Code of Survival w/Greg Eckert

Welcome And Meet Greg Eckert

Welcome everyone to In Other Worlds, a LittleRPG Gamlet and Fantasy Podcast. I'm your host, Jess, and today we have on Greg Eckert. Greg, how are you?

I'm doing good. How are you?

I am doing fantastic. I'm super excited to have you on. You are the author of the Code of Survival series. Book one is Arizona. Tell us a little bit about the series.

So the series is a lit RPG apocalypse, and that way it's kind of similar to DCC, but a very different approach. I was actually sitting outside reading a Sean Oswald novel, uh, where he has like his family MC-based lit RPG. And I kept in my head going, that's not what I would do. That's not what I would do, not at all. And then all of a sudden I just kind of stopped and went, wait a second. What would I oh my god, what would I do? And I ran inside, it was like noon on a Sunday in July, and I got on my computer and opened up Word and started typing. And a little while later, my son came in the room and he said, Hey dad, um, are are we gonna eat dinner? And I'm like, what? And I looked outside and it was dark. I've been writing for like eight hours. And I went, Huh, I guess this is a thing.

So that's when you know it's good.

Yeah, it's about me, my family, what we would do. Uh, my cat Cosmo, my daughter's cat, or bird. Um, even my son's dog, I added in in uh book three. And uh some of the people I know in real life it said in the town of Gilbert, uh, and then moves to Albuquerque and then moves to another planet, and who knows where it's gonna go next.

A lot. So the book takes place in Gilbert, Arizona. Did you choose Gilbert because that's it

Writing A LitRPG From Real Life

you have lived there, or was it just a random city that you decided to use?

No, it's literally like because I put my family into it, I put my life into it. So it talks about my history uh right at the beginning in chapter one. It talks about uh my car accident back in '95. It ended my Navy career, my emphysema. Um it's actually got uh two of the bartenders are champions who are friends of mine. Three of them now are in it. Uh which is a real bar. Yes, it's a real bar down the street, like crawling distance.

That is really cool. So it's very based on your history and your family.

Yeah. Yeah, it's based on my life. It's based on real places in Gilbert. Like we go into the Gilbert Historical Museum, the first dungeons under the Gilbert Water Tower, uh, the Bank of Gilbert, the original bank of Gilbert is in there. Uh, all the historical things. All during the entire journey all the way to Albuquerque. I actually drove the entire route, stopped at every place that's in the books. Wow. Um I did a lot of research. Then when you get to the to book two, uh it's real places in Albuquerque. Um there's actually, not to give out any real spoilers, but there's a really neat thing in the southwest corner of the New Mexico State Fairgrounds. There's this big plaque. And a building next to a small building, it's got bars on the windows, and uh it says on the plaque the original headquarters of Microsoft. So yeah, apparently that's where Microsoft actually started.

Wow, that's a cool little tidbit of information. I didn't even know that.

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of uh history, trivia, all of that. I tried to, you know, tie it to real world places. Books one and two are very heavily grounded in the real world. Book three and four are uh set somewhere else. Uh and in book five, we're back in Gilbert and Phoenix and Nisa, and Jack's looking for his uh best friend, and there's some other familiar, to me, familiar faces that have managed to make their way back to champions.

And so the two main characters, Lee and Jack, father and son, are based off of you and your son. What made you decide to go to MCs instead of just the father being the main character?

Well, I mean, in real life, my son is actually my closest friend. Um lives with me. He's just the most amazing young man. He's 23 now. Uh it's hard to hard to wrap my head around that. I still see this little kid, and you know, but he's turned out to be an amazing human being, and it just felt right for it to be us. I I talked to all of them about it. Uh, you know, my son, my daughter, my ex-wife and her family, my oldest son who lives up in Idaho, um, talked to him about it and showed them their their characters, and like it's specifically in the case of Sammy, my little genius. Um I had to review some of the paragraphs with her because she gets into this science. She's got like a biophysics degree and a master's in archaeology, she's about to get. She just turned 25. She's ridiculous. It's awesome.

That's really cool.

Yeah, it's funny. One of the reviews I got on on book one was like, this is so unrealistic. This doesn't happen. I'm like, dude, that's actually my family.

Research Trips And Location Details

This really happened.

So when you were writing these characters, when you took them their characters and showed them and had them read uh what was written, were there any uh rewrites that you had to do or anything they wanted changed?

Not really. I mean, I know my kids pretty well. And uh like I said, I had to consult Sammy on a couple things. She has this thing she does when she's about to jump into a long-winded, very technical, make your eyes cross explanation. Uh, where she goes, now just hear me out. Yeah, that's in the book.

She, when she read that, was she like, really?

She laughed. She laughed.

So in book one, you know, the apocalypse happens and they're all integrated into the system. They are uh Lee and Jack are at home, and the area that they live in ends up being a area that is much higher level than they are. And they end up kind of traveling around and they they drive through the forest and find a ranger outpost. The ranger outpost that they're at. Um I thought at first they were Yetis. I can't remember what the actual uh name were was.

McGeon. It's spelled McGillon pronounced in Native American as McGeon.

Are there going to be more cryptid characters as the series goes on?

Um yeah. The in like the later books, there's uh completely made-up races. Uh I've actually tried to avoid as many of the tropes as possible, the elves, dwarves, things like that. They're mentioned, but uh I'm going for more of the uh lesser-known mythological creatures.

Okay. Yeah, my mind immediately went to like Mothman and you know the Loveland Frog Monster. Uh, what made you decide to put the this race of characters in the book? And and you did it in such a way that kind of made sense. Like they had said that magic was always on Earth. We just never had access to it, but they did. And now we do. What made you decide to take that route?

So um when I was actually taking my trip up and planning and trying to figure out exactly where I was going with the book, first initially just trying to figure out how the heck to pronounce Megeon, which is it's definitely not intuitive. And I started looking on the internet, and there was a reference to a hundred-year-old sighting of this creature with a kind of square head, some ways similar to Bigfoot, in other ways completely different, glowing red eyes, all of this stuff. And I was like, hmm. And then I spun off on this massive tangent, looking up all kinds of stuff related to Native American culture, and then double-checking everything as I wrote it to make sure that it's uh meshed.

What made you decide to go with them versus a different mythological creature from roughly the same area?

I like I said, uh I stumbled across it when I was looking up the name. I actually so when I write, like I know some people they like will outline a whole book and they'll play on all kinds of stuff, and I was kind of trying to do that, but I wasn't really sure where exactly I was gonna go with it. And so as things popped up, I went, yeah, I can use this. Oh, hey, this is kind of neat. What's this? You know? And uh that that trip was a was quite a bit of fun and very interesting. Like throughout the book, you'll see some just crazy stuff because of it.

Were you more of a a panther when you were writing it or clotter, or maybe somewhere in between where you just kind of had like a loose outline and yeah, I mean I knew the the goal of the book was for Lee and Jack to get to Marie and Eric, you know, but her ultimately that was the whole goal all the way from the beginning.

And you can see that right there in the beginning of chapter one when Lee and Jack are talking to uh Marie over the phone, and and the the two kids are kind of in not so great a place with each other, they're

Cryptids Myth Lore And Magic

not getting along real well, and um a little bit of foreshadowing of you know what the whole point was gonna be. So that was basically what I started with, and then most of it just happened. Like I'd be sitting down doing something, and I'd go, Oh hey, oh, I need to go do this, and that that's I I guess that's how I write. Like, I'll I'll get stuck for a month and not really, and then all of a sudden I'm like, oh, and next thing you know, I'm writing like four chapters straight.

That sounds incredibly stressful.

Book five's coming along great. Book fine. It's totally fine.

I would spend so much time worrying about what I was gonna write in between those moments of inspiration.

No, not at all.

It works out well for you.

Oh, yeah, it works out great. Works out great. Let's just say that that two-month break I take after a release is is uh yeah. Let's read it. Yeah. I so on a positive note, like the next book, I do have the entire idea plan, everything. I'm writing and getting the chapters out. I've posted a couple on my Patreon, and uh um I'll be posting more. I'm also writing an expanded version of book one right now that's only on my Patreon. Uh fills in a lot of the details and um builds things up a little bit more. Um it's not crazy different, but there are some new scenes and new things that happen uh that I meant to put in and then forgot because, well, I'm old.

It's usually the way it goes. I would imagine that's especially true of people who are panthers or just have just generic rough drafts of the book. I would imagine that happens probably a lot.

I literally was like, that's not how I would do it.

So, what made you decide to do lit RPG versus just like a regular fantasy style book?

Well, I in the back of my head I had always thought about writing a book, but I never had an idea. When the idea hit, it hit like a bolt of thunder. And it literally just made sense because I was like, okay, I love this lit RPG stuff, which by the way, I had I didn't even read Dungeon Crawler Carl until I was almost done with book two. I didn't even know about it, oddly enough. Um and uh when I got the idea, uh, like I said, from Sean Oswald's work, he writes some great books. Oh my goodness. I just knew what I was gonna write.

What was the book that got you into LitRPG?

Oh, I don't remember the name of it. It was like 2020. It was a story about this guy who was going to work for uh some secretive company, and they basically threw him through a portal. So it was like a portal fantasy lit RPG titan. And uh there are like five books to it. He eventually gets back to Earth and has to fight and defeat the ultimate bosses and all of that. Um but that one really intrigued me. I had been reading mostly Sci-Fi and but it popped up on my Kindle of recommendations. I was like, this looks interesting. So and then I couldn't get enough.

That's usually how it happens. You find the one that gets you into it, and you're like, okay, well, now I'm here, and this is this is it.

Yeah, actually, if anybody knows, they'll send me an email because I can't remember the name of the series.

Hey, listen, we'll get some people on it. We'll find it for you. So in book one, we have a system apocalypse, we have some dungeon diving aspects because there are dungeons in the world. Uh, we have some base building where they have to build up the cities, which I thought was a really

Pantser Writing And Patreon Expansions

neat way. The way you integrated that into the story, I thought was really, really cool. Are we gonna see any other? I don't want to call them tropes because they're not necessarily tropes, but mechanics in future books.

Yeah, after book one, uh there's a couple of different points. There's a lot more that delves into manitech and how that works and creating things, and then Marie's unique set of skills builds up a kind of a different avenue. And then uh there's base building in book two, and then in book five that will be uh significantly more related to that, trying not to give out any spoilers.

Well, because in book one we see a good bit of the main initial town. They pick crafting classes. You know, you've got alchemist and blacksmith. I think there was a was there a woodwork or two?

Uh no, no. Um one of the characters does leather working. And the alchemy is different because it's actually bartending alchemy.

I mean, that's the best kind of alchemy. I know some people who would pick that class if that were the case.

Oh yeah.

So, how much more of the crafting side of things do we see later in the series?

Um, a good amount. Um, in book four, there's a huge amount of crafting, including beer. And plus, there's also uh Mikey's tale, uh, which takes place during the beginning of book three and during book one, and it introduces some of the other characters that you'll see. So it's kind of like book 2.5.

And that is its own uh little novella.

Yep.

What made you decide to give Mikey his own little side story?

I love Mikey to death. It's Michael Brogan, uh he is a bartender at champions and uh a really good friend of mine. He's goofy and he's awesome, and just like just like Goose in book one. What actually triggered it was while I was writing book three, there's a particular little thing where Mikey's like, hey, I've got a story to tell you, and nobody has time for it. And after I wrote that the beginning of that, I went, hmm, well, there's an idea. Yeah, and then I spun off and wrote the story, wrote that story, and it was like, okay, well, what do I do with this story? And then I've got a little farther into the book and was like, oh, what about this? Oh, I probably need to explain this. And then before you knew it, I had like all these stories, and was like, let's uh put them out. So, you know, if people want to know about all the side characters a bit more, they can.

Yeah. Do you think you'll have any novellas uh based around any of the other characters?

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I can think of three right off the top of my head.

So fantastic. And the novella, I believe, is that on is that on your website? Is that something separate that people can buy?

Yeah, it's on Amazon as an ebook. Um, and there's you can actually buy a hardback of it. The camera kind of narrowed in. All my books are over here, but uh uh it's like 60,000 words, 50,000 words right around there. So it's not like super thick or huge, but uh I had a lot of fun writing those.

Uh so audiobook for book one. That is coming out soon.

Yep, sure is. Um Fireside Audio is uh producing uh my entire series. It has both a male and female narrator,

Crafting Systems And Mikey’s Novella

full acting, uh, so it's not, you know, be aller type stuff.

Um that's always the worst with audiobooks.

Yes. Um my male narrator is uh Michael Norman Johnson. He's done tons of work and he's uh uh executive producer at Fireside Audio. And uh the female narrator that will be playing Marie and Sarah and all these other uh characters is Grace Noble. Uh she's a uh audioed uh, however, produced uh over a hundred books in fantasy, romance, adventure, uh whimsical stuff, does cool accents. Uh I was phenomenally lucky to land the two of them uh to narrate. And it the recording is complete. They're working on it. It should be going up on uh Audible for pre-order in the next few weeks.

Um that's exciting! So would they is there anything else that they have done that people would recognize?

Uh let's see. Grace did uh Madcaps of Mayfair, One Nation under Blackmail, The Sinful State series, uh Mike's done, Bonds of Fire, The System Apocalypse, Kissmet, Voices. Uh both of them have done a lot of uh romance as well as fantasy. So there's people who are into the romance who are listening. Uh they're they both have big followings. I think Grace has like 75,000 followers on TikTok. So um, once again, I I don't know how I got that lucky.

There seems to be a lot of crossover between litter PG narrators and romance narrators. They seem to do a lot of the same stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean uh Fireside's parent company, Flock. Um they're romance-based and they spun off Fireside Audio. And it's been very pleasurable working with them, very easy to get things set up. And uh I I I've just enjoyed the heck out of it. So I can't wait to hear. I mean, I've already heard some bits and snips.

I would imagine that it's much harder to narrate an audiobook than a lot of people think.

Yeah, yeah, you've got to give these guys props. I was trying, even trying to remember the voices for my own people, like you know, my son. And I'm like, I can't be consistent. How do they do this? Just the the work and effort and ability is insane. And both Mike and Grace did such an amazing job.

Uploaded. All right, let's see if this works.

Okay. System initiation complete. Welcome to the multiverse. Your planet has now been integrated into the system. Please review your status screen and familiarize. Your stuff. If your health drops to zero, you die. Good luck. Tutorial begins in three, two, error. Tutorial cancelled. Error. No, you die, girl! The Lich growled as it turned towards Sarah. It took a step forward, then another. Then its head fell off as Jack swung mightily with his sword glowing a vibrant purple, slicing clean through its neck. Black ooze poured from the stump of its neck as the body took two more steps before it too fell over. The creature dead at last. You have defeated a lich banker, Mini Boss, level 18. XP gained.

Oh, that sucked so much.

Sarah complained as she slowly limped out

Audiobook Production And Voice Choices

of the building, blood seeping down the side of her face.

The stole jar exploded when I hit it the third time. Fortunately, I brought it out of the vault before smashing it, since I got thrown into a desk and a chart of glass got stuck in my head. I can barely walk. Can someone give me a hand here?

Jack pulled out a fig bar and gave it to her. As she ate it, the shard literally popped out of her head, and they saw the gash close up and fade away.

Oh my god, now that is magic.

Beth gasped in shock.

There's not even a scar! How do you feel? I love it.

Like I said, the two of them was hearing it come to life like this just like I I can't describe the feeling. It's just insane.

They did a really good job. Did you give them any direction on how any of the voices were supposed to sound?

Yeah, like uh it's kind of interesting. They they gave me a character sheet, uh blank character sheet, and said, hey, if there's things you want specifically, fill this out. So I filled out the main characters and what my mind says they sound like, and the you know what the real people sound like, and uh they made it made it real. Like it's just crazy.

That is awesome. And so what is the actual date that the audio for book one's coming out?

Um, I don't know yet. It's um Mike's finishing up doing the uh edits, and they call them pickups when they need to re-record something because something's different or whatever. Um and then uh at that point it gets submitted to ACX, and ACX does whatever ACX does, and then they get a pre-ordered date uh announcement, and then the publishing date goes live. My best guess is somewhere between November 1st and 15th.

Okay.

So not not long, uh not long at all. And then uh I I'm assuming they'll start recording book two sometime right around then as well. So I don't know how fast they'll put each one out yet or any of that. But uh first time doing this, so I've asked been asking a lot of questions because I'm like, how does this work? What do we do?

That's very exciting. Yeah, they sound like they've done a fantastic job. Um, and it is, it's not very flat. The AI kind of has this game show host vibe to it.

My description for for that voice was do you remember Price was right? You know, the announcer for Bob Barker? That's what I want.

Is that really the description you gave them?

Yeah, that's what I did.

No, he nailed it then.

Yeah.

That was immediately where my mind went. I was like, this is very game show host.

Yeah, there's some others that I didn't like uh the McGeon uh Borgo. Uh his voice is cool. This voice is really cool.

That's exciting. I can't wait to listen to it.

Yeah.

That's gonna be good. So you're currently working on book four.

Five.

Five. Has book four come out? When I looked on your website, book four wasn't showing as released yet.

Yeah, I might not have been great about updating the book. It's updated now. It's got book four out and book five uh on the list, and Amazon even shows the pre-order for book six because they just recently gave authors the ability to plan their books out. Uh, I think it's 18 months now. So you'll start seeing a lot more authors that have two books in pre-order status.

Uh yeah, so book four is out. When do you think book five will be out?

Uh book five is scheduled to release on December 1st. If I finish early, it'll release a little earlier than that.

So, how many books do you think are going to be in the series?

One million.

Okay.

My best guess. My best guess right now is this series will be ten books. But I don't know, when I get to like book nine or ten, maybe it becomes twelve or fourteen or whatever. I'm also uh, I don't know if you've noticed on my on any of my stuff, but uh I'm also writing a second series uh that I'm working on right now that I'm hoping I will submit to a publisher. And that'll be a litRPG time regression novel set in 1988 in Germany.

Oh can you give us any details about that?

Um in the world apocalypse earth fails, something happens, he's sent back to his uh at the time uh 17-year-old body in Germany, and he's on Rammstein Airbase, uh, going to high school there. The system won't be around for five more years.

Oh, so he gets he knows it's coming, it's just not there yet, and he gets to prepare for it.

Yeah, so he's gonna be trying to find little pockets of magic and cultivating and doing pre-system stuff.

That's gonna be fun. That's exciting.

Yeah, it's another idea I had, and it's actually so I grew up in on Ramstein,

Release Dates New Projects And Series Length

went to high school there. It's my classmates. You wouldn't I posted, I I run our alumni group and I posted the idea to them, and I got like a hundred replies of oh, I want to be in the book.

Just like, oh that's usually what happens.

Yeah. So it's uh it's it's pretty cool, you know. Um the first two chapters, or first chapter, first two chapters are up on my Patreon now, too. Uh that one I'm taking a much slower approach. I don't plan on having that book done until like August of next year. Um because I've got book five and then book six to write uh between now and then, and maybe a side novel. Uh or another novella. Maybe it'll be bigger. I don't know. Um yeah, I know where book five is going. I know where book six is going for sure. I kind of have a general idea of w of where and when it'll end, but as far as how many books it takes to get there. Uh it is what it is. Yeah.

Yeah.

Uh I think that is all the questions that I had for you. Uh, was there anything that you wanted to mention that I did not ask about? Uh before we talk about where everyone can find you.

Yeah, no, just uh I hope you're enjoying. You know, for all the people out there, I really hope you're enjoying the books. I've been awed and humbled by uh some of the feedback and meeting people. Lit RPG Con, when somebody walked up to me with an autograph book with me in it, I literally cried.

It was a wild feeling.

Somebody walking up to you and going, Oh my god, I love your books. You're my favorite author.

Yeah.

Well, it's well deserved.

Thank you.

They're good.

Thank you, Bosch.

I finished one and I did not have two yet, and I was like, now what am I gonna do? I can't finish one and immediately start book two. I do. I have it now. I have it now, but when I finished book one, I had not had book two, I have not started book two yet. It is, I'm finishing my current one, and then it's the next one in the TBR. I like I bumped it up because I couldn't wait.

Tell me how you react in chapter seven.

Okay. Luckily, the one I'm reading now is very short, so I'll be finishing that one tonight or tomorrow. And then I'll be starting book two.

And book two is a little shorter than book one. Um and then book three is quite a bit longer, and book four is even longer than that. Wasn't my plan, but you know, you write the story, and then there's a logical spot to move on to the next story. And well, you know.

No, and one of the things that I really appreciated about your books is they're like normal book length.

My my target when I first started writing a book was 80 to 100,000 words. And uh I get right in at 86. The expanded version is probably gonna be 110, 120,000 words, and then I'm probably gonna do an expanded version of book two, because there's a number of things that I didn't put in there that I really wish I would have in retrospect. Um but yeah, my my target now these days is 100 to 110,000 words. I don't want them to be too long.

They like to write big books, 10 lit RPG. Big big books.

And and like and I'm not complaining by any means. I mean, they're great. Pretty much every lit RPG I've ever read has been really good. The authors out there, you know, Sean Hall, David Norris, Sean Oswald, Matt Dinneman. They're all like really good authors. Yeah. Now that I've met literally all of them, they're all really nice people.

Yeah.

It's crazy.

That's one of the beautiful things about um Lit RPG as a group, is everyone is just so nice and welcoming and helpful, and if there's anything you need, they're like, what can I do?

Yeah, all of them are really nice guys. So and all the people who do the podcast, you

Where To Find Greg And Closing

know, you guys are all great, and I felt incredibly welcome.

That's what we strive for. We're a welcoming bunch. Uh so where can everyone find you?

Uh, I'm right here in Gilbert, Arizona. Typically at champions on on Sundays and Tuesdays.

Uh so we're all gonna come hang out and go drinking at your bar.

Hey, she does alcohol in Gilbert. Um online, I've got uh, like I said, uh a Patreon, I've got TikTok, uh, I've got a website, gregackerlitterbg.com. Um if I fail to update something, it's not my fault. Uh uh. But uh, and then of course I'm on Amazon. The audiobook will be on Amazon for the first three months, and then it will go wide. And it'll be on basically every platform after the first three months. Feel free to pre-order it. I really like I I'm excited, so excited that it's it's just so good, like so far beyond what I could have hoped for. Um I think people really, really like it.

So yeah, I the that little teaser was fantastic. It's it's gonna be good.

Let me know after you've read chapter seven of book two. I will have another teaser to send you. But I won't send it to you. I won't let you hear it until after.

Got it. Expect that message in a couple of days then.

I'll just tell you this. I literally cried.

Oh no.

It was that good.

Definitely cry then.

It was tears of joy, but I cried. Oh my gosh. Let's just say Grace is amazing.

All these books making me cry, man.

That's our goal. It's it's specifically to make you cry.

I mean, it's it happens more than you would think. More than you would think.

I've I've definitely had some serious emotions in quite a few of these books as I've had them.

So yeah. Uh well, I will link to everything uh in the description of the video so people can easily find you. Uh I will link to your Patreon, your Amazon, and your TikTok and your website. Uh do you have a Facebook? Is that Yep. Okay, I'll link to your Facebook as well. Yeah, so I'll link to everything, make it easy for everyone.

Cool.

Uh Greg, thank you so much for coming on and hanging out with me. Thank you, everyone else, for sticking around and hanging out with us and keep leveling up.