So I'm currently hesitating between multiple stories, whose tentative blurbs you'll find below:

Dungeon Gods - The Day of the Dungeons

Working with cutting-edge physics means you can make mistakes. Sometimes you live with those mistakes. Sometimes, you don't even know what mistake you made, and are left to wonder if it's just you, or did you manage to blow up Earth? That's a question Morris Gaspar will probably never have an answer to.

For the Adventuring Guild of Modenna, Dungeon delving is never entirely routine or safe, but always enriching, on a personal and financial level. You pass your professional exams, you rise in the ranks, and enjoy the unique benefits of the aether-rich environment that the natural dimensional flaws called Dungeon Hearts create, even if you have to fight against the unique aether-mutated beasts that spring around those.

But the Adventuring Guild is ill prepared when a brand new dungeon start behaving strangely. When what required decades happen in months. When items entirely new appear instead of refined templates. When a dungeon react in dangerously unpredictable ways, violating centuries of rules.

It almost looks as if there IS an intelligence behind this dungeon. And that is something particularly disturbing to consider, when you're an expert Dungeoneer.

A realistic take on the Dungeon Core genre, where simple physics create the standard tropes of dungeon core stories and their adventurer guilds in a recognizable form without a single hitch of a System.

Potential trilogy titles: Day of the Dungeons, Dungeons' Wrath, Rise of the Dungeons.

Tower Climbers - Spring Season

Seven years ago, the largest asteroid impactor ever spotted was detected a few days before its impending collision. Not large enough to be an extinction event, it would still cause the largest explosion since the nuclear Tsar Bomba testing.

However, when it impacted in southern Nebraska, it did not leave a hundred miles of devastation, but a mere one-mile wide flat glassy circle with a lone rock in the middle. Over four days, that rock grew into a seven-mile tall truncated cone of smooth stone.

And while the world was girding itself for First Contact, the mountain simply hacked into satellite internet, mined cryptocurrency to pay for server hosting, and opened up a streaming service for Tower Climb.

Anyone can register, every candidate is scored based on chronic pathologies, and the top scores can enter the Tower at the equinox, get cured of anything they suffer from, and then team up to attempt to beat the current top score. With 24/24 live stream going on, and alien decorative trophies potentially worth millions on the art collector market for the winners of that challenge.

As the entire world prepares itself for Season 14 of Tower Climb, and millions of hopeful register in the forlorn hope of a cure, Gordon Bideau knows this is the best season to attempt. It is now, or never, since you can only register once.

This is a competition where you get the real prize first, and the rest is pure bonus. He just hopes that, if he gets selected, he’ll find himself with achievers willing to go.

Faster, higher, stronger.

It's a self-contained book, mixing tower climb tropes, pseudo-VRMMO, and self-discovery. And a pseudo-cliffhanger at the end to pave the way for a season 15, of course, should there be one. It is heavily inspired by the original premise of Tower of Babel - Speedrunner, a discontinued series that I liked a lot. And maybe a tiny bit by Dungeon Crawler Carl.

Chosen Ones - Ancient Bones

Mycroft Moore didn’t expect anything more than a good gaming evening when he settled down to play the latest early access ARPG.

But the world had different plans. Something more like an apocalypse and the end of all civilization. Which he missed, on the account of being dead.

Generations after the Fall, there is a civilization of sorts. People living, communities thriving. Some of the Ancient knowledge is still around, but when reality bends regularly to the scourge of Changestorms, and the whims of Magic, most of it is lost or mere superstition.

For youngsters that aren’t in direct line to inherit the farm, store, business, there are not that many prospects. The armies in distant counties are always recruiting. Or you can be salvaging adventurers, delving in the most dangerous places to get some Ancient goods that sell well. The most useful things from the old world are in the ruins, their miracle clothes and metals and other crafts.

This one team knows the risks. It’s not Johanna Milton's first hunt, and it won’t be her team's last one, hopefully. But this time, the scavengers encounter something they could not have anticipated, and attract the attention of a Power.

Mycroft Moore has spent a timeless eternity waiting in the Beyond. He may not be able to walk the Earth anymore, but now, he has windows into reality. He has four people that offer him relief from the empty void of his domain. Four people whose life he can experience. Four people whose destiny he can shape, because he can see the rules behind existence. He can give them abilities. He can shape their statistics.

This is something he knows how to do well. After all, he has played that kind of game often enough.

Too bad it’s Ironman mode and you can’t save and restore entire lives. You have to play it to the end as it goes. Hopefully, those he recruited will not go too much off-script.

Semi-unplotted post-non-system apocalypse trilogy. One of which intrigues me most, but one that is probably very different from the run-of-the-mill litrpg. It takes its inspiration from the Baldur Gate or Gold Box type of RPG rather than the more classic MMORPG that nourish LitRPG.

At the moment, it's the second-largest draft in the story pile, and the one most likely to be a candidate for the next series.

If at First... - Remorting

Nobody wanted to take it seriously until it was almost too late. A decade after the Apocalypse, the rise of the undead in the North threatens the entire continent of America, and potentially, the world.

A man saw it coming. Sword Dancer Gregor Ionis has done everything he can to stop the rise of the undead empire his Nemesis Undeath Lord Mack Rowland is bringing, he’s learned everything he could about him, and he has a plan.

But the undead has a bolthole ready. And when he activates his bugout plan to avoid imminent defeat, the self-appointed hero has no option but to follow his prey wherever the unstable portal leads to.

What he did not expect is that it would lead him to the middle of nowhere, on Route 66, mere hours from the Apocalypse, before the System sweeps away the old world and introduces its new rules.

This time, he will be ready. This time, he will end the threat before it rises. He knows what errors to avoid, what paths to pursue.

He’ll have to do it with whomever he can recruit.

A time-travel litrpg, 4 books. Probably the most classic in terms of themes, although, of course, I have twists ready. My biggest concern is the long-term solidity of the series - the way it's set up, the second book will be very weak. Needs more thinking/plotting before I commit.

The Path of the Founder

Daoist Cultivation is a tenacious idea. Thousands of stories have sprung from it. Fantasies covering all ages, eras, worlds. An enduring myth.

But Cultivation Pills were typically heavy metal poisonous concoctions that brought sickness rather than immortality. Meridians are lines on anatomy plates, a map that has never been the territory. There’s a dozen names for the energies of Nature you can breathe in, but O2 is the name everyone insists on using. And the solid object that forms in your body is one of the biggest source of pain possible, once it leaves your kidneys and moves toward your bladder.

In short, it’s bullshit and never worked for anyone in history.

Until someone does it, that is.

For David Reiker, the changes that happen to him are in equal parts strange, exhilarating and dangerous. But what are you going to do when you slowly become someone who might be more than a mere mortal? If you do not have manuals, but endless fiction that might be more trap than guide?

When he realize he is the first, he inherits the biggest responsibility of all. He needs to be the one who will write the manuals. To provide the instruction to those who follow him.

It is said that there can be many Paths of the Cultivator, reflections of your choices and yourself. But David’s Path is unique. No matter what he ends up doing, he walks the Path of the Founder.

Before him lies no opponents, only obstacles.

Better have someone watching his back, then.

Another "Realistic" take, this time outside of the direct litrpg genre. It's a Xianxia/Cultivation story but set in a more urban-fantasy contemporary setting. Someone must be the first, right? So what happens if the first Cultivator in the entire world is a young auto mechanic in a small town in northeast America?

Master Force - District

NATO was founded to counter all threats to its members’ existence. They’ve dealt with many over the decades, but one they never anticipated was super-powered rogue groups trying to take over land bases in a display of abilities worthy of a movie or videogame. They acquire weird skills, they level up, and with each ratchet, the threat level rises.

To face this new menace, NATO needs its own empowered units. The Master Force is their answer to the plague of super-enemies. Carolus Zimmer of the NATO’s Security Directorate hopes that the elite force led by Captain Varanson and Zacharias will be enough to keep the momentum on NATO’s side.

But it is hard to play in a game whose rules nobody really understands, against all form of enemies, small and large. And when the Master defenders of NATO realize what might be at stake, they may end up starting World War Three. With real super-beings. On all sides.

It's a PvP Superhero gamelit. It's my most advanced story - I got 60k words in it. It's also my oldest and in most need of a gigantic draft two rewrites of... about 70% of the chapters. And trying to write military-inspired stories in a contemporary setting is harder than it looks (my personal military experience is peacetime navy in the 80s...). I like it, but I'm absolutely unsure it will work out.

It's got a fun system, though.

The Open Tarot - First Pyramid

Each Card begins more or less in the same way. Someone finds it by random chance. Where it came from, how it landed there… or why someone specifically found it is a mystery. But someone finds the Card and quickly finds out that our ordered mundane reality is an illusion. Then the real problems begin.

Because having powers bestowed by the Cards is never enough. The making of a Deck is not just hard, it ends your old life. Once you begin you never can go back. And experienced Players are always looking for your collection.

Welcome to the jungle. Play, or fold.

Start with the character of Ignacio Loca, from The Lost Room, and add a hefty dose of Yu-Gi-Ho/MTG gamelit. Also, a homage to a very old series I read when I was a kid in the 70s, where a Japanese-style ronin goes and tries to collect magical cards that are rumoured to bestow the power of a God if you ever collected all of them (gee, that reminds me of the Lost Room also... but the MC of the old books would be the Dr Martin Ruber).

It's also the series for which I have no real plot.

Silvergates 2 - Navigator

It's been only a few years, but the existence of a parallel dimension to Earth, where magic is real and power is free already seems mundane to many. It has sprung stories and grand conspiracies, fears and hopes, until myth and superstition are one and the same, and truths placed on equal footing as total fabrications.

For the survivors of the Pyramid, vindication is only the beginning. Birkathane, Quandocor and Vantegaard now have their responsibilities and roles to play, and the Cartographers Guild, the Earthen Brethren and many other major players will make sure to use their abilities and expertise.

None of the great powers of Northworld is ready to delegate the fate of mankind's greatest adventure to the rigid and heavy-handed governments of Earth. First Contact is not going to happen in the cold space between the stars but in the warm forests of a planet where people fight nature with staff, sword or bow, not laser guns.

But with five Gater species, the real question is: Who is going to Contact whom?

And more importantly: who might be watching how that contact goes?

Because I started the series. And I need to finish it. It is a weak book, most of my current draft sucks - in the immortal words of The Expanse - donkey balls, and the needs of the story are forcing me to make decisions that I dislike in term of the plot. But I have to do it just for the book's epilogue, and how it quickstart book 3.

(I already know what happens in book 3 and 4, and they are much "easier" to write than book 2)

Then... what happens after book 4 ends?

The Labyrinth Gates

To say the world was not prepared would be both an understatement and an untruth. When joggers in the middle of Central Park see sparks flying and what looks like molten metal flowing, it is a cause for panic, before everyone starts yelling about alien First Contact as a metal arch resolves in a portal straight out of Hollywood movies and TV series.

But when a random few manage to cross the weird interface and return, the world knows it's not going to get guidances from a thousand stories of aliens coming to Earth. It's looking at something far, far weirder. It is looking at fantasy come to life. The world is going to need to pour over LITRPG.

For millions of nerdy fans across the globe, it is time for the dream to come true. For beyond the five Great Gates opened across the globe lies not alien worlds, but alien games. One that you not only play, but bring back with you, assuming you can cross the Gates.

Beyond lies an Infinite Labyrinth.

What if Johann Hausseger's Earth-570 is no longer the last Divergence to open in 1918, but one opens in the 21st century. This one is probably harder to write properly than anything else. But that's an interesting sequel after... well, after book 4 ends. This is also the only one for which I do not have an epilogue or plot, yet. It's potentially going to be an ensemble series, not a single-MC/team focused one.

Also, the most difficult to write. Because it brings out all the problems you have with VRMMO LitRPG stories - it is very, very hard to compete with hordes of obsessive optimisers looking to squeeze every single point out of a System, running massive Monte-Carlo simulators to tell you exactly which piece of gear will give you the most bang for your buck. And then, you have to fake that into your books, when the real ones - your readers - will do the real thing and yell at your characters because the author told them they were smart, and they're stupid.