Since we’re doing introductions this week, here’s the actual origin story.
We started publishing LitRPG back when that word still got you a confused look at parties. Back when the genre’s Mount Rushmore was The Land, Emerillia, and Awaken Online… and Dungeon Crawler Carl and He Who Fights with Monsters weren’t even glimmers in their authors’ eyes yet. If you know, you know. If you don’t, just picture a much smaller, much weirder corner of the internet where a handful of us were convinced that watching a character’s Strength stat go from 4 to 6 was, in fact, extremely compelling fiction. We were right, as it turns out, but at the time this was a minority opinion held mostly by us and our group chat.
We’ve been here for basically the whole ride since. We watched the genre figure out it didn’t need to just be about dungeon-diving murder-hobos leveling up their sword arm, that you could build a kingdom instead of a kill count, that a dungeon core just optimizing its own halls could be a full character arc, that someone could get isekai’d into a cultivation cycle and spend four books just trying not to explode from too much spiritual energy, that a crafting-and-artificing build was every bit as compelling as a combat one. We watched “LitRPG” stop being one shelf and start being an entire wing of the bookstore, with monster-taming and post-apocalyptic survival builds and corporate-simulation-as-fantasy (yes, we’re looking at our own CivCEO here) all finding their own audiences. What was once a niche so small you could probably name every author in it is now, slowly but unmistakably, becoming a behemoth.
And through all of that, we haven’t really changed much. We’re just a small group of friends who fell hard for a genre nobody else was paying attention to yet, and never really got up from that chair. We didn’t professionalize into some content machine. We didn’t chase trends into subgenres we don’t actually love. We just kept writing the stat sheets and the systems and the slow, satisfying climb from Level 1 to something worth bragging about, because that’s genuinely the thing we can’t stop doing.
We can’t promise you a media empire. We can’t promise a website that gets updated on schedule, historically speaking (see our last post). What we can promise is the same thing we’ve been doing since before this genre had a name people recognized: the best stories we know how to craft, put together by people who are still, all these years later, just really into this stuff.
Thanks for growing up with the genre alongside us. We’re not going anywhere.