline was left for later: things like magic systems, world maps, Big Bads, and themes. When the Player arrives, it's a worst case scenario: he starts yelling "Isekai!" like he's a Pokémon. The Autopilot is ready to jump in with a quest to kill ten boars at any moment, and that would be bad enough, but the Auditor is quickly breathing down System's neck, asking him to stick to a script that the Player doesn't seem to want to play by. Will our darling System succeed? Find out in Avant-Garde Autopilot Rotogravure Express: System-Go!
Any feedback on Agares is welcome, but I do want to say a second time that this is as much "for me" as possible, and I'm sharing mostly because I think it's good to share things I'm writing with you.
Comments
Jack Martin
This was really nice. Would love to see more
Jah
Love this story so far keep it up
