Hey all, glad to see you're following my first published story! Here's the obligatory branch notes section where I ramble about what you can expect to see in this branch, both smut and otherwise, in case anyone cares about this stuff. I'll likely also add up-to-date character sheets for the major characters, dungeon features, and so forth if/when I get around to it.

Tone

Our hero is definitely evil (I mean, he's literally a demon) but I hope to keep the tone fun, moving between silly and at most standard fantasy levels of seriousness. The evil will mostly involve general monstering and the usual fetish stuff (MC, corruption etc) and nothing that's likely to bother anyone on chyoa.

I plan to have a mix of dungeon building/defending content and questing content. Probably leaning more heavily towards questing at the start and transitioning to more dungeon-based as the dungeon gets large and noteworthy enough to generate a steady influx of adventurers, but we'll see how it shakes out.

Smut

This story already contains some light corruption and mind control elements, albeit fairly fast-paced by corruption standards since I want to expand the roster for now! Obviously it'll have harem content in the future as well. Most "standard" stuff will probably show up at one point or another.

I plan to introduce some less common kinks as well: likely futas, slightly more monstrous monstergirls, and possibly some other stuff (TBD). I'll make an effort to clearly mark such chapters since I know it isn't everyone's cup of tea.

I also plan to have some transformation of the outsiders (demons etc) in the story. Not sure if that counts as smut or not since it isn't inherently sexual but their forms will obviously be chosen keeping in mind that this is smut. In any event, our imp friend won't be 2ft tall forever.

Other branches

I've kept a lot of ideas—and some characters—from other branches, but things from one branch are not necessarily canon in another, anything from events to game mechanics. Most notably, characters in my branch tend to be much lower level than in most, and characters above level 50 are essentially unheard of. I make occasional passing references to events in other branches, but other branches MCs will not make direct appearances in this branch and with the exception of the goblins (who serve as a sort of starting point for many different branches) neither do their other major characters.

LitRPG philosophy

I'm a bit fan of the idea of LitRPGs, but I'm also less of a fan of the nitty-gritty details. I'll likely keep some of them using consistent mechanics, such as XP calculations that follow the main branch of this story, but not explicitly spelled out on-screen. Others, such as quantities of mundane materials, I plan to completely ignore in favour of just handwaving it: I'll show costs for more expensive things to remind everyone why the dungeon needs workers but I doubt I'll ever list off exactly how much wood the dungeon has available. Instead, interesting upgrades will be locked behind rare/unique items and quests to actually give him goals other than "mine more minerals" and to keep things interesting.

In terms of "UI," I plan to keep the RPG elements out of the way most of the time: there will be occasional popups which explain buffs, notifications, etc, as well as occasional chapters where the RPG aspects are covered more heavily. Other than that the RPG setting is more of a setting. I don't plan to track HP and MP, show damage numbers or critical hits, and that sort of thing. Stuff like skills and feats are chosen as foreshadowing or as descriptions of capabilities: "Athletics 50" is meant to say "this character is really athletic" and will probably not ever be referenced directly.

I plan on pulling inspiration from all over the place. Thus far the setting is primarily a mix of various D&D settings and the ideas from the main branch, but later on it'll likely incorporate more ideas from a wide variety of fantasy games, books, and so forth.