Apocalypse Stories
When someone wants to write a GameLit story set on Earth, usually they do this by triggering an apocalypse.
Making an educated guess, about half the time aliens are involved. A third of the time a demon realm breaks into reality. And the other 20% is reserved for unexplained zombies, divine disappointment, or the rare truly unique reason an author managed to come up with.
Everyone on Earth suddenly seeing blue boxes appear explaining “levels” and “classes” and whatnot usually leads to mass panic and death. And that’s not even including deaths from superpowered monsters that appear, too.
Overall, Earth gaining a System isn’t a good thing for humanity.
In alien apocalypse stories, usually the invaders make a point of saying the System is based off Earth-made video games. For our convenience. When it’s not, then somehow Earth-made video games are unknowingly based off the universal System.
Either way, it eventually comes up that humans, as the newest race to gain access to the System, are suuuuuuper underpowered compared to the rest of the galaxy. Thus, Earth is about to become a target for resource mining. Generally there’s a grace period while “nice” aliens train humans in how to not immediately die before the galactic dogpiling begins. Stories without the grace period, like Dungeon Crawler Carl, tend to be… grim.
Oddly, the aliens themselves aren’t usually a big part of the main plot. The stories focus on humans and how they fight to survive this new reality. They often cross over into HFY* territory, or whatever the exact opposite of that is for a more grimdark story.
*Humanity, Fuck Yeah!
I’ll admit I haven’t read many demon apocalypse stories. From what I gather, it involves portals and the magic tends to be more deck builder-y than LitRPG-y.
Basically, hundreds or thousands of portals to Hell (or The Underworld, or Hades, or whatever Bad Place the author is more comfortable with) open up all over Earth, letting demons of all shapes and sizes into the streets of our cities. The heroes in these stories have the overarching goal of figuring out how to shut the portals down. While killing hordes of creatures with a red and black aesthetic.
This gives the characters a solid goal to work towards, which is always handy for the author.
Zombie apocalypses may or may not be explained. Was a side effect of the System suddenly appearing a mass raising of the dead? Or did the dead coming back to life trigger the System appearing? Who cares! There’s an undead to your left and a +1 baseball bat to your right! Let’s goooo!!!
Look, good, gorey undead uprisings have a solid place in our media culture, and they need no introduction. Something happened. There are zombies. There are HP bars. Press [Start] to begin.
More rarely, the apocalypse will be triggered because the rapture (or equivalent) finally happened for realsies. For some reason the deity that yoinked all the Good People(™) gave everyone else a System.
All the Good People(™) are now up in the author’s version of heaven, eating popcorn as they watch the rest of humanity tear itself apart. There might be some kind of reward for the last couple hundred survivors, or they might be watching for Good Deeds(™) to pull other people up.
If they aren’t watching, then humanity is truly on its own, abandoned to its sin and vice.
I always got the sense that the authors of these stories are the people who say they “escaped” one religion or other. To write this type of thing you kind of need deep knowledge of religious beliefs and opinions on them.
Other than those, there’s the occasional evolution-related apocalypse, or a rediscovering-of-magic apocalypse, but those are fairly rare. In this subgenre. Outside of it there are plenty of other reasons for an apocalypse that have nothing to do with blue boxes manifesting.
Overall, I’d say apocalypse stories make a good balance for isekai stories. They both answer the question of “how did the main character get magic”, but apocalypse stories almost always keep a sense of home.
The characters sometimes have their own house or apartment to return to at the end of the day. They usually know the streets of the city they’re in. They know where to find food and other supplies. They generally have a friend or group of friends around them. Their family is somewhere around, and a subplot is finding them. There’s a sense that the world has changed forever, and this needs to be accepted.
Whereas in isekai everything is new and unfamiliar. The character is usually alone for the first couple of chapters, and cut off from friends and family permanently. The world they came from continues on the same, barely noticing their absence, and knowing that can be a comfort to the character.
The stories have similarities, but the effects on the characters are vastly different.
So yeah, why not make your next story an apocalypse? Could be fun!