Welcome—or welcome back—to our new website. If you are familiar with the Inner Circle and our RPG product line, thank you for your continued support during our nearly ten-year hiatus! We are eternally grateful for your interest and encouragement. For those new to the company (and for anyone searching the depths of memory to recall who we are), this blog post is intended as a quick recap of our history.
The Inner Circle was initially formed when Wizards of the Coast—the makers of the storied Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game—announced its intent to allow third-party developers to produce compatible “d20 System” products. Our company was one of dozens to take advantage of this opportunity; the industry experienced a sudden boom only magnified by the rise in digital publishing, digital art, and other technologies. Virtually every established publisher in the industry created its own d20 System product line.
There were great games and great supplements published. There were not-so-great games and not-so-great supplements published. We’re too biased to make claims about where our products fell, but you can guess what we think.
The Inner Circle never cracked the top tier of the d20 sales charts, but established a strong reputation for quality content and design with the release of Denizens of Avadnu, a full-color hardcover monster collection that would go on to claim a Gen Con EN World RPG Award nomination and be excerpted in Monte Cook Presents: The Year’s Best d20. Following the release of Denizens, the company periodically released similarly well-received products in ebook format (and earned a second Gen Con EN World RPG Award nomination for Lorebook of the Broken Isles).
As its creators moved on to other projects and other companies, the Inner Circle mostly went dormant in 2009. But creative passions can be a cyclical thing, and we’re looking at new opportunities, new audiences, and new ways of telling stories–and maybe some old ones, too.
Most of all, we’re looking at how best to use Violet Dawn, our in-house fantasy setting. We’ll talk a little about that down the line. Meanwhile, you can browse—and purchase!—our entire line of RPG products from our store. An online gallery is also available that showcases some of our best artwork. Thanks again for your interest. We encourage you to stay up to date by signing up for our newsletter or subscribing to our RSS feed.