Writing progression fantasy

Progression fantasy is the curve without the spreadsheet. Readers are here for the feeling of measurable growth — a protagonist who could not do a thing in chapter five and can in chapter fifty — and they will keep reading a mediocre plot to get it.

What separates it from LitRPG

Both promise advancement. LitRPG shows you the numbers; progression fantasy shows you the difference. The same fight, fought twice, three hundred pages apart, is the genre's signature move and it needs no interface at all. If you want the numbers on the page, writing a LitRPG is the neighbouring problem.

Gate advancement on something you can dramatise

The central design question is what stands between the protagonist and the next tier. Bad gates are quantities — enough time, enough practice, enough resource — because the answer to a quantity is a montage, and a montage is a chapter where nothing happens. Good gates are things a scene can be built out of: a person who refuses to teach, a technique that requires something the protagonist will not give up, a rank that has to be granted by someone who hates them.

The mid-serial sag

Around chapter forty, most progression serials go slack in the same way: the protagonist is strong enough that ordinary obstacles no longer threaten them, and the next real threat is too far off to feel. The three reliable answers are worth having in hand before you get there.

• Change the axis. They win the fight and lose the negotiation. Power that solved the last problem is the wrong tool for this one.
• Raise the floor, not the ceiling. Make the ordinary world harder rather than the enemy stronger — a war, a famine, a rival faction that does not care how strong one person is.
• Charge for the last tier. Something they gained came at a cost that has not been paid yet. This is the only one that also deepens the character.

The arc device built for this

Character design ships an arc device called Progression / Mastery — the ladder climbed rung by rung, wall by wall — with stages you can edit into your own tiers. Setting it up means the writer knows where on the ladder your protagonist currently stands, and can take a natural opening to move them without you asking chapter by chapter.

It pairs well with a second arc on the same character, because pure ascent is thin. Power at a Price, The Lie They Believe, or Corruption all run underneath a progression arc and give the climb something to cost.

In the premise

A stonemason discovers that the carvings guilds use to bind spirits are a language, and that he can read it. Advancement is by commission: he can only learn what someone will pay him to build. The guilds notice long before he is ready.