A Grand Farce (currently being Rewritten)

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

[Completed the Royal Road Writathon challenge - November 2023]

Aleem Beckenbauer, a 23 year old digital artist, dies a painfully sudden death one evening, only to wake up in the immense open-world RPG setting of "Tales of Woe: Orig Eternal". A truly bleaksome game designed by his foster parents, and by which he'd been wholly enraptured growing up.

He finds himself inhabiting the body of a demi-human teenager at the epicentre of a historic calamity that unfolded nearly 12 years before the game's original timeline.

Aleem has been thrust a decade into Orig's obscure past. He is caught between two sides of a divine conflict and must desperately navigate an intricate web of causality just to stay alive. Every alteration he makes to the timeline vitiates and further deters the future he knows.

Aleem possesses enough information to obtain true power and outgrow the machinations of superior entities, but before any of that, he would have to survive his first week on the planet.

WHAT TO EXPECT:

-This is a slow burn story. Consider yourself warned.

-Protagonist starts out weak but becomes very powerful eventually

-An MC who reasonably leverages their knowledge of future events

-Characters that explore their emotions and internal experiences. A fair bit of internal monologuing, but never to the extent of navel-gazing. If you resent that, then this might not be worth your while.

-MC that's not an anti-hero but certainly not a paladin either

-Characters with agency

-Various intriguing schools of magic and mystic traditions

-Crafting, artefacts, spellwork, armed combat, lots and lots of meditation

-Swashbucklery, adventure, daring escapades

-Machinations, plots, conspiracies, cloak and dagger operations

-Third person narrative style with little in the way of gratuitous POV shifts

-Blue screens and Stats that don't bog down the narrative

-Self-aware(-ish) Protagonist

-Very soft western-cultivation elements

-The power of friendship (regrettably)

-An epic slow-burn progression fantasy that wants to knock your socks off

Information

Status: Cancelled
Year: 2023
Author: Opsimath

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.3/ 5.0
Followers: 61
Views: 17,300

Reviews

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Community Reviews(4)

Nomen VIRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
A Grand Farce is a slowburn-ish story, though it does seem to have hit its stride. Things are coming to a head rn, so I'll drop a more comprehensive review once this arc is over.
It's an Isekai LitRPG that uses familiar tropes, like the MC having meta knowledge, while retaining this air of 'intriguing unusualness'.
The MC's initial reaction to the world is refreshing and tickles the little demon in me that likes to eat competent characters; it's a very healthy balance between "FML, woe is me" and "Heilige Scheiße, I know tons of stuff". He struggles, but also shows drive, and I was glad to find a smart MC who isn't a trigger happy sociopath. I'd like to see more of the magic system and world-building. So far so good.
My main gripe for now would be the release schedule. 4k+ word chapters, twice a week, but there've been a number of missed publications. The author has been very communicative, though, so I can't complain too much. I'm a simple RR reader. I just want more chapters
HallulayaRoyal Road
★★★★ 4.0
"A Grand Farce" is an isekai with some LitRPG elements. The author has a really strong grasp of the genre and knows which story beats to utilize to garner attention. They have created a world that I'd love to know more about. I know that it is a Writathon project, but I hope that the author continues their story. I recommend reading the first five chapters to form your own opinion on the work.
Style: I think that the style is one of the author's stronger suits. They have an excellent vocabulary and know how to weave in descriptive words to generate a vibrant world. The world building itself is created fairly naturally through protagonist observations and interactions with other characters. There is some refinement required here and there before I could truly call it perfect, but it is not too far.
Story: As of now, the story and plot are still in their infancy. I know there are big plans that the author has behind the curtain, but it is hard to know what the imminent threats are after the first few chapters. However, the plot is moving at a steady rate and nothing so far has felt burdensome.
Grammar: So far, I have found very little in the way of grammatical errors. I believe you'll find maybe one or two per chapter, but nothing that is problematic.
Characters: All the characters feel real on a superficial level. The only person that the reader will know the inner workings of is Aleem. However, life has been coming at Aleen fast, and I don't think he's truly had the opportunity to gather his bearings and really establish his presence and personality. I encourage the author find some ways to grow them even stronger.
I love it when readers start to feel inspired and begin writing their own pieces. I hope the author continues to cultivate their skills and grow their story further.
RocksNPebblesRoyal Road
★★★★ 4.0
I did not get far with this story. The diction used is overly descriptive with long winded self talk and internal monologuing in between each action. There is a fairly random insertion of obtuse and arcane jargon which is needless and feels like over use of a thesaurus and adds little besides what will be a dictionary check for most readers.
Across 4 chapters very little has happened with almost all of it fitting into half a chapter’s worth of content and 3.5 chapters of thinking, self motivation, and long winded descriptions of places and people the MC will likely never see again or are of low impact.
If you focus on everything, then you’ve focused on nothing. How many words dedicated to a particular scene, person, or place are a way of telling the reader what is important and what can be left to their imagination with a few brief words.
His moment by moment detailed and throw away speculation about motivations with 2 to 3 paragraphs of inner monologue between sentences is an anime level of over thinking and reminds one of long winded speeches between each punch in a dragon ball Z fight sequence which extends over 16 episodes.
I mean seriously, he is talking to those guards in chapter 4 for like a few minutes at most and goes off on long winded guesses about their and others motivations based on like 2 sentences about Tanton. I’m sure most of which will prove inaccurate as he knows almost nothing at this point. A massive waste of time. Show don’t tell…and show don’t speculate through long winded overwrought monologuing.
Overall I felt a sense of constipation and urgency when reading, wanting to skip ahead or to get past the current inner monologue or long description or…everything. This is when I had to DNF. Good luck with the story and this style is in some ways a preference on my part, but in other ways I feel most readers will be put off by it.
Giant WoahboatRoyal Road
★★ 2.0
I really want to like this one. I think the author has an interesting world they're developing. I just can't... A lot of time this feels like an exercise in showing off the author's expansive vocabulary, rather than providing solid characterization.
This is made worse by the feel (and yes, this is my opinion) that many of the more abstruse word choices aren't really appropriately applied. It feels forced, and I genuinely questioned from time to time if an AI had been used to edit this as a result.
As well, nearly twenty chapters in, and I don't really have a good feel for WHO the main character is, and while the world seems fully-fleshed out in the author's head, the characters aren't doing a very good job of sharing their world with us. Reading this feels a lot like people having a conversation about a neat subject that I'm being left out of.
This is probably nitpicky, but this barely feels like LitRPG at all. I think the author has something here, and should keep writing. I suspect if they do, they're gonna make some awesome things, but sometimes less is more. As a common phrase goes: Learn to kill your darlings.