LitRPGTools Built a Free Comic and Graphics Studio Into the Site. Here's What It Actually Does.

Every working LitRPG author has the same folder of half-finished graphics: the Patreon header that’s the wrong size, the character sheet drafted in a spreadsheet, the comic strip that never got lettered because lettering software costs money and time. LitRPGTools.com has now built a tool for exactly that folder, and put it inside the site.

It’s called Author Studio. It’s free. And it’s more capable than “a comic maker bolted onto a book database” would suggest, so it’s worth being precise about what it does and where it stops.

What Author Studio is

Author Studio is a browser-based composer for comic pages and marketing graphics, built from images you upload. You start a project by choosing what you’re making, name it, and get a canvas at the right proportions before you place a single image. The project lives privately in your account: no public URL, no follower gate, no review queue. Delete it and its artwork goes too.

The composer is the same one that powers Bonus Content, the site’s free follower-extras library, but a Studio project is deliberately separate. A Patreon banner no longer has to become a bonus post to exist.

The tools, specifically

This is where it earns the word “studio” rather than “template picker.”

• Panels. Start from a panel template or a freeform page. Reframe artwork inside a panel without touching the source file, split panels, change frame shapes, add and reorder pages.
• Lettering. Speech and caption balloons with tails you drag, edited in place by double-clicking the bubble, from a searchable typeface list. It’s the part comic tools usually get wrong, and it’s done properly here.
• Text, shapes, and free images. Drag an image from the palette onto empty canvas and it becomes its own object: move, resize, rotate, rename, lock, layer.
• Layers. One list of everything on the page, front to back: panels, lettering, shapes, text, images together. Rename, hide, lock, reorder by drag or keyboard.
• Selection and arrangement. Multi-select, groups, align, distribute, and snapping to page edges, center lines, and neighboring objects. On-canvas transform handles, including rotation.
• Masks. Hard-edge image masks from seven presets, or copy the outline of any closed shape you’ve drawn. Clearing a mask restores the full image.

Everything reachable by pointer is also reachable by keyboard, with 44-pixel targets on touch. That’s an accessibility detail most indie design tools skip.

Ten canvases at the sizes that matter

Author Studio ships four comic-page canvases (2:3 print, 4:5 social, square, webtoon) and six marketing canvases at destination sizes: social post 1080 by 1080 and 1080 by 1350, story or reel 1080 by 1920, link preview 1200 by 628, Patreon header 1600 by 400, Patreon tier art 620 by 300.

The size discipline matters more than it sounds. A Patreon header is 1600 by 400 or it isn’t a Patreon header; Patreon will scale or crop anything else. The Studio composes into the exact size and exports the exact size, so the file you download is the file you upload elsewhere.

Export, and the one credit line

Every page exports as a full-resolution PNG to your device. You can also export the project file, which reopens with the whole composition intact: panels, lettering, page order. That portability is the difference between a tool you try and a tool you keep.

The catch, stated plainly: exports carry a “Made on litrpgtools.com” credit in a band below the artwork. Not across it. The platform’s own reasoning is that a band under the page is a credit line and a mark across the page is a watermark, and authors are right to resent watermarks on their own art. On the exact-size marketing canvases the band is inset, so a 1600 by 400 header still comes out at 1600 by 400, credit included. Nothing composed is covered or rescaled.

What it isn’t

Images only: JPG, PNG, WebP. There’s nothing to do with an audio file on a canvas. Composition is desktop-first; phones and tablets get review, text editing, page reordering, preview, and export. Uploaded art counts against the account’s shared media allowance, the same one Bonus Content uses. And the tool is new, which means the template library will grow rather than arriving complete.

It also isn’t a place to publish. If the result belongs on Patreon, in an ad, or on social, you start in Author Studio and download it. If it should become a free follower reward inside the site, you start in Bonus Content instead and release it through review.

The reader side

Comics published through Bonus Content get a panel-tour reading mode: the reader steps panel by panel through the page, the view scales to the active panel, and progress resumes at the exact panel across devices. Ordinary page view stays available. For webtoon-length strips and dense multi-panel pages, that’s the difference between reading a comic and squinting at one.

The verdict

A genre platform building a real design tool is an unusual bet, and the execution is better than the bet deserved to be. Proper lettering, real layers, masks, exact-size canvases, portable projects, and a credit line instead of a watermark, at no cost. If you commission art from the professionals listed on the platform and then spend an evening in Canva fighting sizes, this replaces the evening.

Author Studio is at litrpgtools.com/author/studio. Bring the folder.