Frank the Axe Ruined My Sleep Schedule

A guy buys out the entire head start and everyone hates him for it

Here’s the setup. Ned Altimer is a corporate burnout who wants out of his life so badly that when the VRMMORPG Earthblood Online announces a premium head start period, a few days where paying players get the game early, Ned doesn’t just buy one slot. He buys all of them. Every single head start spot, gone, snapped up by one guy with more money than sense and a bone-deep need to be first at something for once in his life. This immediately makes him public enemy number one among the entire playerbase, and honestly, fair.

As part of his ridiculous purchase, Ned gets bonded to a weapon with a mind of its own: a talking, bearded battle axe named Frank. Frank is not neutral. Frank has opinions. Frank hates mages, loves melee, and starts actively hiding better class options from Ned during character creation because Frank wants a fighter, not a spellslinger, and Frank does not believe in informed consent. So Ned starts the game mediocre, saddled with a weapon that sabotaged him on day one, in a world that already resents him for hoarding the good slots.

Then there’s the actual Ripple System, the mechanic the whole series is named for: certain major choices and world-altering events send a “ripple” through the game that spikes your stats in a big, sudden way. It’s a clever hook because it means the power fantasy isn’t just grinding, it’s about which moments actually matter, and Kirrin uses it to make some fairly quiet character beats hit like plot bombs. Once the head start ends, the other players want Frank for themselves, and things get considerably less cozy from there.

The banter either works on you or it doesn’t, and there’s no in between

Look, I need to be straight with you about something. The first hundred pages of this book rest almost entirely on whether you find Frank funny. He is sarcastic in that very specific internet-brained way a lot of newer LitRPG protagonists and their sidekicks are, and early on the jokes land a little soft. A few reviewers I trust bounced off this exact thing, expecting a breezy comedy and getting stiffer dialogue than they wanted for the first several chapters. I get it. I felt it too, a little.

Here’s the thing though. It gets better. Once Ned and Frank actually start needing each other, once the axe stops being a gimmick and starts being something closer to a genuinely aggravating, genuinely loyal friend, the banter clicks into something that felt, to me, actually earned. There’s a stretch in the middle of the book where Ned is getting hunted by other players who want Frank pried out of his hands, and the tension of “this axe that annoys me constantly is also the only thing keeping me alive” does real emotional work. I did not expect to care about an axe. I cared about the axe.

What doesn’t work as well: the sheer amount of game mechanic exposition. If you don’t already have some tolerance for stat screens, skill trees, and class system explanations, there are stretches here that will feel like reading a strategy guide with feelings. I don’t mind it, I grew up on this stuff, but I won’t pretend it’s for everybody. And Ned himself takes a while to become likeable. He starts the book as a genuinely selfish, somewhat pathetic guy who screwed over an entire playerbase because he wanted to feel important, and Kirrin doesn’t rush you past that. Some readers want their hero heroic from line one. This isn’t that.

Tangent, but I think this is actually the smartest choice in the book. A lot of progression fantasy leads are blank self-insert vessels you’re supposed to slot yourself into immediately. Ned isn’t that. He’s kind of a mess, kind of embarrassing, and the book makes you sit with that before it lets you root for him. It’s a slower burn than the genre usually offers, and I respect it even though it means the opening is rockier than I’d like.

I read most of this on a plane, the kind of flight where you’ve forgotten your headphones and you’re desperate for anything to make the middle seat bearable, and I remember specifically laughing hard enough at one of Frank’s insults that the guy next to me looked over. That’s a real memory, not a marketing line. It earned that laugh by the point I was at.

The best LitRPG sidekicks aren’t the ones who are always right, they’re the ones who are wrong in a way you can’t help but love anyway.

About Kyle Kirrin

Kyle Kirrin is a Baltimore writer who did not stumble into this genre by accident. Before Shadeslinger he’d already won first place in the international Writers of the Future contest, judged by a panel that included Orson Scott Card and David Farland, and he spent time as a first reader for Apex Magazine, which means the guy has read an enormous amount of slush before he ever wrote his own breakout book. The Ripple System is his debut series, and you can feel the craft instincts underneath the game mechanics, even in the rougher early chapters. He’s built the series out to six books and counting, which tells you the audience he found stuck around.

If Frank wrecked your week too, read these next

Try Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman if you want the same “sarcastic companion plus deadly game show” energy turned up to an absurd, gleeful volume. Try He Who Fights with Monsters by Shirtaloon if you want the slower-burn power growth with a lead who also starts out kind of unlikeable and earns it. And if it’s really the talking-weapon dynamic that got you, Cradle by Will Wight isn’t LitRPG but scratches the same “watch a nobody become terrifying” itch without any of the stat screens at all.

You can grab the book here: The Ripple System by Kyle Kirrin on Amazon.

For your book club

1. Ned buys out the entire head start knowing it’ll hurt other players. Does the book do enough to make you forgive him, or does that selfishness linger under the story the whole way through?
2. Frank sabotages Ned’s build without consent because Frank has his own preferences. Is that a betrayal of trust or just a weapon being what it is?
3. The Ripple System ties character power directly to meaningful choices rather than grinding. Do you think that’s a smarter design than typical LitRPG leveling, or does it let the story off easy?
4. Did the humor win you over, or did it feel like it was trying too hard? Where exactly did it turn for you, if it did?
5. Would you want to actually play Earthblood Online yourself, knowing what it does to the people who get sucked into it?