After nearly a year of writing, rewriting, and editing, I finally stopped preparing and launched my first LitRPG on Royal Road this week.

It's called **Pathbreaker: The Cypher's Secret Class**.

The idea that eventually became the story was pretty simple: What if the System didn't just give you a class? What if it decided the path your entire life was supposed to take, and refusing to follow it was one of the worst things you could do?

That's the world Emrick grows up in. Everyone receives a path from the World Cypher, and everyone is expected to follow it.

Emrick doesn't set out to rebel against that system. He mostly wants to invent things, get out of his tiny town, and make something more of himself. Instead, he ends up with a class nobody has heard of, an opossum who shouldn't be able to think or talk, and a Path Tracker that starts moving in the wrong direction every time he makes certain choices.

The problem is that those are usually the choices he believes are right.

There are 9 chapters and 19,990 words live now (so close to 20k, lol), and I'm releasing one chapter a day for the first 10 days before moving to a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule. I also went into the launch with close to 160,000 words already written, because one of my biggest fears was becoming the guy who launches a serial and then realizes three weeks later that he can't keep up.

**Royal Road:**  
[https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/185352/pathbreaker-the-cyphers-secret-class](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/185352/pathbreaker-the-cyphers-secret-class)

It's character-driven progression fantasy with LitRPG/GameLit elements, so there are classes, skills, quests, stats, and progression, but the characters and the mystery surrounding the Cypher are really the heart of it. Emrick is more inventor than fighter, and a lot of his progression comes from figuring out uses for abilities that weren't necessarily intended.

Also, there's a sarcastic talking opossum. 

This is my first time actually publishing a story as a web serial, so finally putting it in front of real readers has been equal parts exciting and terrifying.

For those of you who have launched stories here before, I'm curious: what surprised you most during your first few weeks on Royal Road?

After nearly a year of writing, I finally launched Pathbreaker: a LitRPG where the System decides your path through life and punishes you for breaking it