Shadowrun Publisher Gets into LitRPG With 'He Who Fights With Monsters'

Catalyst Game Labs, the company best known for Shadowrun and Battletech, is taking its own shot at one of the many games in the litRPG market with He Who Fights With Monsters.

The company announced the project before GenCon as part of its push to build hype for the game (including an event signing by the book’s author, Travis Deverell, aka Shirtaloon). The sudden addition of the game was particularly noteworthy after the $14 million campaign funding a Dungeon Crawler Carl TTRPG and board game from Renegade Game Studios.

The game came to exist because owner-CEOs Loren and Heather Coleman were big fans of the property, managing developer Randall Bills told TTRPG Insider. So they began to pursue the IP and get permission from Deverell to build the game.

The game is based on the company’s recently developed Dice Core ruleset, which was originally designed for the Voltron and Frostpunk TTRPGs, Bills added. Both games were successfully crowdfunded but are still in development. The ruleset has players roll a base die and then add it to other dice, depending on available ‘upgrades’ or ‘downgrades.’

The 13-novel series tells the story of Jason Asano, an “office supplies store middle manager,” who is sent to a magical land where he gains darker powers and uses them to fight monsters. The books have been published by Aethon Books since 2021. A deluxe hardcover was published by Simon & Schuster in July 2026, with the next five books scheduled to release in the following months.

One of the distinct elements that He Who Fights With Monsters addresses is the characters' particular power scaling. Asano appears to grow from a ‘bronze-level’ fighter to something far more powerful over the 12 books, and Bills notes that the designers hoped to capture this in the mechanics. He wasn’t able to elaborate on what that meant.

No date has been set for the game’s crowdfunding or release. The alpha test was supposed to be released in early August, but TTRPG Insider was unable to find a copy.

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Other Catalyst Games TTRPG Projects to Note

While Catalyst Games was focused primarily on board games at GenCon 2026, it had a few other projects that may have interested TTRPG fans.

• An updated version of the Battletech core TTRPG rulebook. The 42-year-old game about politics and mechs is getting an errata-level update as of August 1, according to Bills. “The game is 95% the same that it was in 1985,” the managing developer said. The new book is merely an update to the rules, with quality-of-life changes and some odd rules shaved off.

• Quincy’s Tavern: The Book of the Lost Bard and Barkeep’s Bones. The project is connected to Quincy LK, an online influencer from the TTRPG and fantasy space. The project was funded in July 2026. The book contains stories, recipes, and art related to the aforementioned bar. Barkeep’s Bones is Catalyst and Quincy’s modified version of Liar’s Dice.

• Shadowrun: Explosive Decompression is a new campaign and resource book for Shadowrun: Sixth World built around space that made its debut at GenCon 2026.

The Voltron books were at the printer as of GenCon, Bills told TTRPG Insider, implying they will likely be released to the public within the next few months.

What are your thoughts? Send any scoops, tips or press releases to [email protected].