Death, Loot & Vampires
A LitRPG Adventure
by Benjamin Kerei
Kindle, 2023
Death, Loot & Vampires is a LitRPG fantasy and a progression fantasy first published on Royal Road. It is light, violent, and very Dungeons & Dragons.
Vincent was a fairly ordinary guy with a fairly ordinary family, until one day he is summoned to an alternate universe and tortured, turned into a vampire, and left for undead. Then things got interesting.
There are a a lot of odd rules around being a vampire, but one of the big ones is that you don't turn full evil until you take your first innocent life. Vincent, having an unusually high willpower stat and an unusually high number of not-innocent targets, manages to become a full vampire without losing his soul, killing any innocents, or turning evil. This turns out to be a very potent combination; he can do all the vampire things, but can't be banished by cleric's spells, doesn't need to fear garlic or religious symbols, and apparently god kind of likes him, maybe?
However, being a vampire does flatten your emotions and makes worldly concerns seem passé, so he would be happy enough sleeping away eternity in his undead and unevil state. He receives a call to adventure when he learns that the rest of his family was dragged into this universe at the same time he was; this provides him motivation to get out of his crypt and work to protect them. If that means conquering the world, so be it.
I came across this book by typing "progression fantasy" into Amazon and taking the top rated result that was available on Kindle Unlimited. This appears to be a highly variable search, but Goodreads confirms that this is a quite highly rated novel. I would not consider this as core progression fantasy, as a lot of the progress is incidental, accidental, or luck-based, but it certainly progresses quickly. It is much more a LitRPG adventure, with an unapologetic and unexplained D&D world plonked in front of our heroes with zero real explanation.
That said, this is a pretty okay fantasy novel. There is a lot of exciting battles, some moderately boring world building, and an ongoing smattering of witty dialogue. Kerei enjoys introducing new characters and making them interesting enough to justify their presence, so by then end we have a cast of dozens, and it works. There's a good bit more torture than I like in my reading (it's just what people do to vampires in this world, apparently), and it was a bit slow to pick up, to the point that I almost put it down before I got properly started, but once you get into it is fun and fast-moving.
While this is listed as The Vampire Vincent Book 1 and there are certainly some unresolved lose ends, there is not currently a book 2.