Bigger than Middle Earth? An inside look at the Forgotten Runes Wizards Cult

In the world of traditional media, IPs often have to wait for a big-budget adaptation before mainstream audiences embrace them. For example, George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones took 15 years to get an adaptation—and audiences across a wide range of demographics ate it up.

But in the spirit of Web3 enabling new approaches, Forgotten Runes Wizard’s Cult hopes to turn that meta on its head. “We’re running the next big fantasy series fast,” Forgotten Rune’s co-creator said Dota in an interview with nft now. How large? “Bigger than Middle Earth, Westeros and Hogwarts combined,” they boldly proclaim on the about page.

Instead of waiting for a major studio to bring the world they’ve built to a wider audience, the team took matters into their own hands. After the initial launch of its NFTs in June 2021, Forgotten Runes has expanded at a tremendous pace – and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Comics, TV shows, and even a full-fledged blockchain game billed as World of Warcraft meets Stardew Valley—all built on top of a collection of NFTs that started out as pixelated Wizards.

Let’s look at where the magic began, the ever-evolving lore, and what’s next for the R universe.

The wizards that started it all

The Forgotten Runes Wizard’s Cult began as an NFT collection of over 9000 pixelated wizards in all manner of outfits and appearances. But don’t let their pixelated design fool you – each wizard is completely different from the other, thanks in large part to the hundreds of unique heads each wizard can come with.

But these wizards are not intended to be used as simple PFP NFTs – each one gives its holder full rights to design it as they see fit. “What’s different [about Forgotten Runes] is that it is our holders who help create the characters, said Dotta. “You build your character, you own that character, you have a commercial right to that character.”

While it may not sound so unusual now, Forgotten Runes launched with the intention of shaking up the nascent NFT space. “To me it seemed like [other creators] just made another crypto token that happened to have a picture on it,” Forgotten Runes co-creator Elf explained. Thus, the team dared to create an NFT collection that paid due respect to the characters depicted. “All of our tokens have a unique name, every project out there has a serial number. Our wizards have names. We were the first to do this because we want to highlight the character,” Dotta elaborated.

Playing with lore

Forgotten Runes’ holders took that feeling and ran with it as far as they could. One of the greatest testaments to the creativity of the Forgotten Runes community is the Book of Lore, a codex for every wizard from the first collection that is fully editable by the respective holders.

Of course, while in theory everything goes for holders in terms of lore, the Forgotten Runes team laid down some useful groundwork; it all starts with how Forgotten Runes’ Runiverse deviates from reality. First, in this world, magic exists. In terms of technology? “This is not your standard medieval wizarding world. This is a world as technologically diverse as our current world,” said Elf.

While decentralizing the world-building of Forgotten Runes to this extent might sound like a continuity nightmare on the surface, Elf believes the franchise can still tell a coherent story at the end of the day, citing the continuity issues that long-running franchises have historically overcome without a hitch. “If you look at other IPs out there throughout history that Batman, Ninja Turtlesor James Bondeven, […] all of them have almost no continuity,” Elf said. Yet they still have incredibly dedicated followers.

To further this point, Elf even pointed out that the stories the holders have told with their wizards do share a continuity, but not in the conventional sense. According to Elf, all holders have modeled their respective lore around the monomyth – some without realizing it. “You’d be shocked how often people will write about the same thing, like thousands of miles apart without communicating with each other,” he said.

Elf also had nothing but good things to say about the sheer creativity displayed by Forgotten Runes Wizard’s Cult – although the founding team has kind of led by example from the start. “In our cult, magic is the act of creation when you make art,” Elf said. “When you make music, when you write a story, you’re doing magic, you know? This can even be applied to encoders. Dotta is a wizard. He literally writes spells in smart contracts. Even Bear Snake – our third partner – he’s a wizard who opens doors. He can literally open any door in Hollywood, he said. This last bit is critical because it is what has allowed Forgotten Runes to gain serious momentum in making the planned TV series possible.

One of those fateful doors that Bear snake opened involved a conversation with Derek Kolstad – best known as the creator of the Keanu Reeves-led John Wick franchise. With Kolstad agreeing to helm the upcoming Runiverse-inspired series, the Forgotten Runes team has also enlisted animation studio Titmouse to bring the planned series to life.

This planned series – along with the currently running comic – hopes to provide an even greater foundation upon which members of the Forgotten Runes Wizards Cult can base their storytelling. Doing so will unlock what appears to be one of Forgotten Runes’ most enticing tools for any die-hard fantasy and fiction fan – the ability to create functional canon fanfiction.

Engagement in the real world

“You need JK Rowling to write Harry Potter before you can have Harry Potter fan fiction,” Dotta said. “And so, how do we get the stories out into the world in a way that’s as quick as possible? We think one of the best ways to do that is to have a TV show, which is written by, you know, professional storytellers. [But] in the meantime, we are [also] trying to do more bite-sized storytelling from our own company [in the form of comic books].”

Despite Dotta describing the storytelling Forgotten Runes has done with his comic as bite-sized, the intention behind the release is whatever but. This, and all Forgotten Runes’ other media ventures, are also intended to drive more people into the core community.

“We printed almost 200,000 copies. As for NFT projects, other products have done comics, but as far as I know, no one has actually printed a comic, let alone 200,000 copies, and it’s so annoying. NFT people want to turn everything into an NFT,” Dotta said. “Why would you make a whole comic and then send it out to the holders and make it a super rare collectible? When you hold a physical copy of this comic and you flip through it, [you] can leave it inside [your] office, and [your] kids can pick it up and read it, he said.

“My kids aren’t going to log into my meta mask and read my Cool Cat’s token gate comic. It’s absolutely critical to getting a franchise off the ground because the whole point is to go beyond a niche crypto community, he said. And so, how has the progress been? Based on last June’s Enter The Runiverse event held at NFT NYC 2022, pretty good. Held a year after the collection’s initial launch, the Enter The Runiverse event was launched in NYC to a (surprisingly) raucous crowd decked out in full costume.