Christopher Sinclair goes out for a walk on a mild Arizona evening and never comes back. He stumbles into a freezing winter under an impossible night sky, where magic is real -- but bought at a terrible price.

That brings me to the thing that just barely keeps this from being a LitRPG story. Realism. Within the story are all the elements of LitRPG: leveling, experience points, alignment, classes and spell points. They’re all just called different things and pushed into the background for the sake of realism in the story.