AxiomWeaver is now Understory
By Rob Chipman
AxiomWeaver was always a compromise. I chose it for uniqueness — nobody else had that name — but it always explained itself too hard. "A weaver of axioms." Grandiose. Technical. The kind of name that makes an author wonder if the tool was built for them or for an engineer.
I've known it was wrong for a while. This week I did something about it.
The search
The rename started as a naming session with the team. We ran through dozens of candidates. The obvious ones were mostly taken. Canon: blocked by Canon Inc., who holds a live Class 9 trademark. Codex: blocked by OpenAI, who launched a standalone Codex app in February 2026. Loom: Atlassian, $975M acquisition, no path there.
Some came close. Writ had the right feel — a legal document that establishes what is officially true, and the past tense of "write." Clean trademark picture. But quiet. Wyrd appealed to me for a while: Old English for fate and destiny, also the root of the word "word" and of "weird." Still interesting, just not quite right. Norn, the Norse Fates who weave the tapestry of all time: technically perfect, clean on trademark, but no one in the LitRPG community had heard of it. Hoid, from Sanderson's Cosmere: a brilliant conceptual fit, but Sanderson is currently publishing a series called Hoid's Travails and piggy-backing felt cheap.
The direction that worked came from thinking about what the tool actually does, not what it is.
The understory
LitRPG authors build a world behind their story. The entities, the histories, the magic systems, the timelines, the math that makes it all hold together. Most of them keep it in a spreadsheet. This world-building layer is invisible to readers, painstaking for authors, and foundational to everything. It has a name in ecology: the understory — the layer of vegetation growing beneath the forest canopy. Hidden, living, the thing that makes the whole forest work.
Understory. Every world has one.
The forest connection matters to me personally. The studio is called Tiny Forest Labs. The product and the studio are now in the same ecosystem, literally.
On the obvious questions
Yes, it sounds like Undertale. The LitRPG audience are gamers — they know Undertale and they'll make the comparison. I'm not worried about it. The association is warm, not confusing.
The Overstory is a Pulitzer-winning novel about trees. The contrast between Overstory (the canopy, the visible part) and Understory (what's beneath) is poetic and deliberate.
And Codex: that was the original working title when I started this whole project. Before it had any name at all. I'd been calling it Codex for two years privately. OpenAI got there first. Understory is better anyway.
The product hasn't changed
Same temporal world engine. Same entity database. Same Author Truth vs Reader Lens. Same event ledger. The alpha at tinyforestlabs.com/understory is the same build as before — just with a name that finally fits what it is.
If you're new here, here's the studio and what it stands for. And here's the spreadsheet problem that started all of this.
-- Rob