Dakota Krout

Dakota Krout left the US Army for a computer science degree at North Dakota, and published his first novel, Dungeon Born, in 2016 while still a student. It opened The Divine Dungeon, narrated in large part by a sentient dungeon that grows stronger by absorbing the adventurers who come to loot it, and the conceit helped fix the shape of the dungeon core corner of LitRPG. Two years later he set up Mountaindale Press with his wife Danielle, which now carries a roster of other fantasy and cultivation writers alongside his own titles. Something (2020) and Anything (2022) open a comic sequence in which Luke, an apprentice leatherworker, is caught by a royal draft, just clears the magical aptitude test and lands on a plane that should not exist. Krout puts the rule-bound logic of his systems down to his programming background.