Every light on Earth goes out. When they come back, everyone alive has sixty seconds to claim a floating card or die where they stand. You are twenty, in a lecture hall with two hundred people. Which card do you take?
I made this. On OOC I'm OnlyQuality.
New York Draws First is an all-ages survival LitRPG I published on 2 October, and more than 280 players have started it since. It has 26 named characters, 370 pictures, 33 monsters and 10 endings.
The setup
Every light on Earth goes out at once. When they come back, everyone alive has sixty seconds to claim a card floating in front of them, or die where they stand. You are twenty, in a lecture hall with two hundred people, and the cards turn slowly in the air at the front of the room.
Each card is a class with one to five stars. The stars are a permanent ceiling, not a head start. Then the rifts open over New York, and monsters come through in waves that grow stronger. The waves keep a schedule, and nobody knows why.
The four factions
Four factions are rebuilding New York. None of them is simply good or bad.
- Frontliners, in One Police Plaza: former NYPD, military and EMS survivors. Order first.
- The Commons, in Brooklyn: mutual aid with no command structure. Weak in a fight, and the most trusted.
- Ledger, in the Diamond District: treats Cores and closed rifts as a market.
- The Nine, in the sealed subway tunnels: they survive by force. Ninefold rules.
Five of the 26
- Sadako, a Paladin. Her skin hardens with every ally within arm's reach. Alone, she is no different from anyone.
- Ijeoma, an Arbiter. She can bind anyone who understands the terms to an agreement that cannot be broken.
- Ninefold splits into countless weak copies, and the more she splits, the likelier she loses track of which one is her.
- Blackburn, a Reaver. He takes the Core or power of anyone near him, and all four factions hunt him.
- The Ferryman opens a safe passage that monsters ignore, one hour at a time. The hood stays up until you earn trust.
How it plays
- It is a grim survival story, not a power fantasy. Let the narrator draw your card, or name the class you want and see if the city lets you keep it.
- Cores from dead monsters and closed rifts pay your progress. 4 and 5 star classes earn six Awakenings, from a class weapon to a second class.
- No plot armor, for anyone. What is stronger than you stays stronger, bad choices compound, and death is permanent. It is told without gore.
- Every named character is an adult, 20 to 46, and every one can be romanced, whatever your gender or preference. Nobody is won by one good line.
Memory
Every reply starts with a header that tracks your vitality, rank, Cores and who is with you. There are four slash commands: /status (the full state), /recap (the last ten turns in ten lines), /retcon (find and fix contradictions) and /skip (fast-forward to the next real event). I built it to drift less. It still drifts sometimes.
Put your personality, a like and a dislike in the user notes. The narrator reads them from the first line.
It owes a debt to Solo Leveling and The Gamer. If you try it, tell me which card you drew and what killed you first. I read the comments. The link is in my next comment.