On a desert world a village struggles to survive. Pell's passion is deciphering the odd bits and pieces that the Ancients left behind. Her neighbors consider it a waste of time and would rather melt the artifacts down for the metal they so desperately need. Everything changes when a stranger, the first Pell has ever met, asks her to help repair Ancient machines in what the villagers thought was an impenetrable Tower. Driven by curiosity to see inside the Tower, and Moseus' promise of payment in the form of scrap metal, she agrees. In the Tower she finds three Ancient machines, all larger and far more complex than anything she has seen before. She also meets the other inhabitant of the Tower, Heartwood, and she wants to decipher his mercurial moods as much as she wants to know what the machines actually do. Almost immediately she begins to have visions, or maybe memories, of the Tower and its inhabitants, which draw her ever deeper into the mysteries of the Ancients, a tale of warring gods, and the history of the village of Emgarden.

As the centuries go by, even Hadrian Marlowe is beginning to get old. His expertly crafted palatine genome, and the cryo sleep he has endured while traveling through space, can only extend his life so far, and Marlowe is now over 600 years old. It has been two centuries since he struck the emperor and fled imperial space to Jadd, leaving behind a war and political intrigue for the life of a fugitive. He has certainly enjoyed his time on Jadd, especially the last 40 years raising his daughter Cassandra. She is a skilled warrior who has learned swordplay from the famed Maeskoloi of Jadd, but she knows little of the dangers that exist beyond this planet. So when an Imperial messenger arrives with a pardon and calls Marlowe back into service in a war that humanity is losing, he has no desire to accept. But he must, because if he does not, there will be no future for any human, and that includes his Cassandra.

A man wakes up with no memories and is horrified to find himself in a room that clearly belongs to a dark wizard given its decor. He's even more horrified to discover that he himself is the dark wizard who styles himself Dread Lord Gavrax. He's a middle aged mediocre dark wizard living in a tiny castle above a pathetic village served by goblins and a creepy majordomo who mostly talks about torturing people. Gav even has a princess locked away in the dungeon. Unfortunately, he can't just free the princess and sneak away to live anonymously because it seems she's a component in a ritual that he agreed to participate in with three other, far more impressive, dark wizards. If he fails to show up with the princess they will obviously hunt him down and kill him slowly, but the more he learns about this ritual the more wary he is about participating, let alone sacrificing an innocent woman.

The 7th floor of the dungeon was abruptly destroyed, so instead of the 7th floor this book takes place on the 8th, known as The Ghosts of Earth. Each team's leader must pick a location to start, and despite being well prepared for the Bahamas, Carl and Donut wind up in Cuba because Donut isn't exactly great at geography. Because no crawlers were eliminated on the aborted 7th floor, the AI has made the floor extra deadly in an attempt to dwindle down the number of crawlers before the 9th floor Faction Wars. This level requires the crawlers to collect monsters ala Pokemon in order to build out the decks they will use to combat other crawlers and NPCs in a real time version of Magic the Gathering. Of course, every part of this is done in a ridiculous over the top manner that culminates in an insane multiplayer card battle with everything at stake.

Thanks to our favorite science fiction franchises we most frequently imagine alien intelligence to be humanoid, or at least an animal capable of communicating in some way. What humans find on the planet they call Pax is such a different life form that neither side truly understands what they are dealing with, and how they will both forever be altered by the relationship. To the colonists who fled a dying Earth with the idealistic intention to adapt themselves to their new environment, rather than the opposite, their new home looks like paradise. Pax has a breathable atmosphere, plenty of water, only slightly higher gravity than Earth norm, and abundant flora and fauna. Too late one of the colonists realizes that to the "plants" on this new world humans will only be tolerated based on what they can offer, and that they need to choose their new allies carefully if they wish to survive. Semiosis is a long tale of how each generation changes as they adapt to Pax and their evolving relationship with the photosynthesizing sentience known as Stevland.

The sixth floor of the dungeon is identical in size and layout to the 3rd floor, but the same cities that were bustling with NPCs on floor 3 now lie in ruins and are infested with hundreds of years of overgrowth. This level is called The Hunting Grounds, and it features hunters that try to kill the crawlers in order to take their gear. The hunters use the gear to outfit their respective factions down on the 9th floor, and there are also freelancers that collect gear to sell to the highest bidder. The hunters all start at level 50, but they can kill NPC mobs to level up just like the crawlers do. After 17 days of hunting and killing each other, the level culminates in the Butcher's Masquerade, which is a party attended by the remaining hunters and the top 50 crawlers. What could possibly go wrong there?

Wexler, best known for his gunpowder fantasy series The Shadow Campaigns, takes on the the LitRPG genre with this humorous tale about a human woman who is summoned into a fantasy world as a savior, but winds up failing and dying horribly. Repeatedly. However, she's determined to not only be on the winning side, but also to get herself chosen as the Dark Lord themself. Davi has approximately two months to recruit some Wilder followers and cross most of the map before the convocation that will choose the next Dark Lord. After her many lives. and deaths, she knows every inch of the human Kingdom, including the location of the nearest camp of Wilders, but she knows almost nothing about the Wilds themselves. Or how the convocation actually chooses a Dark Lord. No problem. After all, what's the worst thing that can happen? She'll just find herself back in an ice cold pond listening to a doddering old wizard's long winded speech again and hope she doesn't make the same mistake again. Yes, there's a lot of dying, a lot of swearing, lots of sex off screen, and thousands of confused Wilders along the way.

Since Carl and Donut were able to overcome the complexity of the 4th floor by creating group chats that helped the crawlers share information, the AI that runs the world dungeon has responded by making some adjustments. The 5th floor is now a myriad of unique instanced zones (bubbles) and no new groups can be formed by the crawlers. The crawlers themselves will be evenly distributed across the bubbles, and since Carl and Donut are two of the highest level crawlers, that means they will be sharing their bubble with a bunch of I-can't-believe-these-idiots-are-still-alive n00bs. Each bubble has 4 quadrants within it (air, land, water, and subterranean) and each one has a challenge that must be overcome before the crawlers can move on to another one. Carl and Donut wind up starting in the air quadrant, which is good since cats and water don't mix, but that is just delaying the inevitable for Donut. Before Donut finds herself submerged, they first have to deal with the Dirigible Gnomes, who are using their insanely designed aircraft to bomb the hell out of camel like race that lives beneath them.

After bringing the corruption of her former boss at the San Francisco office of The Protectorate to light, and getting him fired, Alma Bellrose is dismayed to learn that a famed demon hunter will be replacing him. She knows that they keep tabs on her and the changeling she once saved from execution, Sebastien, so to distract The Protectorate she agrees to go undercover at a week-long party hosted by well-known witches. Right off Alma knows something is wrong when she doesn't see any fae on the property, a sure sign that a "demon", or more correctly, a possessing spirit is present. But seriously, all of these people are behaving suspiciously, except the actual "demon," and it's not long until the bodies start to pile up, starting with the hostess apparently committing suicide.

Carl and Donut are both on the newly introduced leader board, but like everything else in the dungeon, that comes with a downside. Everyone in the top 10 now has a bounty placed on their head encouraging the other crawlers to take them out via PvP. Of course, the leader board is just another way for the alien corporation running this apocalyptic game show to make money, and various sponsors now vie for the rights to each crawler. Carl and Donut both get sponsored, which opens up the possibility of sponsor and fan provided loot boxes, which they are both going to need. The 4th floor is known as the Iron Tangle, and it was clearly designed to disorient the crawlers. It is a mess of a multi train underground railway system with numerous tracks and junctions that intersect in an unpredictable way. Each group of crawlers arrives on the floor in a train filled with monsters, and more monsters get on and off the train each time it arrives at a new station. It makes you wonder what happens if the train gets to the end of the line?