Fateless Podcast Meets Dorian

What if making a game didn’t require a studio, an engineering team, or years of technical experience, but instead started with the thing creators already do best: telling stories?

That’s the tale behind this Fateless podcast episode, where Brad welcomes Simon and Sham from the Fateless team alongside Julia, founder of Dorian. Dorian is a platform built to help non-technical creators, artists, writers, and cosplayers, turn their work into playable games and actually earn money doing it. And the deeper the conversation goes, the more you realise why this crossover is so interesting for Godforge fans: it’s all about community, creativity, and giving people tools to build worlds.

Let’s break down the most exciting ideas from the episode, and why a Godforge “tale” on Dorian might be way more than a fun experiment.

Julia introduces herself as the founder of Dorian, a platform that enables non-technical creators, artists, writers, and cosplayers, to turn their art into fully playable narrative games. The hook? Dorian isn’t just a place to post stories. It’s designed to help creators monetize those stories, even if they’ve never coded a single line in their life.

What really stands out is the audience Dorian serves. Julia explains that a large portion of their creators are female or queer, and their players are heavily Gen Z women, a group she argues is underserved and misunderstood by the traditional games industry.

And here’s the wild part, Dorian creators have produced games earning six and seven figures, sometimes built by just one or two people.

Julia’s path into games is a story on its own.

She grew up in Ukraine, raised by a single mother, in an economically difficult environment. Games weren’t a big part of her childhood. She read fiction, wrote fanfiction, and soaked up art and culture instead. That background built the foundation of how she views creators today: people with talent, vision, and community, but often no path to sustainable income.

Her early career took off at G5 Games, where she worked across publishing hundreds of projects, particularly story-driven genres like hidden object and time management games. Later she moved to the UK, earned a business degree, and went into venture capital with London Venture Partners, investing in game startups while, in her own words, being a huge Clash of Clans addict.

This gives Julia a unique and valued skill set in publishing experience, monetization knowledge, investment perspective, and a creator-first worldview.

One of the funniest, most human moments in the episode is Julia explaining how she met her husband through a clan.

She invited him into her Clash of Clans clan, which included startup founders, and he immediately shot to the top. Julia, competitive by nature, was impressed by his strategy and skill, and that shared “game brain” chemistry turned into a relationship.

Sham jokes that the lesson is: if you’re being friendzoned, just dominate the leaderboard.

Brad absolutely runs with it.

It’s a great moment because it captures something important about gaming communities: shared play creates shared identity. That same dynamic is exactly what Dorian is built on, creators and fans forming tight loops of feedback, iteration, and engagement.

The most important part of the conversation is how Dorian actually enables creators.

Julia describes Dorian as a visual toolset where creators can build story games:

• using a no-code interface
• preview and test instantly with an emulator
• publish immediately with no app store builds and no approvals
• and see performance data like retention, completion rates, drop-off points, and monetization rates.

And then the kicker: creators can update their games instantly, even dozens of times per day, based on what their audience is doing.

That is insanely powerful for narrative content, especially when you compare it to traditional game dev pipelines.

Simon even references classic choose your own adventure books, the flip-to-page fantasy books many of us grew up with, and the conversation naturally connects that style of branching storytelling with modern interactive narrative games and dating sim structures.

At first glance, Godforge and Dorian sound like different worlds. Godforge is a hero collector with mythological factions, combat systems, progression loops, and deep lore. Dorian is an interactive narrative platform with creator tools for branching story games.

But when you zoom out, the overlap is obvious.

Godforge is already built around mythology, heroes, character relationships, story-driven worldbuilding, and a community that loves theorycrafting what comes next.

Julia even points out that Dorian can be used to test community perspectives quickly, and that’s where this gets spicy. Because Fateless has been vocal about building alongside the community, and Dorian’s ecosystem is basically a machine for rapid creator iteration and audience feedback.

When Sham starts talking about trying a Godforge tale on Dorian, it doesn’t feel like a gimmick. It feels like a legitimate experiment in expanding Godforge lore beyond the core game, exploring side stories and character arcs, letting narrative-focused community members play in the Godforge universe, and gathering real engagement feedback fast.

And if you’ve ever wanted more lore drops, more character moments, or more story depth between major updates, this kind of collaboration could be a sneaky way to deliver it.

Julia’s vision is massive. She says Dorian’s goal is to become the YouTube for games, a platform where anyone can create, publish, and monetize interactive experiences.

But the real curveball is what’s coming next: Dorian is launching an equity crowdfunding campaign through Republic, allowing everyday community members to invest, starting from small amounts, so creators and fans can literally share in the platform’s success.

Julia frames it as correcting a pattern the industry has repeated for years: platforms become huge, Roblox, Webtoon-style ecosystems, creator marketplaces, but the creators often don’t get a real chance to participate in the upside beyond their immediate earnings.

Her pitch is simple. Creators earn from their games. Creators and fans can also be shareholders. Communities can build wealth alongside the platform.

Whether you’re into business or not, that idea hits hard, especially for creator-driven ecosystems.

To close the episode, Brad asks Julia the classic Godforge question: which mythological figure would you love to see in Godforge?

Julia immediately goes to Greek mythology, especially Athena, and Sham reveals something hilarious and wholesome: his kids are named Athena, Freya, and Apollo.

Julia suggests a collaboration where Dorian’s community could rapidly generate mythological character proposals and perspectives, basically turning a lore concept into a community-driven creative exercise.

Sham’s response? Let’s do it. He even mentions pulling in Godforge’s narrative team, including Aaron, their “lore keeper”, to explore what a Dorian collab could look like.

This episode isn’t just a guest interview, it’s a look at how game creation is shifting toward creator-first tools, community-led discovery, and faster feedback loops. Dorian’s model is built around empowering artists and writers to build playable experiences without needing a traditional studio pipeline, and that philosophy lines up surprisingly well with the way Fateless has approached Godforge development.

A Godforge tale on Dorian might start as a fun side experiment, but it hints at something bigger: a future where Godforge lore could expand through community-driven narratives, rapid iteration, and new ways to engage with heroes beyond combat.