Kadokawa’s Sneaker Bunko imprint confirmed on Friday that Ryo Mizuno’s Record of Lodoss War: The Crown of the Covenant (Lodoss-to Senki: Seiyaku no Hokan) novel series is back in production. Volume 2 is still some distance away, but the imprint will publish a chunk of the manuscript on the Kakuyomu website on October 22 at 5:00 p.m. JST.
That works out to 4:00 a.m. EDT for anyone outside Japan. The preview is the first new material from the series in a while, and it comes with an unusual admission from the publisher: the book is not finished yet, so here is part of it.
Why the wait has been long
The first volume arrived in September 2019 with illustrations by Hidari. It was the first new Record of Lodoss War novel in twelve years, which tells you something about how the franchise had been running before that. Lodoss has stayed alive through adaptations, spinoffs and reprints rather than through new prose from its creator.
Atsushi Suzumi launched a manga adaptation of the new novel in October 2019, and Udon Entertainment released that adaptation in English across three volumes. The manga covers the same ground as the first book.
The story picks up a century after the events fans know. The Crown of the Covenant brought peace to the accursed island of Lodoss, and that peace has held for a hundred years. It is the ruler of the kingdom of Flaim who threatens to break it, and the young prince Lyle of Marmo who goes looking for help. His answer is Deedlit, the high elf, who is by this point the franchise’s most recognizable surviving character.
Where Lodoss lives now
The novels are one branch. The other is Record of Lodoss War: Queen of Death, the first webtoon from Studio White, which launched globally in August 2025 after a South Korean debut in May 2025. Southern Camel handled the adaptation and Blanton did the artwork.
That webtoon is an official prequel, set before the original story and built around the fall of the Kingdom of Kastuul. Studio White is a joint venture between Kadokawa, LINE Digital Frontier and REDICE STUDIO, which makes it a fairly deliberate attempt to move a 1980s property into a vertical-scroll format for a new audience. The same partnerships keep showing up elsewhere; Crunchyroll, HAYATE and LINE Digital Frontier are working on roughly fifteen webtoon anime together.
So the franchise is running two tracks at once. The webtoon handles the distant past and reaches readers who mostly read on phones. The novels continue the main timeline for the audience that has been there since the beginning.
The origin story is worth repeating because it explains the series’ durability. Record of Lodoss War began as magazine articles recounting tabletop RPG sessions played by a group calling themselves Group SNE. Those write-ups turned into novels by Mizuno, and the novels turned into the 1990 video anime series and the 1998 television sequel Record of Lodoss War: Chronicles of the Heroic Knight.
That path, from someone’s D&D campaign notes to a franchise with a webtoon spinoff, is not something that happens twice. It puts Lodoss in the same small club as other long-running light novel properties that refuse to die, like the Kino’s Journey team’s new series.
What the October 22 preview means
Publishing part of an unfinished manuscript on Kakuyomu is a small but notable move. Kakuyomu is Kadokawa’s user-generated novel platform, the same site where a lot of current light novel hits started as amateur web serials. Putting Lodoss material there places a legacy property inside the pipeline that produces new ones.
For readers, the practical read is that volume 2 exists in draft form and Kadokawa wants to show progress rather than announce a date it might miss. Anyone who wants to read the preview will need to be on Kakuyomu at 5:00 p.m. JST on October 22, and Japanese reading ability will help considerably.
For everyone else, the news is simply that the series has not been abandoned. Twelve years passed between novels once already. A few more months is not the same kind of gap. The manga route is still open too, and light novel to manga adaptations have become a standard way for fantasy series to stay visible between volumes.
Sneaker Bunko has not given a release window for volume 2. The preview is the only date attached to the project right now.
Featured image: Record of Lodoss War: The Crown of the Covenant volume 1 cover, illustrated by Hidari, via Anime News Network.
Source: Anime News Network — Record of Lodoss War: The Crown of the Covenant Novel Series Resumes
