We are not a studio that decided roleplayers might be a market worth chasing. We are roleplayers, writers, and builders who have run persistent worlds together for more than twenty years, and who finally have the tools to build the one we always wanted.
That longevity is the point. The hardest part of a project like this is not the first year of enthusiasm. It is the fifth year, the difficult conversation, the slow stretch where most teams quietly fall apart. We have already done that distance, together, more than once — the same people running the same worlds, side by side, for twenty years. The communities some of us started in 2002 still have people in them today.
Co-founder & Game Director
Lara has spent thirty years building and running immersive roleplay communities, from in-person LARP in the early nineties through two decades of persistent online worlds. She founded and ran Sanctuary, Comraich, and Grimmwold, designed and built custom game worlds across multiple platforms, and is a published folklorist whose worldbuilding is grounded in real anthropological method rather than invented for effect. Grimmloch's world, its cultures, and its design are hers.
Co-founder & Systems Architect
David is a senior software engineer with more than twenty years building systems that are not allowed to fail. He spent years on federally regulated, safety-critical platforms where reliability is the whole job, and he brings that same discipline to Grimmloch's foundations. He has also been an admin and owner of every community Lara has run, which means he is not a hired engineer learning our world from the outside — he has helped run it for two decades. He is the reason the game runs on infrastructure we own rather than a platform that can change the rules on us, and the reason it can do what we are asking it to do.
Co-founder & Operations
Aaron has been part of this community since 2010 and has run a business alongside Lara since 2011. He has also helped administer and own our Second Life and Conan roleplay worlds, so the operational side is not new to him. He keeps the practical machinery turning — the conversations with lawyers, accountants, and partners that let everyone else focus on the work. He is also a longtime dungeon master and builder, and that side of him will have more to do as the world grows.
Co-founder & Head of Community
Genevieve has been part of this community in one form or another for twenty years, and the broader roleplay community far longer — starting as a player, and serving as a de facto community manager long before she had the title. She is a writer and graphic designer by trade. If you have a question and aren't sure who to ask, a concern, a conflict, or just need someone to talk to about your experience in Grimmloch, this is the door. Start here.
Engineering Contributor
Sean is a senior software engineer with over a decade in distributed systems and modern backend platforms, and a longtime member of the same engineering community our architecture is built in. He joined as a volunteer because he believes a text-based world is uniquely positioned to do something gaming rarely manages: genuine accessibility for blind players. He has the skill to actually build toward it, and we are glad to be exploring that with him.
Marketing Consultant
Jess spent fifteen years in technical writing, content strategy, and project management, including senior work for major financial institutions, editorial leadership at a gaming publication, and an award-winning newspaper. She is also a veteran of running roleplay communities herself. She did not need months of briefing to understand what we are building. She already knew.
Videographer
Lauren is our videographer. She brings five years of film and video editing and more than eighty completed projects, and as a longtime member of the Second Life roleplay community — where she has served as a community leader — she produces video for both Linden Lab and Second Life vendors. She already lives in the kind of immersive, world-based environment Grimmloch is built around, which makes her a natural fit for telling its story on screen.
Community Manager
Elise has spent years running online roleplay communities across platforms, including a Second Life homestead sim where she organized event nights, mediated player disputes, and kept a dedicated team functioning — all without the guardrails that popular communities lean on. She also brought that same steady hand to the Conan Exiles roleplay community, and her background in customer service means she knows how to hold difficult conversations without losing the room. Elise brings a strong dedication to keeping a community productive, and she will never choose complacency over protecting those who are too quiet to speak up. If something is wrong and nobody else is saying it, she will.
Community Manager
Duine has been roleplaying since the mid-1970s, back when Gygax and a new game called Dungeons & Dragons first got hold of her. In the decades since she has led guilds, clans, and alliances of every size, from five-person families to organizations of more than a hundred, most recently as a focus-group tester and launch clan leader with Pax Dei. She is fiercely devoted to her family, in real life and in game, and she will tell you with a smile that she loves being old. If you spend any time in our community, you will know her.
Community Team
Nova has been roleplaying in commercial games since 2000, and has played and staffed roleplay-centric games for the last fifteen years — including three of Lara and David's worlds. Over that time she has filled nearly every role a community needs, from mentor and mediator to mapper and gamemaster. She keeps an open door for anyone who wants to raise a concern. A creative writer in her own time, she is in this for the collaborative storytelling above all.