Template · 13 August 2026
A LitRPG stat block template that survives forty chapters
A stat block takes ten minutes to write and years to keep. Chapter one is easy. Name, class, level one, three skills, a rusty sword. Nothing has happened yet, so nothing can contradict. Chapter forty is where it goes wrong, and it never goes wrong loudly. Nobody rewrites a stat block into nonsense. It drifts, one unrecorded change at a time, and then a reader who has been keeping their own spreadsheet posts it in a review.
The whole template is below, as Markdown you can copy. After it come the four fields that break first, and how to decide what belongs in the block at all.
Two jobs, and only one of them is the reader's
On the page a stat block is a scoreboard, and watching the number go up is most of the pleasure of the genre. Off the page it is a constraint: the thing that tells you, in chapter 52, whether your protagonist survives the fall. Most templates are built for the first job. This one is built for the second.
Copy this, then delete half of it
Chapter references are written book.chapter, so 2.41 is book two, chapter forty-one. Use any convention you like, as long as every mark in the file is a chapter rather than a calendar date. A calendar date tells you when you typed something. A chapter reference tells you when it was true, which is the only question you will ever ask this file.
# Kaelen Ardhu — stat block
As of 2.41, start of scene. (Book 2, chapter 41.)
## Constants
Human, Ashfall lowlands. Left-handed. Grey eyes. Burn scar, right forearm,
from 2.31. Speaks lowlands, reads none.
## Identity
- Class: Warden, tier 2 (advanced at 2.09)
- Level: 24
- Titles held: Oathbreaker (1.19), Debt-Sworn (2.07)
- Titles lost: Ninth of the Company (stripped at 1.19)
## Resources
Max and regen are rules. Current is a reading, true only at the mark above.
| Resource | Max | Regen | Current | Read at | Regen paused by |
|----------|-----|--------------------|---------|---------|------------------------|
| Health | 410 | 4/hr, out of combat| 310 | 2.40 | burn, 2.31, untreated |
| Mana | 180 | 12/hr | 0 | 2.40 | ward still open, 2.40 |
| Stamina | 120 | 20/hr | 88 | 2.41 | — |
## Attributes
| Attribute | Base | Gear | Effective | Last moved |
|-----------|------|---------------|-----------|------------|
| Might | 18 | +2 bracers | 20 | 2.11 |
| Grace | 12 | — | 12 | 1.30 |
| Wit | 15 | — | 15 | 2.22 |
| Will | 21 | +1 oathmark | 22 | 2.09 |
Unspent points: 3, since 2.33.
## Skills
| Skill | Rank | Progress | Ranked up at |
|------------|------|----------|---------------------------------|
| Ash Ward | 4 | 60/100 | 2 at 1.28, 3 at 2.11, 4 at 2.33 |
| Cinder Cut | 2 | 15/50 | 2 at 1.22 |
| Read Debt | 1 | 0/25 | learned at 2.07 |
Lost: Company Cant, went with the title at 1.19.
Wording changed: Ash Ward covers two people from 2.33. One before that.
## Inventory
| Item | Qty | State | In at | Out at |
|----------------|-----|-----------------|------------------|-------------|
| Emberflask | 2 | sealed | 2.12, shrine | 1 used 2.29 |
| Marks (coin) | 6 | — | running | 34 at 2.07 |
| Warden's blade | 1 | notched at 2.31 | 1.04, a gift | — |
Held by someone else: the second map roll, with Dottie since 2.18.
## Conditions
| Effect | Source | From | Until | What it changes |
|------------|------------|------|-----------|----------------------------------|
| Burned | fire, 2.31 | 2.31 | untreated | max health −100, no regen by day |
| Debt-Sworn | oath, 2.07 | 2.07 | debt paid | cannot refuse Dottie outright |
## Obligations
- Owes Dottie 40 marks since 2.07. Unpaid. She has not asked twice.
- Oath to the Warden line, sworn 2.09.
## Who knows what
| Fact | Known to | Since |
|-----------------------|-------------------------|---------|
| He is Debt-Sworn | Dottie; the Ashfall inn | 2.07 |
| He is Debt-Sworn | the Ninth Company | not yet |
| He broke the oath | the reader only | 1.19 |
| The oath outlives him | nobody, including him | — |
## Unfired
- Second Emberflask, still sealed since 2.12.
- Three unspent points since 2.33.
- The notch in the blade, 2.31, never explained.
Half of that will not apply to your system. Delete it. A block you keep badly is worse than no block, because you will trust it.
The line most templates leave out
As of 2.41. Without it the file is a claim about the present tense, and by chapter forty there is no present tense. There is the chapter you are drafting and the chapter you are about to go back and fix, and they need different answers.
Everything in a stat block is either a rule or a reading. A rule is stable: max health is 410, mana returns at twelve an hour. A reading is a measurement taken at a moment: health is 310, at the end of chapter 40. Keep them apart in the layout and mark every reading with its chapter. The file then stops lying, because it stops claiming to be current.
Regenerating resources are a rate, not a number
This is the first field to break, and it breaks quietly. You writeMana 0/180 after a hard fight. Two weeks later you open chapter 42, see 180 in the max column, and write a caster who is fresh. Forty minutes have passed in story time. He has thirty mana.
The failure is not that you forgot. It is that the format let you write a number without writing down when. A bare 0/180 cannot answer “how much does he have now” unless the rate and the clock sit beside it. Keep four things: max, rate, current, and the chapter the current was read in. Then add the column nobody keeps, which is why the rate is paused. Poison, a broken arm, an open ward, deep water. Suspended regeneration is the easiest thing here to lose, because it never gets a field of its own. It lives in the scene where it started, and it dies there.
A skill rank without a scene is a promise you already broke
Ranks are the field readers audit hardest, because in progression fiction the ranks are the plot. Somebody who saw Ash Ward at rank 2 in chapter 28 and rank 4 in chapter 33 has been robbed of a rank-up, and rank-ups are what they came for.
There are two failures. The first is a rank that appears without a scene. The second is quieter: the skill's effect widens to suit the fight you are writing this week, while the earlier description stays where it was.
One column fixes both. Do not record the rank. Record the rank-ups, each with the chapter it happened in, so the current rank is read off the end of the list rather than asserted. A rank with no chapter beside it is a rank you have not written, which means either you owe the reader a scene or the number is wrong. Do the same when an ability's wording changes: new wording with its chapter, one line of the old underneath. You will want it when somebody quotes chapter 12 at you.
Countable things need a ledger, not a quantity
Inventory is the cheapest continuity error to make and the most embarrassing to have pointed out, because arithmetic is the one thing a reader can check without rereading. Three potions in chapter 12. One drunk at 19. One thrown at 24. Three in the bag at 31.
A quantity column cannot prevent that, because you update it from memory, and your memory holds the last scene rather than the chain. What prevents it is in and out: the chapter a thing arrived, the chapter it left. The quantity becomes a sum you can check rather than a number you maintain.
Keep the rule narrow. Anything with a number attached needs the ledger: potions, arrows, coin, charges, doses, days of food. Anything unique needs a different line instead, which is who holds it and since when. A sword does not need a quantity. It needs an owner, because the item error that survives longest is not the count. It is an object in two places at once, or in the hand of somebody who gave it away in book one.
A title is a fact about other people
This one catches writers who track everything else properly. Levels and skills live inside your protagonist. A title does not. Warden-Sworn, Oathbreaker, Duellist of the Ninth: whatever stat it carries is trivial, and the social consequence is enormous. From the chapter it lands, guards address him differently, innkeepers price him differently, and the woman who hated the last Warden decides in one line what she makes of this one.
So the failure is not that the title is wrong. It is that everyone knew instantly. You award it in chapter 20 in a room with two witnesses, and by chapter 23 a stranger in another city greets him by it. Nothing in the stat block was inaccurate. The world just became omniscient.
Track the title and its spread separately: who knows, and since when. That is the “who knows what” table, and it earns its place even if you never write a single stat, because it is also where the things your protagonist does not know go. That distinction is the difference between dramatic irony and a mistake. Losing a title needs the same care: it removes a form of address, a set of permissions and usually an ability, so record it as an event with a chapter rather than deleting the row.
How to decide what to track and what to leave to prose
One test holds up: track what a reader could check. If it is a number, a count, a rank or an order of events, somebody will keep a list of it, because auditing the maths is part of what this audience enjoys. That belongs in the file.
Texture belongs in the prose. How the forge smells, the way he stands when he is lying, the tiredness of a city at dawn. Filing those does not make them more consistent, it makes them a chore, and the chore is what kills the file. Between the two sits an awkward middle: eye colour, scars, an accent, a minor cousin's name. Checkable, but they never change. Give each character one short constants list and refuse to let it grow.
The second test is about fields rather than facts. A field earns its place if changing it would force you to rewrite a scene. Current health does. Unspent attribute points do, because three unspent points are a loaded gun the reader is waiting on. The colour of the guild banner does not, unless you have written a chapter about the banner.
Then be honest about the cost. Every field is a field you update after every scene that moved it, for as long as the series runs. The block above is already at the upper limit of what a person keeps by hand. If yours is longer, the question is not whether it is thorough. It is whether you will still be doing it in March.
Where the file should live
For one book, a Markdown file beside the manuscript is genuinely fine. Obsidian is free and the files stay on your own disk, though nothing validates the front matter, so nothing stops chapter 61 using different field names from chapter 4. Kanka's free tier has unlimited entries and costs nothing at all, which no other hosted tool here matches; its vocabulary is tabletop first, so levels and skill trees are improvised in custom fields.
The harder question is what happens when you draft with a model. Sudowrite feeds prior narrative in for you, but its Chapter Continuity caps at roughly 20,000 words across up to 25 linked chapters, so at chapter 60 the skill unlocked in chapter 8 is outside the window, and chapter 8 is usually where the interesting constraint sits. A Claude Project with the file attached is enough for a first book: the file sits in every conversation in that project, and you paste nothing. It is still a snapshot. You re-upload each time a number moves, and the day you do not, the model is working confidently from last month's health total.
If the file lives in Obsidian and you are technical, the community MCP plugins will serve it to a local client instead. That is a real answer, as long as you never want the same file from ChatGPT on the web or from a phone.
New Quest keeps this same shape as typed fields rather than free text, updates it from the scene you just drafted, and serves it over MCP to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Cursor, with nothing running on your machine. What the model reads is the block as of chapter 41, not the one you last uploaded. That is the entire product. If the re-uploading does not annoy you yet, you do not need it.
Questions people ask about this template
How often should I update it?
After any scene where a number moved, and at no other time. If that sounds like a lot of scenes, the block is too big. Cut fields until updating takes a minute. A block you update three times out of four is the dangerous kind, because it looks maintained.
Should the stat block appear in the book?
What you track and what you display are different jobs. A full sheet stops the prose dead, so most progression fiction shows a trimmed version at moments of change and nothing in between. Track everything. Show the two lines the chapter earned.
My system has no levels. Is this still useful?
Yes, minus the attribute table. The parts that break are never the levelling maths. They are resources that refill on a clock, abilities that improve in stages, countable objects, and facts other people learn at different times. A cultivation ladder, a soft magic system with a cost and a heist series with a gear list all fail in the same four places.
Can I just ask an AI to keep track instead?
Not on its own. Chat memory is associative: it remembers that your protagonist is a reluctant healer, not that her mana regeneration hit fourteen a second in chapter 62, and when it does not know a number it tends to supply a plausible one rather than say so. That is the expensive failure, because the invented number reaches a published chapter. A model reading a file you maintain is a different thing, and works.
Take the template
The block above is the useful half of this page. Copy it, cut it to your system, and keep it by hand for as long as that stays pleasant. If you reach the point where updating it is the part you start skipping, New Quest keeps the same fields current for you.
One book free. Your work is yours, and is never trained on.