Good day! We've got plenty to update you on across all projects, so let's get to it!

Getting all the production issues squared away with the manufacturer took longer than we would have liked, but at this point, we are satisfied with what we have seen and have given the go-ahead to get everything assembled and shipped out, which is great news! The factory is crunching the numbers on when we'll be able to get everything on the water as we speak, so we don't have dates yet, but we'll keep you informed when we do!

Over the last month we've seen significantly more back-and-forth with our miniature factory as we make some serious progress through pre-production, especially on the Gloomhaven and Frosthaven summon sets, which saw the most momentum. We really appreciate their increased focus and are doing our absolute best to capitalize on that focus, replying quickly and thoroughly.

Speaking of summonable creatures, these summon miniatures are so full of character and variety. It's exciting to think about how summons started as generic tokens, eventually got standees in Frosthaven and the new re-release of Gloomhaven, and now they’ll be miniatures!

And check out that Elder Drake, one of our very few multi-hex miniatures!

From Danielle:

Hello mercenaries! The past couple of weeks the team has been pouring through the RPG book’s layout and leaving comments about anything from art, design, visual impact, readability, and content. The goal is to catch anything at this stage that might need further clarification, a graphic to go along with it to enhance understanding, or reorganization to present the material in the best way possible. It’s an exciting time for me, as it means we’ve hit a pretty important milestone of first proof. This stage is sometimes deceiving. You think the book is almost done, but really, there’s a lot of little design tweaks that can take some time to implement. They may seem small, or even insignificant if I were to enumerate them here, but they make a huge impact on the final product and are worth doing.

That said, this stage of the project doesn’t always have flashy images or cool things to show you, so instead I’m going to share a snippet of setting text to tide you over. This does come in the form of a layout image so you can see how some of the design elements are coming together.

                                        

In other news, Frosthaven Digital was announced last week, in case you missed it. Snapshot Games has been working on this for more than two years, and I'm excited to see it come to fruition.  They've made a faithful port of the board game that looks great and plays snappy!



It'll be going into early access soon and you can wishlist it here.

We're very happy to have Gloomhaven moving again, and we have some more important updates coming down the pipe. Things are moving, so I'll catch you next time with the latest news!

Good day! We're going to have a small update today. Basically, we are in the middle of a lot of things with squaring away the Gloomhaven re-production, proofing the RPG book, and approving miniatures for the miniatures project, and don't really have any more solid news on any of them.

We're very busy behind the scenes, but, yeah, we need to take a pass on this week's update. We'll have more substantial news to report in the future, so until then, stay cool, and I'll catch you next time!

Good day! Thank you for all your RPG questions following the last update! Danielle has compiled a list of questions and answers for you to read through below.

Other than that, we've got minor updates on Gloomhaven production and miniatures for. A lot of the team is out at GAMA, so it's a bit of a slow week, but let's get to it!

We continue to work with our manufacturing partners to improve the quality of the game’s components. We’ve been consistently in contact with the factory to determine solutions for the problems we’ve seen. The folks at the factory have been working as quickly as they can to offer and test potential solutions. At the moment we are not able to share an updated timeline, but we expect we’ll be able to soon.

We have begun our review of a new batch of physical miniature proofs. We can’t wait to finish an in-depth review of them and share our findings with you! Look for this in the next update.

From Danielle:

Thanks for asking questions after the last update. I’ve tried my best to answer each question and provide any additional information that I felt was pertinent to help with context. I aggregated some of the similar questions, so I don’t always have the exact questions from each person. If I somehow missed your question, let us know!

What kind of resources will be available for GMs, and how beginner friendly is the game to GM?
(This question was not phrased this way exactly, but I figured this is the gist of the question, and it’s better to answer this than each specific inline question.)

We’ve tried hard to create an easy to understand and approachable set of chapters for the GM. I’ll admit the game has quite a bit of complexity tied into it, and familiarity with the board game does give you a bit of a leg up, but it might prove to set some expectations that we can’t meet.

We’ve tried to break everything out by situation (combat vs. social vs. environmental or puzzles) and give strong guidelines on how to utilize these elements individually and together. We have a strong GM chapter that guides you through planning encounters, and a bestiary full of monsters each with stats at all campaign levels (just like in the board game). Because antagonists work similarly to the player’s mercenaries, but controlled by the GM, we don’t have ability decks for them. We have provided a list of actions you can choose for them along with the initiatives you can use them at, and the GM chooses how fast they act while the players are choosing which Skills they are using each round. Everything you need to know about each antagonist is provided in the book, and because you’re unlikely to be using them at more than a single campaign level, it should be easy to jot down their stats and pertinent abilities when preparing for your encounter. As for health or status trackers, you can easily use your board game components, pen and paper, or any other tracking system that works best for you.

Where the GM chapter gives a lot of broad advice, the introductory adventure gives lots of detailed information about how to set up scenes, what is going on in each situation, how NPCs will react, and where to go next depending on what the mercenaries do. We also provide some GM notes and advice on how to keep the action moving along if the players get stumped.

Everything you need to know about Gloomhaven, its relevant history, and details that you might have missed from playing the board game are covered in the RPG. If you weren’t aware before, the Gloomhaven RPG is filled with Gloomhaven 2e spoilers! We did choose a “canon” ending for the Gloomhaven scenario, the events of which happened about 6 months in game time before the setting of the RPG. We expanded the lore from the board games, taking into account lore established through our other board games (such as Jaws of the Lion, Frosthaven, and even Buttons & Bugs). We also give brief coverage to locations beyond Gloomhaven, such as the valrath lands to the south, and the continent to the east, where the orchids and quatryls hail from.

We are conscientious that powerful items available for purchase early in a campaign can make a game feel unbalanced. In an RPG, there’s no reason shops in Gloomhaven wouldn’t have rarer items available immediately, but that doesn’t mean lower level mercenaries can purchase them. We use a combination of item cost, item rarity, and the mercenary company’s level to help mitigate what can or cannot be purchased, rather than using a prosperity level.

We don’t really want to limit ancestry or class choices to players. Ancestries make perfect sense to mix and match, or have an entire party composed of a single ancestry. For classes, that becomes a little less straightforward. There are 16 different classes available and they all fulfill a different niche and use case. Having two people playing the same class could easily lead to spotlight stealing or one player feeling second class compared to their counterpart. While you can absolutely do it, we suggest that if you do make two characters with the same class, that you make a second character of a different class and never have both characters of the same class go on the same missions together.

This was a series of specific questions, but I think it’s best to answer it all at once. We plan to sell as many individual components as make sense for players to pick up for their games. That said, the deluxe version of the game will have its own cool little (as if anything we make is little) storage box for all the cards and decks, and you’ll be getting one of everything and enough modifier cards for 1 GM and 4 players. But everything else will come packaged likely in tuck boxes (but it’s still too early to know for sure). We plan to sell modifier card decks, class ability cards and perks bundled together, and some combination of ancestry cards. We’re still working on how to bundle all these things together for both ease of access and to not have 100-million SKUs floating around for retailers to track down.

Beyond that, we do have plans for game supplements that will be forthcoming once we get the RPG out into the world. I can’t be too specific about what those will look like, but we want to support the RPG as a line, not just a one-and-done novelty.

We’re still working on what this will look like in specific, but we do plan to have some guidelines for community created content, community provided webtools, etc. Our priorities are the books and starter set, but rest assured that we will have more information in coming updates about community tools.

                                                 

And that's about it for what we have to share now, so I'll catch you next time!

Good day! We appreciate all the support on the previous update. It was a rough decision to have to make, but I'm glad we can agree that when you have to choose between getting things done correctly or getting them done quickly, doing it right is more important. It had become clear that shipping these out before Lunar New Year would mean sacrificing quality, and that wasn’t acceptable to us.

We don't have extensive updates on the situation yet, given the tail end of the new year, but we'll get into what we do have below.

We are starting up communication with the factory again after the Lunar New Year, and the general plan is to disassemble the copies that were produced, salvage the parts that are acceptable, and reproduce everything that isn't. We were informed that they should be able to start shipping these reworked copies out at the end of the month, but, again, we'd prefer to do things right rather than fast, so we'll be taking whatever time is necessary to review the new assembly and make sure everything is acceptable. We'll keep you informed of the progress in future updates.

On this project as well we'd like to welcome back our production partners from Lunar New Year as we jump back into miniature modifications and production review. Depicted above are a smattering of miniatures including monsters, bosses, and summonable allies. Part of our design process is making sure miniatures are dynamic and to scale, but also remain manageable and able to be maneuvered around a busy game board. To this point, all miniatures share the same base size (25mm), and we do our best to make sure that any projections on the miniature (arms, legs, tails, weapons) don't stick TOO far outside a standard Gloomhaven map tile hex. We also make sure that we're taking into consideration monster group sizes.

We'll be previewing these miniatures throughout this year at various conventions, so if you stop by the Cephalofair booth, be sure to get a look for yourself!

We’re still working on layout for the RPG. It’s going slower than I like, but we’re making steady progress. I should be sending the first half of the book to the team for proofing in the next day or two, and then the rest of the book should follow shortly after that. I really wanted to be able to update today that the whole thing was in proofing, but alas, layout is not a simple or fast process.

Since we’re doing a lot of “this is still in layout” updates, I’d like to maybe do a different kind of update next time. If you want to submit questions about the RPG, I’ll try to answer them in our next update as a little Q&A. Please keep questions to things I can reasonably answer, such as lore or mechanical items or processes on how we make our games.

Until next time, here’s some art by Ed Bourelle for you to feast on!

                                       

In other news, our sales and marketing team will be at the GAMA Trade Show next weekend, and we look forward to connecting with our retail partners out there!

I'll catch you next time with more news on Gloomhaven production!

Good day! I need to jump right in with the bad news here: last week, we made the hard decision to cancel ocean freight on Gloomhaven due to newly presenting production issues. We were all very excited to see our first round of printing start shipping, and we sent advanced copies to our team, some creators, and our partners, only to find significant component problems when we opened our boxes.

What are the production errors? We saw warped map boards and scenario trackers, along with poorly injected and assembled miniatures. None of this met our quality standards or had presented itself in samples or pre-production copies received ahead of mass production. 

Obviously, this came as a huge shock to us, especially as ocean freight had already begun on multiple containers. However, once we verified that it wasn’t just one or two boxes with these issues, we recognized that halting further shipping and returning the product to the production facility was the only reasonable solution.

As Lunar New Year is tomorrow, facilities are already shut down for the holiday. We’re in conversation with the facility manager, who is fully invested in correcting these issues. They have both acknowledged the errors and  committed to providing us with replacement product. That being said, we won’t be able to reprint the game until workers return in mid-February.

We won’t approve another mass production run until we are certain we’ve discovered the root cause of the issues and solved them. So what does this mean for you? It means a delay of a couple of months. We aren’t sure exactly how long it will end up being, but be assured that we and our production facility are determined to solve this problem quickly and efficiently.

Making this decision was genuinely heartbreaking, but we firmly believe it was ultimately the best call.

So that's the news on the Gloomhaven front. We're also going to skip over updates on miniatures. We did have some progress there, but haven't been able to fully process it yet with big issues taking priority. So that leaves us with an RPG update below.

We do have some good news on the RPG front, so this update isn’t all bad. Layout is moving along smoothly, all art is turned in and approved, and graphic design on new icons for a few RPG-specific use cases are moving along quickly. We’re still on track for getting the RPG to proofing by the end of this week or early next week. I don’t want to make any promises, but I'm crossing my fingers that we’ll be able to send out a preview PDF in February to all of you.

This part of RPG production always feels like directed chaos. The pages look like a mess, headers are scattered everywhere, we only have placeholder images, and yet, somehow, we are close to done with the book. That last bit takes a ton of effort, but it isn’t so bad. We’ve gone through and edited the text for readability, and it might look a mess, but a quick find and replace will shape it up in no time. Here’s a spread to show you what I’m talking about:

While these updates have been focused on the book, we’re also hard at work designing the RPG cards and other physical components, so that those of you who backed for the deluxe box aren’t going to have to wait. (Which is, honestly, most of you.)

And here’s some more art from the core rulebook:

                                         

And that is all we have for the moment. We're sorry the news isn’t good, and it certainly isn’t news we’re happy with, but we'll hopefully have better news to come as we work with the factory on where to go from here. Catch you next time!