Knight in a Strange Realm: A Post-Apocalypse Reincarnation Isekai Light Novel Portal Fantasy GameLit LitRPG Progression Adventure

A man stays up late after work playing RPG video games and getting high and eating pizza when he is suddenly transported to a magical fantasy realm. He learns that he is now inside a fantasy RPG video game, his character is a Level 1 Human Knight, and he has a main quest: defeat the Four Accusations, also known as the four Emperors of the Elements, the four evil demons who rule the Four Realms: Emerald, who rules Earth Land, Ruby, who rules Fire Land, Sapphire, who rules Water Land, and Diamond, who rules Air Land. If he does, he wins access to the secret fifth Realm, the Dark Land, where he will face the final boss, the Accuser.
Along his journey, the hero will encounter many monsters and traps, and he can only get past each obstacle using one specific combo of attacks, items, and abilities, so he will have to figure out the right strategy for how to solve each puzzle to reach the next step and progress through his quest as he travels around the Four Realms. He'll need to find the right items, level up to get the stats he needs, and master his different moves and abilities and attacks, but there is one thing he won't need: pants! Because he's already wearing some. He'll also meet a talking dog and talking cat, help some angels as part of a side quest, get dragged into a war between two rival guilds, and then at the end he'll learn that this game he's in is really Hell and he has to defeat the seven deadly sins to escape, because Emerald is the lord of gluttony, sloth, and greed, Ruby is the queen of lust and envy, Sapphire is the goddess of wrath, and Diamond is the king of pride, and the Accuser is the ruler of Hell, and he must defeat them all and win the game to be able to return to Earth or reach Heaven or go wherever it is he is going to go. And if he does not, he'll be trapped inside the game forever.
This novel is a crunchy LitRPG with explicit stats and an explicit combat system with a single main character, a party of NPCs, five dungeons to clear, and five dungeon bosses to defeat, set in an epic high fantasy setting that's actually the inside of a fantasy RPG video game which the hero gets sucked into at the start of the story. The arc is the hero's progression through the game: there is no romance subplot, and no subplots involving politics, however, the final boss is literally the Devil, so the arc does touch upon issues of ethics and morality. The entire series is set in one RPG video game, and the story ends when the hero defeats the final boss (or fails and dies, you'll have to read to find out what happens!). Also, one of the NPCs in the hero's party is queer/non-binary, although the hero himself is a cisgender hetero straight man. It has a few elements of horror and foul language but it's not looking to shock the reader, and it has a lot of stuff that's cute and funny. Be warned that there are some info dumps along the way which explain the RPG system and how the combat system works. The system in the novel is actually a custom bespoke system based on a mashup of two real tabletop role-playing game systems (both open source), the d20 System and the Powered by the Apocalypse System, but converted into a video game RPG system.

Russell Hasan was born the son of a white Jewish mother and a dark-skinned Muslim father—and that isn't the strangest thing about him. His father had ties to the mafia—nope, not the weirdest thing about him. He thought he was a gay man for many years before realizing he is agender asexual—relatively normal compared to what truly makes him strange. Do you want to know what the weirdest, strangest thing about Russell is?
He's a WRITER.
Yes, that's right. He writes. Why? How? Why would he want to do that to himself? How could he allow this to happen to himself? He is still trying to figure that one out. Therapy can cure lots of things and alcohol and drugs can cure other things, but the only cure for being a writer is to write, so he writes. He's not into BDSM, yet for some reason he has chosen to punish himself by having a passion for writing and a need to write. Despite having made the huge mistake of choosing to be a writer, his books have sold over 10,000 copies, so perhaps it was not the worst mistake he ever made after all. He does not have one particular bestseller but has instead spread those 10,000 sales across many books he wrote. His magical journey of self-torture begins when he has the idea for a new book, and then continues when he wakes up at 6am to write from 6am to 8am before work every day (he has a day job—he's not insane! His day job is being a lawyer, the most boring, evil job in the world, by the way), and, after many cups of Starbucks matcha tea and Coca Cola (never Pepsi—yuck!) he somehow puts words onto a page. He has written 30 books, both nonfiction and fiction, but, as something of a twist on the traditional successful indie author model, he is known more for his indie nonfiction, not his fiction. But he does write fiction. Some of his fiction is good too, probably, he hopes.