litRPG vs. Progression Fantasy vs. Cultivation: Three Labels, One Simple Test

September 18, 2026

One of my framing guys caught me reading on my lunch break and asked what it was.

“Progression fantasy,” I said.

He asked if that was the same as litRPG. Sort of. Then he asked what cultivation meant, and I said “uh” — which is a heck of a way to talk somebody into a genre.

So I went and did the homework. What follows is the version I wish I’d had in that truck: no gatekeeping, no nine-hundred-comment forum thread where four guys argue about a definition until everybody leaves.

The one-liners

litRPG — the game rules are right there on the page. Levels, stats, skills, and little pop-up messages telling the hero he just got stronger. If you’ve ever played a video game, you already know how to read it. I wrote a whole plain-English intro to litRPG if you want the long version.

Progression fantasy — the hero gets visibly stronger, and that climb is the story. No scoreboard required. Training, practising, figuring out the rules of the magic and then breaking them.

Cultivation — the hero pulls energy out of the world into his own body, refines it, and pushes up through ranked stages toward something like immortality. Borrowed straight from Chinese fantasy fiction.

That’s the elevator version. Now the useful part.

The test that sorts it in one question

Here’s something almost nobody mentions: progression fantasy has a birthday.

February 2019. The author Andrew Rowe put up a blog post saying that he and fellow writer Will Wight had been making books that didn’t fit anywhere — the best labels going were “almost litRPG” and “inspired by xianxia,” and neither one was right. Somebody named Jess Richards suggested a better one. Rowe ran with it, and here we all are.

In that same post he gave a test I’ve never seen beaten:

Could the book-three version of the hero beat the book-one version of the hero in a fight?

That’s it. If yes, you’re holding progression fantasy. If the hero is basically the same guy at the end that he was on page one — wiser, maybe, but not stronger — it isn’t, no matter how much magic got spilled along the way.

I like that test the way I like a framing square. It doesn’t have an opinion about your taste. You just hold it up to the thing and look.

What each one actually feels like

litRPG feels like the numbers are part of the fun. You watch the hero’s strength go from 4 to 11 and you feel it, the same way you feel a level-up in a game. Some readers love that. Some readers’ eyes slide right off a block of stats, and that’s fine — those folks want the next lane over.

Progression fantasy feels like watching somebody get genuinely good at something. The magic has rules. The hero studies them, tests them, gets beaten by somebody who knows them better, goes away and gets better. Rowe points out that Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive fits progression fantasy and none of the other labels on this page, which tells you the tent is bigger than the internet makes it sound.

Cultivation feels like a ladder with a whole world built around it. The energy is usually called qi — think of it as the power running through everything, which you can learn to breathe in and pack into yourself. You gather it, refine it, and hit a wall. Then you break through the wall into the next named rank, and everyone can tell what rank you are, and they treat you accordingly. There are sects and elders and old masters, alchemy pills that speed you up, and at the big breakthroughs a “heavenly tribulation” — lightning out of the sky, testing whether you’ve earned the next rung.

Two words worth knowing while you’re in that section of the shelf. Xianxia means roughly “immortal heroes” and goes cosmic: flying on swords, cracking mountains, living for thousands of years. Wuxia means “martial heroes” and stays human-sized — rooftop leaps and secret manuals and a code of honour, but nobody’s becoming a god. Cultivation shows up all over xianxia. It’s the engine under the hood.

So which one do you want tonight?

Pick by mood, not by label.

If what you want is the scoreboard — the loot, the skill you didn’t have last chapter, the plain animal satisfaction of a number going up — that’s litRPG, and you should stop reading this and go get one.

Rather watch somebody just get good at something, without reading a spreadsheet to do it? Progression fantasy.

And if you want the long climb — ranks, old masters, a whole world where everybody’s measured on the same ladder and knows exactly where they stand on it — go cultivation.

One first book per lane

litRPG: Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. A regular guy, his ex-girlfriend’s cat, and an alien game show that turns the planet into a dungeon with a live audience. It is funnier and sadder than the title has any right to be. I made the full case for it here, and if you’d rather sample three litRPGs before committing to a long series, that’s the starter pack.

Progression fantasy: Mother of Learning by Domagoj Kurmaić. A magic student named Zorian is killed the night his city gets invaded, and wakes up at the start of the same month. Again. He’s stuck in the loop, so he uses it — month after month, learning things nobody could learn in one lifetime. Kurmaić posted it online for free starting in 2011 and finished it in 2020, and a publisher called Wraithmarked later put it out in four fat print volumes. No stat screens anywhere. Rowe himself uses it as an example of the genre.

Cultivation: Unsouled by Will Wight — book one of Cradle. A kid named Lindon is born “Unsouled,” which his clan uses to mean too weak to bother with, and he goes out into a much bigger world to prove them wrong. Wight even renames the energy: in Cradle it’s madra, not qi. Two things make this the easy recommendation. Book one came out in 2016, the twelfth and last one landed in 2023, so you can start it knowing it actually finishes. And it’s written for a reader who’s never touched Chinese fantasy in his life.

The overlap nobody agrees on

I’m not going to pretend these lines are crisp, because they aren’t.

The progression-fantasy crowd will tell you that all litRPG is progression fantasy, and by their own definition they’re right — a stat screen is just one way to show a power curve. Plenty of litRPG readers have never once thought about this and are having a great time anyway.

Cradle is cultivation. Cradle is also the example Rowe reaches for when he explains progression fantasy. Both true. He said in that first post that the term overlaps litRPG, xianxia, and even shonen battle manga, and that a book doesn’t have to belong to any of them to count.

Which is the part I’d underline if I were you. These labels are a shelf, not a fence. They exist to help you find the next book you’ll like, and the moment one of them starts doing anything other than that, somebody’s using it wrong.

My framing guy took Dungeon Crawler Carl, for what it’s worth. He hasn’t asked me a single genre question since. He just asks when the next one’s out.