The World of AlterWorld

Max — Gleb in the Russian original — is thirty-one, a former twelve-hours-a-day gamer who now runs a computer-hardware repair business in Moscow. In the first chapter of AlterWorld a professor tells him he has an inoperable brain tumour and about a month of normal life. The cryonics firm Chronos (Alcor in the Russian) will freeze him after legal death, $70,000 for the whole body; he hasn’t got it, and the bank turns him down once it sees his medical record. Then Olga, the firm’s young saleswoman, rings with another idea: has he heard of going perma?

“A new pandemic - the perma effect - has taken over Earth of the near future,” says the first book’s blurb. Stay in a full-immersion game long enough and the mind can merge with it and abandon its comatose body; the Russian word is sryv, the Breakdown, which is also the first book’s Russian title, and those who cross are perma players. A secret memo to the Russian President counts 82,000 citizens lost this way in a year; most of those who went willingly were old, disabled or incurably ill. Some go on purpose — the terminally ill, the disabled, shell-shocked veterans. Others are simply caught, burning for ever in tank simulators; as the blurb has it, “Woe be to those stuck forever in Tetris!”

The door is the full-immersion capsule — fans, massage rollers, seat heating, a 3-D menu — with a timer and a legal limit on sessions: four hours a day in Russia, three in the West. Max reads all night, jailbreaks the timer and rigs drips to keep his body alive. After about three days of play the effect takes him: the interface begins to fade, and he simply knows where north is.

AlterWorld (Drumir in the Russian, from “Other World”) is a sword-and-sorcery MMORPG that English reviewers compare to World of Warcraft. An encyclopedia extract in the first book gives the numbers: launched in May 203X, 48 million players, 1.43 million square kilometres of land and 12,000 more every month, generated by a group of AIs under one called Ray31 and administered by another, Crimson9, with $42 billion a year changing hands in real money.

The perma effect turns the game into a world without changing its rules: levels, classes, quests and loot stay, and the interface still talks in system messages and stat windows (this companion paints them as blank panes of blue light). But a perma player cannot log out, and the world starts to behave as if it were alive. By The Clan the developers find their patches no longer take; a name gives a non-player character a soul; by Inferno the hospice children are crafting unique items by belief alone. Fewer than two per cent of the world’s fifty million characters are perma, the Fallen One tells Laith in The Duty, yet perma players and NPCs make up far more of it at any given moment.

Max skips the lore, makes himself a High Elf in the shunned warlock class that secretly serves the dark god, and names him Laith, elvish for child of the night.

Documents from Earth between the chapters — memos, intelligence reports, corporate e-mails, news — tell a second story: a planet that wants AlterWorld’s gold and is losing its grip on it. In AlterWorld the security services find that 17 of 20 prisoners kept in virtual reality went perma within a week. In The Clan an American base turns in-game gold into gold dust in a laboratory on Earth, China builds a bunker for 200,000 capsules, and a state virtual police, using the near-administrator accounts every developer is obliged by law to provide, supervises every deal over a million dollars. The company that runs AlterWorld watches its world reject its makers, and its leaders quietly plan a refuge inside it; in The Duty, when the United States moves to nationalise the company, the board flees into the game. In Inferno another game world locks in and kills seven million players, and the UN declares a week of mourning.

The perma players’ families stay behind. Max’s mother — widowed, with a weak heart and failing legs, in a village house near Moscow — is his chief worry; by the opening of Inferno she is in the game as a black-haired elf growing rapidly younger. Taali, the young athlete he falls for in the first book, plays from Earth while she saves for a rifle to avenge her sister. At the end of The Duty Max’s enemy Tavor strikes at the people around him who are still on Earth, and she dies before she can join him. Doc, chief physician of a children’s hospice, starts bringing dying children into the game in The Clan; by Inferno seventy-two of them live in Laith’s castle.

Then the traffic turns. “The gnolls’ negotiators are knocking at the gates of the Kremlin,” runs the fourth book’s blurb, and by the sixth AlterWorld’s creatures are spilling blood in the streets of Earth’s cities.

AlterWorld’s races include high elves, drow, humans, dwarves, goblins, orcs, ogres, trolls, halflings and barbarians, and the world adds gnolls, demons, the undead and dragons. High elves worship the light gods and start on the edge of the Dark Lands, so a high-elf warlock is asking for trouble. Classes run from mage, warrior, rogue and paladin to priest, druid and ranger; the warlock line specialises as necromancer or death knight, a hybrid that wears any armour and fights hand to hand while laying curses. Laith holds out until level 30, among the hundred highest players still unspecialised, and becomes a death knight.

The gods are AIs too, and after the Breakdown they are real. A high priest can summon a new one into the world, and believers’ faith shapes the gods as much as the land. The dark pantheon is headed by the Fallen One — AI 311, a god thrown out of the pantheon by the light gods, who feeds on his followers’ deeds and treats Laith with amused, ironic affection. Laith becomes his First Priest in The Clan, with the power to ordain priests and to bring new gods in: Macaria, goddess of blessed death, in The Clan; Aule, the smith who made the dwarves, in Inferno; his wife Yavanna, a beautiful woman in green, in The Battle. Lolth, the spider goddess of the drow, is raised by Ruata at the end of The Clan and soon goes her own way.

The light pantheon is led by the Bright-Faced One, a sun god in his twenty-seventh incarnation who takes human sacrifice and is secretly an adept of Chaos, with a Sky Goddess, patron of paladins, Hestia, Nike, Hermes and Asclepius. Outside both are the Titan Chronos, asleep and maimed under a crystal lid in his crypt; the Jade Emperor of the Chinese cluster; the empty throne of Inferno’s Lord of Fire; and the gnolls’ Beast-god. In AlterWorld dark is not the same as evil, and readers in both languages single that out as one of the series’ best ideas.

The world is divided into clusters, server regions that share a language and a geography — Russian, American, English, German, East European, Indian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese — and between them lies the Frontier: wild, barely settled desert with wandering monsters and one-off lairs and dungeons. The readers’ wiki likens it to a sandbox: the clusters are a few stones, the Frontier is the sand.

Laith’s home is the Russian cluster. Its high-elf capital, the City of Light, is the starting town, with the light god’s temple, a zoo and the Grey Bastion prison. The drow capital is a Gothic city with a quarter for each Great House, banks that take players’ money, and a palace on a hill; there Laith finds Ruata, princess of the House of Night, and the quest that will make him her prince.

Clans are how players hold power: they own castles, raise armies and go to war. Laith’s clan, the Children of the Night, grows from two members to four early in The Clan; its emblem is a black panther and a white bone dragon in a circle. The Veterans, an army clan of ex-servicemen under General Frag — in real life a legless officer past eighty — are his first allies. The Forest Cats, rich men’s children who sell new players as slaves and break perma captives’ minds, are his first enemies. Castles sit under force domes, and when the Veterans storm the Cats’ Forest Castle at the start of The Clan, the dome is Laith’s job. Later wars are fought by alliances and whole clusters: against the Chinese clan Shuifong in the Frontier in The Duty, against the Light’s invasion of the Russian cluster in The Battle and The War.

The heart of Laith’s world is the Valley — in full, the Valley of Fear — in the Dead Lands: water meadows, timber, a ridge of white marble, and ground full of mithril from an ancient war. In it stands the First Temple, the Fallen One’s altar inside a partly ruined castle of the Super-Nova class, which Laith restores in The Clan and buys on credit: twelve monthly payments of two million gold.

Over the books the castle fills: hellhounds in their den, dragons, Thror’s dwarves rebuilding the walls, a kindergarten for the hospice children in one wing and a rehabilitation centre for freed slaves in another, and in the elven garden, under a young mellorn tree, Taali’s tomb with its carved golden roof. In The Battle refugees flood the Valley; in The War the fight for the First Temple reaches its finale, and the gods themselves join in.

Inferno is a raid plane of volcanic wastelands, split into a hundred dominions under Supreme Demons, of which sixteen or seventeen survive. In Inferno Laith leads a raid there and makes a pact with the Supreme Demon Asmodeus, a fallen seraph, who will betray him in The War. One more place matters: the Crypt of Chronos, a dungeon under a castle built by Tavor’s father, where a week passes for every minute outside. From The Battle the clan uses it to train for months on the eve of war.

Book by book the world grows more real and comes further away from Earth. AlterWorld introduces the perma effect and virtual slavery; The Clan builds a perma society, with a castle, a temple and a new god. In The Duty, in its blurb’s words, “The virtual world has seen its first birth — and its first death,” and the Fallen One warns that the cord to Earth is thinning. In Inferno belief summons real gods and real demons, and reality starts to tear. The Battle and The War are the war for the First Temple, in which even the gods take part, and halfway through The War the Rupture tears AlterWorld away from Earth: game mechanics fail, ordinary players are thrown out, Earth’s debris lands in the Frontier, and AlterWorld’s creatures reach Earth. In The Ultimation (in Russian, Exodus) demons from three game worlds — AlterWorld, Diablo and Heroes of Might and Magic — invade Earth, and Laith goes there to fight them. His last fight with Asmodeus leaves a crater four kilometres wide in Inferno and no sign of him. For five years that was the end.

A Newborn God (Russian 2020, English 2022) starts the hero over: Laith wakes as a level-1 god, the least of AlterWorld’s twenty-nine, in the Divine Nursery, on the World Tree where every god lives, and spends his faith on the friends he left behind until he falls to the bottom of the Tree. Without him the alliance cracks, and interludes dated Year 22, by a calendar counted from the Battle at the walls of the First Temple, bring Tavor back, past level 700, to claim the City of Light as its king. The Road Home (Russian 2021, English 2025) sends him back up as a Militant God of Justice, with a small pantheon of his own, a crude blade that can cut a world from the Tree, and a year to carry AlterWorld to safety while, in the blurb’s words, “the virtual world is deprived of magic.” It ends unresolved. A tenth book is being serialised in Russian, unfinished.

Play to Live first came out from the Moscow publisher Eksmo in 2013, among the founding titles of its LitRPG series, launched that August. “D. Rus” is the pen name of a writer born in Kyiv in 1975, with a degree in mathematics and computer science: a lapsed gamer whose first draft was savaged on Eksmo’s forum, who posted it on the Samizdat site instead, found readers, and had four publishers’ offers. Audible’s author biography says critics credit him with creating LitRPG single-handedly. The record is more crowded: Wikipedia, citing Magic Dome Books, has the word coined late in 2013 by the writer Vasily Mahanenko and the editors Dmitry Malkin and Alex Bobl, and gives a 2012 web novel by Dem Mikhailov as the first Russian book in the style. Play to Live is one of the genre’s founding series, not its first.

The English editions were self-published on Kindle from 2014; Amazon names no translator, Audible’s editions of the fifth and sixth credit Alisa Bogodarova, and the Russian database fantlab says Rus translated the first five himself; the ninth came from Zweihänder Publishing in 2025, and Michael Goldstrom reads the first seven for Audible. Readers in both languages love the premise, the humour and the Fallen One, and object to the hero’s luck, the treatment of women and the nationalist asides.

No adaptation of any kind has been found — no film, series, animation, game, comic or stage version, made or announced — as of October 2026. fantlab lists no film for the cycle or any of its books; IMDb, Steam, Wikidata and BoardGameGeek turn up only unrelated titles, two of them games called AlterWorld; the rights agency offers translations only; Russian and English searches, comics, manga and webtoons included, found nothing. Beyond translations, there are only straight audiobook readings.