Hex Kittens Hits Five Episodes: Adam Lance's Strangest Experiment Is Paying Off

When we ran down Adam Lance’s newest releases at the start of May, Hex Kittens was the wild card. We flagged it as the most interesting thing in Lance’s catalog and, honestly, the hardest to call — a two-episode experiment that could just as easily fizzle as catch fire. Three weeks later, the picture has changed. Hex Kittens is now five episodes deep, with the fifth installment landing in mid-May, and it has stopped looking like a gamble.

This is a quick check-in on where the series stands, what the release rhythm tells us, and who should be picking it up.

From curiosity to a real serial

Adam Lance writes Hex Kittens with Michael Dalton and Neil Bimbeau on a rotating-director model: same characters, same world, but a different author takes the creative lead from episode to episode. It’s an unusual setup, and the obvious risk is tonal whiplash — three writers pulling a series in three directions until it stops feeling like one thing.

Five episodes in, that hasn’t happened. The cast still reads as the cast. The absurdist horror-comedy register that defined the opener — the one where launch protagonist Nick, a paramedic, answers a routine cardiac call and ends up cornered by a troll — is still the register. If anything, the rotating-lead structure has become the series’ strength: each episode has a slightly different flavor without ever feeling like a different show.

The format, restated

For anyone meeting the series here: Hex Kittens is an episodic urban fantasy serial. Each episode runs around 6,000 words and is built like a TV episode rather than a novel chapter — self-contained enough to satisfy on its own, connected enough to reward bingeing.

It is also a deliberate departure from Lance’s usual mode. Hex Kittens is progression-lite: no stat blocks, no skill trees, no system screens. That places it much closer to urban fantasy harem than to the full harem LitRPG Lance built his name on. The Fateforged scaffolding is still there in the background — Wardens, the Fates, fae politics drifting at the edges — but it’s set dressing, not homework. New readers can start at episode one without having touched another series in the universe.

What five episodes actually tells us

The episode count matters less than the cadence. Episodic fiction lives or dies on whether the team can sustain a rhythm, and Hex Kittens has shipped a new installment roughly once a month since launch. That consistency is the real signal here. Plenty of serials open strong and then stall when the novelty wears off; this one has kept its release schedule and its tone intact through five entries and three rotating authors.

It’s also worth noting what the series is not trying to be. Hex Kittens is not a substitute for a flagship Fateforged entry, and it never pretends to be. It’s a between-seasons spinoff — lighter, weirder, faster to read — and judging it against a full-length harem LitRPG misses the point. Judged as what it is, an ongoing comedic urban-fantasy serial, the experiment is working.

Who should be reading it

Pick up Hex Kittens if you want the Fateforged sense of humor without the page count — short episodes, quick payoffs, and a premise that leans all the way into supernatural absurdism. It pairs especially well as a palate cleanser between heavier series.

If you came to Adam Lance specifically for the mechanical, system-driven side of harem LitRPG, set expectations accordingly: that’s not what this is, and that’s fine. Read it the way you’d watch a spinoff — for the cast and the comedy, not the stat sheet.

Five episodes in, Hex Kittens has earned a spot on the watch list. For the rest of what’s landing in the genre this month, check our new releases page, and you can track the full series and reader ratings on Harem-Lit.com.