Live at the Forum

Zeke is a bartender from New York whose greatest talents are mixing drinks, chain-smoking, and complaining that his life is going nowhere. None of that prepares him for being abruptly dropped into a cult-classic video game world from the early 2000s; a game series so obsessively dissected by its fandom that it has outlived the servers and the developers of the game itself. Like any isekai protagonist, Zeke does have a special power. Unfortunately, it isn't magic, a legendary weapon, or infinite stat points. Instead, it's access to an online fan forum dedicated to the very game world he's now trapped inside. The problem is that every time Zeke asks for help, the forum assumes he's writing fanfiction. To get advice on things like avoiding monsters, finding safe campsites, and figuring out why everything in the world is trying to kill him, Zeke has to prove he's "doing the research." That means posting field notes, travel logs, dungeon maps, and historical breakdowns of his own near-death experiences. The more he writes, the more engaged the fandom becomes...all while completely missing the fact that this is all really happening to him. As Zeke struggles to survive a hostile world filled with bandits, hidden dungeons, and boss fights the community swears never existed, the forum itself turns into a second warzone. Lore purists argue canon versus headcanon. Amateur historians dissect his posts line by line. Longtime fans resent him for not knowing trivia that they've long since memorized. Live at the Forum is a story about survival, the absurdity of fandom culture, and the strange way collective storytelling fills in the gaps when canon falls silent. It's an isekai where the most dangerous thing in the world isn't a monster or magic, but being corrected by someone with a wiki link while you're actively bleeding.