Erfworld

Erfworld was a story-driven fantasy/comedy webcomic and independently published graphic novel about a master strategy gamer summoned into and stuck inside a wargame running from December 2006 to its abrupt cancellation in October 2019.
Featuring then-current memes and pop culture references, the webcomic's publication schedule was intermittent at times as it grappled with artist exits and delivery issues. Erfworld was an early pioneer in crowdfunding, featuring the Toolbox, a Patreon-like funding mechanism that was created specifically for the comic and its site.
The first book, The Battle for Gobwin Knob was written by Rob Balder and illustrated by Jamie Noguchi. Erfworld was recognized as one of the top 10 graphic novels of 2007 by Time Magazine. The second book, Love is a Battlefield was illustrated by Xin Ye. Before his departure, David Hahn was the artist for much of the third book, Hamsterdance versus the Charlie Foxtrot, with colors and inks by Lauri Ahonen and Lillian Chen. A portion of the webcomic series has been animated, Ken-Burns-style, with voice-over work by Arthur Chu.
"Erfworld" followed a graphic novel format, with a new page added with each update. The setting is "Erfworld", a fantasy world that adheres to the rules of a fictional turn-based strategy wargame. The narrative focused on a complex story about warring factions within this world, but most installments also contained humor, puns and side-gags about strategy-fantasy video games, role-playing games, and references to history or popular culture. The webcomic's distinctive visual style countered the theme of unending violence with an artistic sensibility (described by the creators as "cute") in which characters are drawn to look like dolls, or anime characters, or toys. Injuries draw no blood in Erfworld, and damage is cured overnight. That same aesthetic follows in its lisping use of letter changes in frequently used names, particularly replacing "r" with "w" (spidews, dwagons, and twolls instead of spiders, dragons, and trolls). The comic was originally started as an attempt to bring all of author Rob Balder's fantasy-related strips from his other comic, PartiallyClips, into the same universe and tell a story with them.
"Erfworld's" plot, setting, and characters were released under a Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, ShareAlike license.
In May 2019, Balder announced that the comic would switch to 3D modeling: The stated goal of this change was to allow Rob himself to more easily create the images needed for the comic and hopefully return to a more rapid update schedule. In the same news post Rob explained that an undisclosed personal tragedy had occurred and, as a result, Erfworld would not be updating again "for the foreseeable future, possibly the rest of the year." This new event was dubbed Horrible Thing II. Nonetheless, updates did resume later in 2019.
On October 11, 2019, the website's front page was replaced with an announcement, signed by Rob and Linda Balder, which announced the permanent end to Erfworld as a webcomic as a result of a string of personal tragedies. The Erfworld updates previously published remain available in an online archive. All former functionality of the site was restricted to users with "heartstrings" badges. A few days later, the original copy of Book 1 was taken down from the GiantITP website. While the authors have not yet publicly explained the reason for the shutdown, it is thought to be due to the death of Thorin Macht, son of Rob's wife.<ref>