Missed a GamesBeat Summit Next 2022 session? All sessions are now available for viewing in our on-demand library. Click here to start watching.
Heroic story raised $6 million to build a Web3-enabled tabletop role-playing platform.
The Los Angeles company’s goal is to empower storytellers to imagine new worlds for open game franchises, and it recently released an online version of Legends of Fortunata, a tabletop role-playing game franchise created by the founders of the company.
Upfront Ventures led the round with participation from Multicoin Capital and Polygon Technology, bringing the company’s total funding to $7.4 million to date, Heroic Story CEO Jay Rosenkrantz said in an interview with GamesBeat.
The round also included participation from strategic angels including Jonathan Lai (a16z Games Fund One), Steve Arhancet (CEO Team Liquid), Richard Ma (CEO Quantstamp), Orange DAO, George Strompolos (Founder Fullscreen), Wolfgang Hammer (Head of Film, Miramax) and screenwriting
duo Ryan and Kaz Firpo (Marvel’s “Eternals”).
Past investors include Transcend Fund, Kevin Lin (co-founder Twitch), Holly Liu (co-founder Kabam), and Furqan Rydhan (CEO Thirdweb). The money will be used to hire talent, market the live beta and build on-chain technology to support a massively multiplayer world controlled by professional gamemasters
and directed by millions of players.
Rozenkrantz and his brother Scott started Heroic Story in the summer of 2019 at the Y Combinator accelerator. Since September 2021, the company has been building a massively multiplayer version of Legends of Fortunata.
Heroic Story reinvents the traditional gameplay of pen-and-paper role-playing games in a new gaming platform that combines matchmaking services with the world’s top game masters, and story-based digital collectibles that allow players to co-direct their shared adventures.
Legends of Fortunata, the company’s first game franchise for the platform, is a brand new living campaign set in the fantasy world of Fortunata. Fortunata was created by Heroic Story’s in-house narrative team of novelists and screenwriters, with contributions from their community of thousands of fanfiction writers and digital artists.
The immersive gaming experience eliminates the pain points of playing traditional table games online, with no stress planning and an exciting virtual reward system designed to expand the reach and appeal of TTRPG to new audiences. Legends of Fortunata is now available to play through Heroic Story’s game pass-gated platform.
“The intersection of storytelling and technology has been the theme of my career, from my early years as a top online poker pro and entrepreneur to designing and directing one of the first consumer VR adventure games,” said Rosenkrantz. “At Y Combinator, Scott and I have doubled down on solving problems for storytellers, the world’s most underappreciated talent, and after exploring Web3 for the past year and a half, we truly believe that smart contract-driven platforms will bring gaming, storytelling and community building will transform.”
Legends of Fortunata was released on September 23, 2022 with a free collection of 1049 World Passes. Shortly after its release, the Fortunata World Pass collection became the most traded collection on OpenSea.
The platform launched with several well-known game masters, including Ron Ogden (host of the Dungeon Run), Jason Charles Miller, Aliza Pearl, April Hill, Patrick “ThatGreyGentleman” and Luke Gygax, the son of the inventor of Dungeons & Dragons.
“We fell in love with Heroic Story’s vision as they build authentic online RPG experiences for a large, global audience that is passionate about the tabletop RPG genre. We don’t know a better founder than Jay to serve this community, as evidenced by the successful launch of the Fortunata World Pass collection,” Mark Suster, managing partner at Upfront Ventures, said in a statement. “He lives and breathes the spirit of this community and we’re excited to support him in making this a live game.”
The team consists of art director Paul Adam (Bioware, Wizards of the Coast), programmer Martin Beierling-Mutz (EA), and esports industry veterans Matt Elento (Team Liquid) and Daniel “Tafokints” Lee. The team consists of 11 people in total.
As the company and the gaming platform grow, the plan is to improve the economics within game franchises – made up of players, gamemasters and content creators, many of whom currently buy and sell goods and services through siled, inefficient marketplaces – through platform-wide tokenomics that enable participants encourage and reward to improve gameplay together.
A life of ashes
They created the company as a result of a series of life pivots. Rosenkrantz said he thought he would become a screenwriter. He attended film school in Boston and graduated in the middle of the online poker boom. He entered that community and eventually became a top 10 player in the world.
“I was super fascinated with how the internet changed poker culture around the world,” said Rosenkrantz. “And so I started making films about the people – documentaries, shorts.”
His feature film Bet Raise Fold is a documentary about that online poker boom and its eventual failure, which took place in 2011 when the US Department of Justice shut down the industry.
“That was a very big turning point,” Rosenkrantz said. “And all my friends left the country to keep playing. I really wanted to tell the story of the community well and finish this documentary. We had to edit it all over again. My younger brother, Scott, graduated from film school around the same time. And we had always told stories together.”
They moved to Austin and started making VR movies, thinking VR would change the way stories were told. They moved to Montreal and started a game studio and shipped a VR adventure game in 2018: Chiaro and the elixir of life. Unfortunately, they concluded that they were on the market 10 years early.
Then they went to the Y Combinator, where they studied Web3 and the opportunities in blockchain games.
“For a totally different idea, Web3 wasn’t even a thing in our mind. But our concept has always been around this convergence of entertainment and technology to solve problems for storytellers using these new media,” Rosenkrantz said.
The brothers came up with “how not to die”, following Y Combinator’s instructions, and they watched non-exchangeable tokens explode in art and gaming in 2021.
“We’re trying to figure out how to get around the problem of writers and storytellers,” Rosenkrantz said. “So much value is created by writers, but so little is captured by them. It is very ungrateful.”
Rozenkrantz added: “And so we wondered, ‘What if it was more like a video game? What if you had this repetitive game?” What do smart contract-driven writing products look like?’”
They wondered if it was possible to make NFT books. That kind of thinking led them to tabletop RPGs and the collaborative storytelling that takes place within them.
“We started experimenting with NFTs where we built this collaborative storytelling game, building a creator community of writers who love to write fan fiction around sci-fi and fantasy franchises, and fan artists who really enjoy drawing,” he said.
They started having creator contests every week and brought in a novelist to help with the story. They started creating the story and so Legends of Fortunata was born. They noted how Dungeons & Dragons had a resurgence during the pandemic, especially as Netflix’s Stranger Things grew in popularity.
“Tabletop has never been more popular,” said Rosenkrantz. “If you have the right group of people, if you have a good game leader, that’s great. What if we solved all that? What if we created compressed fun time so you could find the players or group of players you want to play with? Immediately? And you could be matched with an excellent game master?
And in the end, they concluded, “And then what if you could influence them to direct the story in a giant MMO-proficient world? That was very exciting.”
When they presented this idea to investors, they got excited.
“They just intuitively agreed with that hypothesis that you could expand the game’s audience, make it more accessible, and it would solve huge pain points for them,” Rosenkrantz said. “Then we started building the platform into the game.”
As for Luke Gygax, the son of D&D creator Gary Gygax, Rosenkrantz met him and he’s now doing quests on the online platform.
“He’s a great person to have on board and just to build relationships with our crews,” said Rosenkrantz.
Some gamemasters started off as extremely skeptical of Web3. But when they saw the shared world-building in the first project and seeing the company give profits to the community of creators, they came on board, Rosenkrantz said.
“Heroic Story builds with a very principled approach,” he said. “I think our gamemasters are a really great resource right now to bridge the gap between the mainstream and Web3.”
GamesBeat’s credo in covering the gaming industry is “where passion meets business”. What does this mean? We want to tell you how important the news is to you — not only as a decision maker in a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you’re reading our articles, listening to our podcasts, or watching our videos, GamesBeat helps you learn about and have fun with the industry. Discover our Briefings.
Janice has been with businesskinda for 5 years, writing copy for client websites, blog posts, EDMs and other mediums to engage readers and encourage action. By collaborating with clients, our SEO manager and the wider businesskinda team, Janice seeks to understand an audience before creating memorable, persuasive copy.