How we read, rate, and edit

This page is the short version of how the site works, so you know what a score means before you trust one.

We only review what we read

Every review on the site covers a series that has been read in full, in at least one format, by the time it goes up. We do not review books we have not finished, and we do not score a series off its blurb or its first chapter. Reviews cover the whole published run, not just book one, which is why each series page shows the per-book lengths: you can see exactly what you are signing up for.

The verdict scale

Scores run 0 to 10, and we map them onto the genre's own rarity ladder so a verdict reads at a glance. A score is a judgment, not an average of star ratings from somewhere else.

Under the headline number, each review breaks the call into the axes a LitRPG reader cares about: story, prose, the progression system, characters, and narration. A high system score and a low prose score tell you something an average never could.

Spoilers

The review is the spoiler-free front door, no major reveals in the body, the title, the description, or the preview image. Anything that would spoil a reveal lives on a separate, clearly marked reference page that states the earliest book it is safe to read from. You set how far you have read once, and the reference pages hide anything past that point until you move the marker. We treat a spoiler leaking into the wrong place as a serious error.

Facts and citations

Book facts (book count, length, narrator, status, release dates) come from the work itself and from the author or publisher, not from scraping a rating site. On the deep reference pages, factual claims cite the book and chapter they come from, so you can check our work. When we cannot verify a fact, we leave it off the page rather than guess. We never invent a detail to fill a gap.

Our ratings are ours

The score on a series page reflects our own reading and nothing else. We do not pull in Amazon, Goodreads, or Audible star averages, and we do not present anyone else's aggregate as if it were ours. If you see a rating here, a person who read the series put it there.

Independence

No publisher or author pays for a review, a score, or a spot in a list. The where-to-read links are plain and untracked, not affiliate links, and they have no bearing on how a series is rated or ranked. If that ever changes, this page changes with it and the change is disclosed in plain language before any link does anything different.

Corrections

We get things wrong sometimes, a number, a narrator credit, a spoiler in the wrong spot. If you spot one, tell us and we will fix it and say so.