Quest Portal, a startup dedicated to making tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) more accessible online, raised $7.6 million in funding.
The influx of capital will enable Reykjavík, Iceland-based Quest Portal to further develop its platform, which aims to democratize the TTRPG space and make it more inclusive. The startup has already gained significant traction during its beta phase, with 10,000 users and 140,000 game sessions played. That’s pretty good, considering the company opened for early access late last year.
Lakestar, Moonfire, and a group of seasoned gaming industry veterans and Dungeon Masters led the round.
“We’ve been completely blown away with the reception so far,” said Gunnar Holmsteinn, CEO of Quest Portal. “We’ve found a great way to play tabletop role-playing games with your friends.”
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“[Like with QuizUp], games should be social,” Holmsteinn said in an interview with GamesBeat. “Figuring out how to just get more people to enjoy tabletop role-playing games is the mission we’re on right now. I’ve been on this path for maybe the past 15 years, but this time it’s going to be the best one for sure.”
He noted there are a lot of peer-reviewed studies that have told us that these games are making people more creative, making them more empathetic, and more collaborative.
“However, they’re just insanely tricky to get into,” Holmsteinn said. “To be a dungeon master, you have to read a ton of books. What we want to do is to make it a lot easier to become a dungeon master or Game Master by figuring out the path for people to jump into a game without maybe knowing all of the rules.”
He said that Quest Portal is what you would get if Slack and The Lord of the Rings had a baby.
“It’s this communication platform, with all these like nerdy little tools. You have your ties, your character sheets, your notes and kind of a library of all the beautiful source books,” he said. “We’re going to weave those together in a really nice, accessible way.”
Traditional tabletop role-playing games, such as Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder, have long been enjoyed in face-to-face settings, fostering collaboration and creativity among players. However, these games often have high barriers to entry, requiring Game Masters (GMs) to navigate extensive rules and lore. While online platforms have facilitated the transition to virtual gameplay, they remain complex and unintuitive, Holmsteinn said.
Holmsteinn previously ran Tea Time Games, maker of QuizUp.
Quest Portal aims to overcome these challenges by leveraging its tech to make TTRPGs more accessible to a wider audience. The platform offers a range of features under its free tier, including the ability to create immersive characters and worlds, roll dice, chat, and access great content. Moreover, Quest Portal introduced the Pro subscription tier, which enhances the tools available to GMs and elevates players’ overall gaming experience.
The Pro subscription includes three novel features. The first is an AI-powered Assistant that assists GMs with rules, idea generation, and the creation of non-player characters (NPCs), encounters, backstories, and place descriptions.
The second feature, Library Link, allows GMs to access information about the lore and rules of supported game systems. Finally, the Avatar Generation feature enables players to quickly create profile images for their characters and represent them with game tokens.
Mika Salmi of Lakestar said in a statement, “The Quest Portal team has a transformative view on the benefits of playing tabletop role-playing games. We’re excited to support their journey to create the best virtual tabletop for RPGs.”
Quest Portal’s user-friendly interface and AI-powered tools are aimed at making it the go-to virtual tabletop platform for Game Masters. Unlike existing platforms that often require GMs to take on the role of IT support, Quest Portal’s technology solves common problems faced by players and GMs, such as quickly answering rules-related questions and simplifying game creation and hosting. The platform is accessible on various devices, including desktop web, iOS, and Android, allowing players to power up both their online and in-person gameplay. Rivals include Roll20, Heroic Story and StartPlaying.
These tools have all digitized the tabletop experience.
“Our approach is focusing a lot more about what’s around the table, rather than what’s on top of the table,” Holmsteinn said. “It’s all about the people and their experience of playing. So we’ve spent a lot more time kind of figuring out how to make this more accessible and social and easier for new people to get into. We do have these aids that are on top of the table, but that’s not our core focus.”
“Some of our competitors are focused on doing triple-A graphics and 3D and all of these different special effects. We’ve stayed away from all of that, trying to make a very simple, lightweight, accessible tool,” Holmsteinn said.
Holmsteinn said he started playing when he was 13 years old. In those days, it wasn’t about insane graphics and maps.
“We focus on trying to make the role of a Game Master 10 times easier,” he said.
Quest Portal caters to a diverse range of users, from in-person groups looking to enhance their home game experience to friends living in different countries who want to maintain their connections and online friendships.
“I can generate NPCs while my players are talking,” said Tom, Call of Cthulhu Keeper of Secrets. And Volonda of Blighthouse Studio said, “The Quest Portal Assistant has been helpful in not only clarifying rules for a system I’m currently learning, but also its such a time saver for when it comes to generating NPC stats for when my players inevitably want to work with a character I hadn’t intended to be a part of the session.”
Nik, a game master, said, “I’m known as an over prepping game master. It is not uncommon for me to prep for 5 hours for a 3 hour session and the bulk of that prep is on VTT input. Recently, with Quest Portal I managed to prep for a six hour session with only 30 minutes of VTT input time, a record for myself.”
Quest Portal has 14 people based in Reykjavík. The roster of backers includes Hilmar Veigar, CEO of CCP Games; Bing Gordon, former Electronic Arts leader; David Wallerstein, CXO at Tencent; Rahul Vohra, CEO at Superhuman; and Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga. Their involvement reflects the promising future of Quest Portal and its position at the intersection of entertainment and technology.
Holmsteinn said that Petursson helped him with mentoring early on when he started his first company at age 19 in 2008.
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