It’s been a while since I last wrote one of these broad overviews of the various pieces of online fiction I’ve been reading. The truth is that I spend far more time reading so-called amateur online fiction than published books nowadays and recently I find that I’ve been enjoying them more as well. And of course many of the most successful pieces of online fiction eventually make their way to become published as traditional books. By far, my current favorite of the lot is The Wandering Inn web serial by pirateaba. I’ve been following this for a few years now so I thought I’d already written something about this but it turns out that I hadn’t. So I’m writing this to convince more people to try it out.

Like so many other pieces of mediocre web fiction, this one starts out as a so-called isekai litRPG, in which a person from the real world somehow appears in a fantasy world that operates according to RPG rules. The first chapter is short and written in a very straightforward and simple prose. As with so many of these web serials, the author’s writing ability improves greatly through the many years of working on the serial and this serial would later become known for its massively long chapters, so this first chapter is nothing like what it would eventually become. Still the basic premise is attractive for its novelty. Upon arriving in this weird new world, the protagonist, a young woman named Erin, comes across a ruined inn and sees in it a place of safety. So rather than trying to go out and be an adventurer, she decides to settle down, fix and clean up the inn and run it as a business. She gets her start by gathering fruits to sell and her first customers are patrolling guards from a city named Liscor that turns out to be nearby. However one of the two guards is a reptile-like Drake while his partner is an insect-like Antinium. Nevertheless Erin welcomes and befriends them and so an epic story begins.

Indeed the story starts modestly with Erin carefully exploring her surroundings, learning what things are dangerous and what things are good to eat and taking it a day at a time. But it eventually gets to the point that she becomes one of Liscor’s most important figures and her actions are noticed by the great powers of the world. Furthermore, it turns out that she isn’t the only person from Earth to arrive in this fantasy world and there may be as many as hundreds of them. Though Erin remains the fan favorite and arguably the focus of most stories, the serial eventually expands to cover multiple protagonists all over the world each with their own storylines. Like other fantasy stories, there are monsters, dungeons, adventurers, epic battles, feats of great magic, ancient secrets, political intrigues and so on. But one notable trait of this serial is that the main characters are mainly non-combatants. Erin herself is the prime example as she really does mostly run her inn, providing support for the many adventurers who make it their home base. She is perfectly willing and capable of throwing a good punch when she needs to but the way that she affects the world is not through fighting.

In line with the personality and outlook of its main character, this serial tends towards the heartwarming and the sweet. There’s plenty of violence, horror, death and tragedy but the theme that the serial returns to, time and again, is essentially the power of friendship. Most other serials when dealing with a modern day human transplanted into a fantasy world delight in having them impress everyone with technological innovations. While there is some of that here, Erin’s most important contributions to what fans are calling the Innworld is her modern sense of morality, pacifism and equal rights for all sapients. This manifests most obviously in Erin’s insistence that goblins should be treated as people while everyone else treats them as pests at best or civilization-threatening monsters at worst. As such, the most prominent things that Erin brings to the world are cultural artefacts: foods, theatrical plays, sports and games, songs and so on that serve to help her make everyone happy and bring them together. This could so easily be cheesy and sentimental pap but pirateaba does manage to pull it off and work this into a successful story. An example of this in-story is that because Erin sees everyone as unique and interesting individual people, this leads the Antinium which is ordinarily a hivemind to develop individuals as well which is huge for their civilization.

The other thing that I really love about this serial is that as it has developed and the author has grown more confident, its format has changed in a very different direction. Early chapters are very short and look very similar like those of other serials, especially those hosted on the Royal Road website: short with a teasing ending deliberately designed to make the reader want more. Current Wandering Inn chapters however tend to be quite long and indeed almost act as self-contained stories. This has caused the serial to sprawl almost uncontrollably with new characters, far-off places and innumerable parallel storylines, so that it doesn’t feel at all like a coherent novel at this point. Yet the stories are so well conceived and written that it’s such a joy to read them. It can be frustrating when the story keeps skipping over the characters you’ve come to love to focus on entirely new ones. A good example would King Flos, a King of Destruction, a character that many fans seem to hate. But I personally find that pirateaba is good enough of a writer that I can enjoy just about any story that he cares to write.

At the same time, this being very much a tale that has grown in the telling, the same unfortunately applies equally to the world it is set in. It is obvious that the author didn’t have a complete picture of the world when he started out and just made things up as he went along. It’s a credit to his creativity and storytelling ability that he’s able to write such an engrossing tale this way but over time the discrepancy between the world when we first see it and when it is shown late in the story is too stark to ignore. An easy example is the difference in power and scale. Early on characters are introduced as having relatively mundane classes and the power of the skills they are able to use suggest a relatively low power fantasy world. The city of Liscor is threatened by a single monster that has escaped from the nearby dungeon. But later on there are a profusion of characters and monsters that would consider this single monster as basically a joke and from what later learn of the city’s history and the dangers it has survived, it’s unbelievable that so weak a monster could be seen as a credible threat. Similarly later on it feels like every other character acquires an exotic prestige class of some kind and the skills they get are incredibly overpowered.

This lack of consistency when it comes to world building also shows up in other ways. The author is rather infamous on the Reddit forums for being bad with numbers as it is impossible to reconcile the figures that he provides for distance, travel times, population, prices and the like. An example might be absurdly large sizes for armies that are supposed to be supported by a populace that seems too low. One of the other main characters is Ryoka who makes a living by being a runner, a messenger who make deliveries on foot. This suits the character very well and makes for good stories but pirateaba ties himself in knots trying to justify why employing a runner is the norm instead of someone riding a horse or even the many magical means available. Plus by working out Ryoka’s routes and travel times, it turns out that the author has a poor grasp on realities like how large a city of a given population ought to be. This detracts from the plausibility of the story as you eventually realize that this is farthest thing from an organically developed world. Instead it is exactly what it feels like, a world with characteristics cherry-picked to have as much drama and fantasy theming as need for the story the author is currently telling.

In fact lately things have been getting so bad that I half-expect one of the Earth emigres to put two and two together and realize that this really is a world that operates according to game logic. That’s why countries aren’t just generic countries but must have unique features that distinguish them from other countries, so you have a country of undead, a country of golem makers, a country of beast tamers and so on. Early on Ryoka does have suspicions about the world’s class system and another exploits it to give himself the Emperor class. But it seems that the author has no interest in making things too meta and expects readers to take the world at face value. That gets increasingly difficult as you see more and more of the world and you realize that everything really is skin-deep as a real world could never have organically developed to be the way it currently is and everything is arranged just so in order to serve the current story. Maybe some kind of reasonable explanation may be offered later, perhaps something to do it with the so-called dead gods, but I doubt that anything can make the world even remotely realistic.

Anyway, I don’t want to end this on a downer so I’ll reiterate that while pirateaba is a terrible world builder, he is a fantastic storyteller. The characters he creates are so appealing, the individual chapters as self-contained stories are so fun to read and the satisfying manner that he brings different characters together make this the serial that I most look forward to reading, flaws and all. He also receives plenty of praise for his absolutely insane writing speed but personally I would settle for a slower pace of releases if it would mean a more rigorously consistent world. Still, I would recommend this highly and consider it pretty much the most fun piece of fantasy fiction out there at the moment.