Just reread Ministry of Space (Image) and its a bit dry, but thats okay because it focused on the British. It still holds up and the social commentary stuff within it didn't feel out of place, mostly because it was allowed to sit on the page and not be thrown in the readers face. Think Alt History and Cyber Punk worlds are great bases for LitRPG novels to branch out from, and wondering if anyone here has seen a stand out from comics or graphic novels that would be close to Alt History? Alt-Worlds would fundamentally change their future LitRPG players / Portal World adventurers experience of a game-world sprung from such a history. Man in the High Tower mashed up with Fallout comes to mind, or Ministry of Space with a Space Opera MMO where half the players are on Mars and the other half on Earth. That or Watchmen + Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning... that would be a brutal game world. If Warriors of Fate can do the Romance of the Three Kingdoms there is def game and LitRPG potential from the Alt History genre.
Grab books by Harry Turtledove. They're not comics, but his entire writing career has been based on Alternate History. You could also look for the GURPS Illuminati and GURPS Illuminati University gaming supplements. Those two are chock full of good ideas for RPG campaigns, which with just a bit more work transforms into a new litRPG story. One of my great joys is reading conspiracy theory and weird books of oddness.
Not sure I want to go down the conspiracy route with todays politics in the US. I'll start seeing parallels on the news, and suddenly I'm living out of a car with a tin-foil dust cover. Performing amateur surgery by looking in the rear view mirror with the only source of light being a hand-cranked lamp. Surgery because I'll find a cut on the roof of my mouth and obviously someone snuck in and put a tracking chip up in there when I was asleep. Long story short, it will be a regular corn chip that I didn't notice get stuck when I was eating salsa and chips from a food truck the day before, obviously a food truck because restaurants have too many cameras. I'll die shortly after removing the corn chip due to blood loss and the accidental swallowing of an exacto blade I was using instead of a scalpel: my last thought being that it totally makes sense now why they don't make scalpels with removable blades. Of course I was doomed all along because really it was the lizard people who put the shard of corn chip in my mouth to make it fester and turn into an abscess, I never had a chance. I'll have to check out Turtledove, with a last name like that he probably over compensates on the dark side of things.
I'm working on an alternate history. Now I would not call it a traditional alternate history, as in you won't recognize the land, but I think it'll be close enough that you'll like it. I don't want to give anything away, but it is for a great cause. In the LitRPG facebook group a guy's friend was diagnosed with MS and I told him I could write a story with her as the MC, and he gave me a bunch of information that I think I can spin an awesome story with. I thought it was a cool thing to do. So anyway, it is a virtual world obviously, but its mixing fantasy with modern age, and it has a female MC which more people are asking for too. Working title is the Seventh Talon, extrapolate whatever you want out of that.
DC anti-hero Talon is all that comes to mind on "Seventh Talon", or maybe he's a bad guy... not a huge DC fan. Think a Raymond E Feist character too. Going the "hidden world" route or straight up magic at McDonalds? Get your lady hygiene product game down pat or prepare for hate, but don't go too far. VR pod waste management questions and Aunt Flow douching came up in an outline I was making... hit the red button and ejected fast. Kept the waste management details for a serial I'm considering, but some questions are better left unknown, or go with the dry toilet on a yacht option and say "they burn the poo!"
There are ways to make people experience sensations similar to those experienced by schizophrenics, where they "feel" as though they aren't in control. Just by manipulating the speed at which they can use a computer mouse or get feed back from a system. The key I believe was making it so they had acclimated to the normal settings, and then they would just tweak the controls and responsiveness of whatever type of program the subjects were interacting with so they would feel as though they weren't actually guiding the cursor. The feedback was adjusted in some way (either faster or slower) to make the sensation more pronounced so it was like someone else was guiding them. A scientific ouija board. My idea for VR was better with real time for all players, because hardcore players who use abilities that they would have no way of replicating in real life would constantly get that sensation once they are out of their pods and doing whatever. Sudden urge to use your telekinesis ability from the game to grab the salt and papper? Not gonna work. Cue the sudden feelings of disembodiment and psychological issues. Time dilation would just make it so they live 1:1 in the game world versus reality if they have a day job, so even my casuals would be popping anti-psychotics.