In the early 2000s, indie role-playing discussion forums such as The Forge developed innovative design patterns and theories.
Starting in the early 2010s, indie game publishing provided new opportunities for LGBTQ writers to share underrepresented stories.
For example, an organizer of the 2022 Queer Games Bundle on Itch.io told Chase Carter for Dicebreaker:“Our goal is a future in which there are no more starving indie developers.
Some publishers have no interest in financial success; others define it differently than most mainstream companies by emphasizing artistic fulfillment as a primary goal.
[37] Starting in the 2010s, indie role-playing games became a haven for LGBTQ storytelling, due to creators' ability to release non-mainstream content without seeking approval from mainstream publishing companies.
[44] The next year, April Kit Walsh's Thirsty Sword Lesbians, a Powered by the Apocalypse descendant, became the first tabletop game (indie or corporate) to win a Nebula Award.
[48] The Forge, an internet forum overseen by Ron Edwards, provided the center of a self-identified indie RPG community in the early 2000s.
This community generally defined indie games by the creators maintaining control of their work and avoiding traditional publishing.
The Forge was strongly influenced by Ron Edwards' essay "System Does Matter" and GNS theory, which classified all participants in tabletop role-playing games under one of three personality types: gamist, narrativist, or simulationist.
[50] Indie RPGs inspired by the Forge often deliberately aligned with a narrativist approach to game design, focusing on strong characters confronting difficult moral choices.
[51] The Forge was started in 1999 by Ed Healy[52] as an information site,[53] with Ron Edwards serving as the editorial lead.
[54]: 91 White states that the Autumn era (2007-2010) was impacted by disagreements between Edwards and others who ran the community, such as Nixon who at the time was the Forge's technical expert.
In May 2010, there was a "major server crash" and the recovery split the site into a read-only archive (2001 to mid-2010) and active forums (" beginning with January 2008").
Examples include Grey Ranks (2007) by Jason Morningstar, which takes place during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising,[56] and Montsegur 1244 (2008) by Frederik Jensen, in which players tell a collaborative story about the Cathars.
[64] Twitter was a main center of indie RPG design discussion, artistic collaboration, and audience outreach from the mid-2010s until 2023.
After Elon Musk's purchase and rebrand of Twitter as X in 2023, many indie game writers and artists left the social network or struggled to continue using it for outreach with a reduced user base.
[65] Several different digital publishing marketplaces that were later merged into Wolves of Freeport sold indie role-playing games between the 2000s and early 2020s.
RPGNow and DriveThruRPG were two companies that sold indie role-playing games (as well as mainstream products) as downloadable PDFs.
Examples of indie role-playing game designers also working in related movements include Anna Anthropy, Sharang Biswas, Emily Care Boss, Banana Chan, Lucian Kahn, Jonaya Kemper, Jason Morningstar, and Jeeyon Shim.