Worth the Candle

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

A teenager struggling after the death of his best friend finds himself in a fantasy world - one which seems to be an amalgamation of every Dungeons and Dragons campaign they ever played together. Now he's stuck trying to find the answers to why he's there and what this world is trying to say. The most terrifying answer might be that this world is an expression of the person he was back on Earth.

This work is complete and partially stubbed. You can buy the first four (of eight) ebooks or audiobookshere.

Information

Status: Ongoing
Year: 2019
Author: Alexander Wales

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.5/ 5.0
Followers: 5,088
Views: 3,056,469

Chapters(111 total)

Reviews

No reviews yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!

Community Reviews(10)

CristianBoyRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Despite the fact that i've never played D&D, i can easly understand what the author want to tell us. And oh boy,after a whole year of reading lots of RR,chine,japanese,and korean novels,i gotta say that this one is special,got me interested in chapter 3-4. I recommend this to newcomers in the reading community and the veterans there. It's such a great read
BrickedKeyboardRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
I've read WTC to the most recent chapter and eagerly read each update.
The positives are that the story has a huge and intricate world. What makes a story "rational" is that the world has rules, and those rules don't always benefit the protagonist. Moreover, the protagonist is going to use the best option at his disposal if he knows about it, and his antagonists will do likewise. Done well, this makes for an excellent, interesting story.
It's really, really good.
Now, the downside : the very first section of story suggests a much leaner and more fun story. One where our hero motorcycles through the zombie infested wasteland with his hot girlfriend, getting into fights and using his Gamer abilities to solve tense situations in dramaticly cool ways. One where when our hero tries to do something, he gradually gets better until his skill level become "epicly awesome", without softcaps and exclusions and 50 other limits on him that are present in this fic.
This is not that story. But it's still really, really good.
Ontological WeevilRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
A DnD gamemaster is taken to a world that is built from his ideas and creations.
amazing world-building, subverting tropes from fantasty, harem stories, lit-rpgs...a mix of hard magic and soft magic...Original and inspired races. The last few chapters have become watershed moments for the book where the character, Juniper, is utizling the maxiumum extent of his magic.
People have some hang-ups when there's a scene-break to Juniper talking with his friends around a dnd table, those scenes are purporsed towards immediate foreshadowing and help explain the actions of other characters that we don't get to see the monologue for. They also can serve as a way to explain concepets and ideas occuring in the story that the author believes needs a better explation.
There's tons of concepts that the story will introduce you too, memetic warfare (not related to memes), exclusion zones that contain world-breaking events, people, or creatures (examples being someone going through a groundhog's day every month, or an entire area populated with clones of a single indiviudal).
I think it's resonable enough to say that the author has gone through a similar tragedy as the main-character and is processing his grief through the transformative work of writing. It's a story with reoccuring themes of depression, loss, and friendship. If you haven't had your heart-broken it may be hard to relate to the characters in the story, but there's a lot more to it than that. The action and build-up is amazing, and the intelligence that the main-character utilizes stops you from rolling your eyes. This is one of the top ten stories on this website.
UnOriginalRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Expected standard fantasy fare of whisked to a magical world with game-like elements and got a surprisingly deep introspective story about life, grief, and love. Highly recommend it because the story flows well and the moment of reflection is tastefully done.
DOOOOOOOINGSystemsRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
probably my favorite first person narrator in all of fiction, juniper is one of the few first person narrators who feels like a real person, and reading WtC almost feels like I'm reading a letter from an old friend. The cast is pretty solid, some of the characters can feel sidelined sometimes but they all get to shine at some point. Fenn remains one of my favorite comic relief characters of all time
VeneerRoyal Road
★★★★★ 4.5
Now that it has been complete for a few months, I want to offer my full thoughts on WTC.
Overall, Worth The Candle is the best finished story of significant length I've read in my years on this site. It is also one of the most inconsistent good stories on this site. There were many aspects which I took extreme issue with, and I think entire sections of the book are average to below average in quality.
This is made up for entirely by not only some of the best technical writing on the website, but a unique and fascinating world, excellent use of themes as a guiding structure, and a beautifully crafted story which is at the same time often unpredictable yet entirely natural and logical. The first 100 and last 50 chapters are not just some of the best webnovel writing I've read, but some of the best writing in general.
That statement is perhaps inviting the question of my thoughts on the middle portion. It is certainly not universally bad, there are excellent moments and story threads that I found compelling. That being said, I quit this story four times in the space of 80 chapters, and there were reasons for it.
The pace slows down significantly around the third to halfway point, which is not a problem on its own. In keeping with the D&D theme, the party has stopped being railroaded so much and is sort of doing their own thing. The problem lies in the fact that this just does not jive with the rest of the novel and its themes. The most compelling part of the story is the overarching plot and the mysteries behind it, and the main characters are at their most interesting when directly interacting with that plot. The story meanders here for a long time, and much of the character development of Juniper and Grak, in particular, though the rest of the crew as well, takes a steep nosedive from its earlier quality.
The grammar is as close to perfect as you will get online. Any mistakes were minor and not repeated, and a majority of chapters had no mistakes at all that I notice
ZimzimbadabimRoyal Road
★★★★★ 4.5
I've been following this for a while. It's nice to see it on another platform where it can get more exposure.
This is a pretty neat story. If you are a fan of DnD and other such dice-rolling adventure games that require a game master, you will probably really enjoy this.
I think by far what keeps me reading this story is the characters. These are some of the most authentically crafted characters I have read in a fantasy story. This genre usually is more known for plot and worldbuilding than it is for nuanced characters. Not so with this story! I would argue that the characters are the real shining stars of this story.
The world building is good, don't misunderstand me. It can become a bit cluttered at times due to how complex the world is set up to be, but that is ok because it is merely the stage and props with which the characters bring the story to life.
Continuity is good. Logical coherence is also good, and of critical importance considering the premise of the story, so kudos to the author on that.
This story has authentically portrayed romance with a twist that I will not spoil for you.
There is abundant action and adventure into new and interesting lands. There are a seemingly limitless number of species. So if you only want the classic human, elf, dwarf trio with maybe an allowance for a few others, this is not for you. All the races in this story are original to the author except for humans. So I hope that interests you. There are creatures inspired by those in other fictions, but none copied directly that I have found so far.
Also, I know some really hate stories with a "person pulling strings behind the curtain" character that guides the journey of the MC, and this story does have that, BUT it does it in a way that I personally think adds to the story and is very directly and consistently addressed by the main characters such that it is a valuable plot point as well as a character development tool.
I don't want to give too much away. It's a good story. I
Eritis sicut DiabolusRoyal Road
★★★ 3.0
This story is very niche. Its a meta story, its a story about stories. If that isn't your thing, you'll hate it. You'll hate it so much.
I've had trouble reading stories like this in school, they made me want to throw the books at my teacher. I'm thinking The Things They Carried, or The Catcher in the Rye. I hated those books so damned much they're burned into my brain. Yet the MC of this story is also a selfish whiney asshole, yet this story is still interesting because the story leverages that it isn't really about him. If you think the story is about him, you're gonna hate it.
BobGuyRoyal Road
★★★ 3.0
I've been following this story since sometime last year (2019) and it's honestly pretty good. There's hardly any grammatical errors or typos the plot is entertaining and the world building is fairly consistent.
.
Despite all that, something has been eating at me the entire time I was reading this story. Nearly all the interactions between the characters feel one dimensional and monotonous.
I think this is because whenever any characters are having a conversation, all I ever read about is the words they say to each other but I find it hard to envision anything else about their interaction because almost nothing is mentioned about their facial expressions, body language and tones. Even on the rare occasion that anything like that is explored, so little is mentioned that it's almost pointless.
It makes conversations feel like it's just one guy talking to himself.
Conversations also sometimes feel like infodumps even when that might not be the author's intention, and it can get so bad that even parts that might've been meant to be entertaining start to drag.
All this also makes the characters hard to relate to because they are not fleshed out properly in my head. I'm not saying that there's not any attempts to flesh out the characters because I always read descriptions of what they look like and what they wear and what the other characters think of them, but I can't help but want to see what they see as they're talking to each other.
Conversation has many more dimensions than just the words spoken but almost all of them are missing.
If the author could deal with that issue, then this story would be a masterpiece.
Spoiler: Spoiler
Bayesian FoxRoyal Road
★★★ 3.0
This novel has some very strong points. It has an array of interesting characters, monumental worldbuilding, meta-discourse and self-awareness. It is a shame that those same virtues are also the novel's greatest weakness because it feels so artificial.
I like every character the author has presented to us (even the MC, to some extent), and I believe he/she did a good job in their characterisation. The characters make the story very enjoyable. The MC ruins it all, as I've said, but I will develop that point later on as it will probably take the form of a full rant.
The worldbuilding is very thorough and pleasant, and I particularly like the descriptions of some places. It does lighten up the reading and foster a feeling of wonder in me when the author shows us the magic in the scenes. Up to a point. In the last chapters I've been skipping the description because it's simply too much. After nearly 200chapters of force-feeding details to the reader, it didn't feel quite as pleasant as in the beginning.
This novel is also very fond of meta. From meta-narrative, to talking about feelings and subjectivity and SJWness... I also liked it in the beginning, but it turned into an obsession (Amaryliss being the result of it).
Communicating feelings is perfectly normal, but the MC has been stuck with his for 200 chapters. He's such a simp that he would let his crush beat him up (three times), reject his feelings in a way I think is cruel, etc.. he doesn't learn. He's supposed to be a thinker, and even though he knows what's going on he does nothing. He believes he was raped, gets confused because it felt good, then gets mopey and try to find somebody to complain/cry. I'm disappointed, because he can't ougrow his patheticness. He's died several times, or often nearly did, he's been on his adventure for years now. He's supposedly fighting to save the world, blablabla... He should be more mature. If he were the same 17yo nerd as in the beginning, sure, but after 200chapters? (yes,