Gloomhaven Grand Festival

Chris here stepping for Isaac to provide this week’s update. We’ve got a quick fulfillment update, some images of the Frosthaven Play Surface Books as well as a designer diary from Danielle, so let's get to it!

Wave 1 and 2 fulfillment: The first containers of Frosthaven are scheduled to arrive in the US next week, with the EU containers following close behind - arriving to port two weeks later. The remaining containers of Frosthaven, Buttons & Bugs, and other wave 1 add-ons are still inbound (see the last update for more info).

We’ll be sending out address verification emails to backers today. If you’ve recently moved or need to update your address for any reason, please either follow the link in the Backerkit email or contact [email protected] with your new address, so we can make sure your order gets to you!

Please note that Cephalofair will not be responsible for any packages that are lost or returned due to an address error. Please make sure your address is correct so we can get your order to you!

Wave 3: We discussed this last time, but just a reminder, with the production delay, we have decided to leave the wave 3 pledge manager open until at least the end of March to give backers more time to complete their pledge. We'll keep you updated on this as we get closer to March to give an exact date. We'll also be sending a final warning email from Backerkit directly before the wave 3 pledge manager closes to make sure it isn't a surprise.

Gloomhaven Second Edition: Art and graphic design continue to move along. The puzzle book has now been put together, with completed artwork and design layout. Our fabulous team of game designers and play testers are currently putting it through its paces. Graphic design is underway for several of the game's other components, and we're commissioning some new art pieces to further elevate it.

Here is the finalized version of the beautiful world map from cartographer Francesca Baerald:

Frosthaven Play Surface Books: We didn’t quite get the final proof in time to display at Megacon, but we've now received the finalized playbooks. They’re looking pretty sharp and make setup quick and easy. We can’t wait to start getting them shipping out to everyone!

Megacon: Speaking of Megacon, we attended for the first time and had a great time meeting players, demoing Buttons & Bugs, and introducing lots of new people to the world of Gloomhaven! We even encountered a wild Deathwalker (Amanda Byars @byarsfam)! 

That’s all I have this week, so now I’ll turn it over to Danielle to finish the update off with another RPG designer diary. Also, just a quick reminder that you can find more RPG designer diaries, character class spotlights, and more on our blog here!

Greetings Mercenaries!

It’s been a whole heck of a year, hasn’t it. What? It’s only the end of January? I’ve got 11 more months of 2024 to go? Someone please explain to me how this could happen.

Okay, silliness aside. It’s honestly been a great start to our year. I’ve gotten the first drafts of setting material for the RPG and it is looking great. I’m getting excited to start sharing that information with y’all as soon as I can. Until then, I’ll share a few more mechanical bits that I think will help with the context of the game.

Today I’m going to talk about Skills and Ability Cards. In the Gloomhaven Board Game, the classes and their abilities are iconic for hitting the right balance between each character fulfilling a different role, and everyone being distinct. No two damage classes are the same, and no two healer classes are the same. We wanted to preserve that iconic variation within the RPG, and the best way to do that is to use similar Ability Cards for each Class. In an RPG though, your character isn’t just its combat abilities. They also have social, investigative, knowledge based, and even crafting abilities. Also, in the board game, every cragheart is a savvas, and every spellweaver is an orchid. But in the RPG, a savvas could be a bruiser and an orchid could be a tinkerer. You get to mix and match ancestry to class, meaning we needed to separate abilities that came from being an ancestry from their individual classes and rethink what benefits being a specific ancestry gave you.

The way we did this was to give both ancestries and classes a combination of Skills and Ability Cards. Let’s talk first about Ability Cards, as those you’re more familiar with. Now instead of just having a class based set of Ability Cards, you also have a few ancestry specific Ability Cards that you can choose from to create your Stamina Deck. This makes choosing cards a little more meaningful, as you have more options, and you can create different combinations, allowing multiple characters of the same class to feel different in play. 

We had to adjust Ability Cards to remove some of the actions that just don’t show up in an RPG (like the Loot function) and adjust a few things for the more narrative aspect of the game. The biggest change you’ll see is the base movement value on the bottom of a card is now 4 instead of 2. This is to account for the fact that in the RPG we have more terrain features you can interact with (climbing on top of obstacles, going up or down sheer or steep inclines, etc). These take up more than one movement point, so we’ve increased the movement value to compensate. There’s also a little less need for the really tight movement you see in the board game, since combat action and non-combat action may flow and interweave between one another in a single mission.

Here’s a Level 1 spellweaver card, just to show you what they might look like (Note: the Ability Cards aren’t completely final, and may change due to playtesting):

Now, let’s talk about Skills. Skills are very similar to Ability Cards in that they allow the character to take a unique action that requires you to expend a card (Discarded or Lost). There’s a few key differences. A Skill is not on a card, it’s on your character sheet. Because of this a Skill is neither a top nor a bottom action, which means you can use your Skill as either your top or your bottom action in combat. Because you aren’t discarding the Skill after you use it, you can use your Skill multiple times in a row before any kind of card refresh (*unless otherwise stated). A Skill can be used in or out of combat. Skills are just a special action you can do, so you can do it whenever you like.

Class Skills are abilities that really define a class that we felt would be best expressed as an action that a character can take at any time. These are some of the most iconic class abilities that really show what a class is about. In the same vein, ancestry Skills are abilities that show what an ancestry is, what they care about, and how their history defines them. Even though Skills can be used in combat, they are designed to be generally useful at any time. Some are socially focused, while others are focused on manipulating elements or using magic.

For an example Skill, here’s one from the spellweaver class. 

You’ll notice that this breaks what I said a little bit. That’s what the * was about. This Skill can only be used once per Full Rest, rather than over and over again (rest assured, the spellweaver does have Skill options they can use multiple times). But, this ability is so iconic to the spellweaver, that we’ve made it a Skill. (It’s also still an Ability Card.) This means that a spellweaver can refresh their Lost and Discarded cards outside of combat, making them particularly good at taking risky actions that require losing cards, but also gives them a second refresh within combat situations. Use it wisely.

You will start your character with a few Skills, and be able to gain new Skills as they level up. We’re still working out if those Skills will add to your available pool of Skills, or if they’ll be Skill replacements the way Ability Card progression works. So you’ll have to wait until later to find out the answer to that particular question.

This was a big one today, so I hope you enjoyed this information! I have just a couple more mechanical specific widgets to show you, and then we’ll be sharing some more setting information. So stay tuned!

Good day! I am happy to report that things are continuing to move along as anticipated from the last update. All of waves 1 and 2 (Buttons & Bugs, Frosthaven, Frosthaven Play Surface Books, and Forgotten Circles) are finished with production and are either on the water or will be very shortly.

Here are rough timelines for freight shipping in all the regions.
Asia: The one exception here is our Asia fulfillment. While all other shipments will not be affected by the Lunar New Year, VFI won't be able to properly stage their fulfillment until after that is over, so they'll be picking up and beginning fulfillment at the end of February.
AU/NZ: All product is scheduled to arrive in Sydney by the end of February.
Canada: All product is scheduled to arrive at Vancouver in early-mid March.
UK/EU/ROW: All product is scheduled to arrive before the end of March (we are experiencing some delays here due to freight rerouting away from the Suez Canal).
US: Scheduled to arrive at Long Beach port in early-mid March.

So now let's talk about some other important scheduling. Originally, we had planned to close the wave 3 pledge manager in January 2024. However, with the production delay we have decided to leave the wave 3 pledge manager open until at least the end of March to give backers more time to complete their pledge. We'll keep you updated on this as we get closer to March to give an exact date.

We'll also be sending a final warning email from Backerkit directly before the wave 3 pledge manager closes to make sure it isn't a surprise. We have also had some requests for payment to be processed before wave 3 closes, which is totally doable. If you'd like to have your order processed early, please contact [email protected], and we can assist you.

And the last bit of pressing news is that we had multiple requests for the Forteller Frosthaven narration to be sent out ahead of the rest of fulfillment, so that is what we're doing. The codes are going out now! You may already have received yours, but they are sending them in batches, so it may take a day for yours to arrive. If you don't get your code by the end of the week, please let our team know at [email protected]. If you do receive your code, but are having issues activating it on Forteller's site or app please contact them at [email protected].

Development and art direction of the other projects - the new edition of Gloomhaven, the RPG, and the miniatures - continues to move along at a good pace, but there's not really anything new to share on those fronts.

That's all the project news I have for this week, but I also wanted to let you know some of the team will be out at Megacon in Orlando next week, February 1-4, Booth 601. If you're attending, please stop by! We'll have Buttons & Bugs demos and may have a finalized copy of the Frosthaven Play Surface Books on display as well!

Catch you all next time!

Good day! I hope you are having a great 2024 so far! Everything is continuing to move forward over here, even if there aren't any big updates or changes from the previous update.

Freight shipping is still in progress on Frosthaven. Everything is in the water or waiting on the Play Surface Books, as discussed in the previous update. We currently have 5 containers US bound of Frosthaven and Forgotten Circles and 2 to the EU. Canada, UK and Australia should have their containers shipping within the next week or so, and VFI Asia should be picking everything up from the manufacturer that same week for their shipments.

Furthermore, Buttons & Bugs and the Frosthaven Play Surface Books are still in production. Buttons & Bugs should be ready to start freight shipping on Monday, with the Play Surface Books following a little later in the month. Basically, the goal is that by the next update in two weeks, we can say "everything is in the water".

Here are some images of the Play Surface Books proofs!

We are ramping up the art and graphic design on the new edition of Gloomhaven. Mercenary artwork is almost finished, and work has begun on the rulebook, map tile art, and many other aspects of the game. In addition, we've finished the editing process on all the narrative text in the game, so layout on the scenario and section books can begin.

On the RPG front, first drafts on all the writing are in, and Danielle is reviewing them all. Everything is progressing along as expected. And speaking of the RPG, I also have another of Danielle's designer diaries to share:

Happy New Year Mercenaries!

It’s time to set aside the past year and look forward to the future. I know that for me, setting aside 2023 is going to be pretty easy. A lot happened over the course of the year, and not all of it was great, but some of it was stellar. But 2024 is looking to be so amazing, I can’t wait for it to be here. I know I promised to talk this month about Attributes and checks, and I’m definitely going to do that. First, I’m going to spend a short paragraph to wrap up 2023 in style.

I joined the Cephalofair team in September, and in that time I’ve gotten a crash course in the already in progress design for the Gloomhaven RPG, playtested the RPG several times with several different people, had a chance to run a session of it at PAX Unplugged, and gotten all our setting authors lined up and writing the setting. The past three months have been super busy, but it’s going to pay off in the new year, when I can start sharing excerpts from the game.

But, now on to Attributes! Last month I previewed the current Attributes (note, we may add one more in the future, but if we do, I’ll explain a bit about why at the time). For a refresher, they are: Athletics, Finesse, Focus, Influence, and Knowledge.

Athletics is for feats of physical might or stamina. 

Finesse is for feats of physical dexterity, grace, and hand-eye coordination.

Focus is for concentration and attention.

Influence is for dealing with other people, such as persuading or intimidating them.

Knowledge is for memorization, recall, and logical deduction.

Whenever you attempt to take an action that has an interesting fail state (such as: jumping over a large crevice could result in damage if you fail, or remembering the right pass-phrase could get you attacked if you fail) you make an Attribute check against a difficulty. That difficulty is often set by the GM, but could range from 3 at easy to 12 or even higher at very difficult. If two people are acting against one another, such as when someone is trying to intimidate someone else, they both make a check and the highest result wins.

Your Attributes have ratings on your character sheet and at creation they can range from 0 to 3. The modifier deck has Attribute check numbers on them that range from 1 to 6. You’ll notice that 3+6 isn’t enough to hit that highest difficulty of 12+. So how do you do that?

There’s a couple of ways. The first is that your friends can assist you with any check you might take. To do that, they flip over a Background card and say how they use their character’s background in this situation to help. All Backgrounds have some utility in a variety of situations, and they state how much bonus they add to a check. Multiple friends can assist you, which can give you a lot of bonuses towards a check. The second way is that you can have advantage and disadvantage on checks depending on the situation, or if an ability grants it. The last way is that the x2 modifier card is an automatic success, no matter what the difficulty is.

Okay, so say you draw a +6 card on a +3 Attribute and your friends gave you a +5 bonus and now suddenly you have a 14 result. Say that was on a difficulty 7 action. Holy crap, that’s double what you needed. Does all that extra result go to waste? No! We have levels of success, from a critical failure (you pulled that null card everyone despises) to a critical success (woo-hoo x2). For everything in between, failure and success, we have some varying levels of success. Failure doesn’t always mean you just didn’t get what you wanted. Sometimes it means you did the thing, but had to suffer some kind of consequence for doing it. Often this translates into discarding a Stamina Card, but it could sometimes come with a Condition, damage, or gaining disadvantage on your next action. Success isn’t always just success either. If you succeed far better than expected, your GM will give you a better result. This could be purely narrative, such as more information or a deeper emotional connection, or it could be a positive Condition, infusing an Element, or some other small mechanical benefit. Of course, a critical success gives you the best result, maybe giving you a Bless, Advantage on your next action, a Condition, or some other big benefit.

To finish up, I’ll leave you with some example actions and their difficulties.

I hope everyone is as excited to see what we have in store for 2024 as I am!

                             

That's all we've got this week! As stated above, our goal is to have freight shipping underway for all of waves 1 and 2 by next update, so I'll catch you then!

Good day! First of all, I want to apologize for missing the update two weeks ago. There really is no excuse, so I'll just say that it won't happen again!

Happy holidays to everyone! As the end of the year quickly approaches, things are moving right along as anticipated. For a more thorough look at where we are with all projects, you can take a look at this previous update. None of the timelines outlined there have changed.

Frosthaven production is now finished and has started freight shipment. Two containers have shipped out heading for the US, two more for EU/Rest of the World are scheduled to depart this week, and we have also arranged local factory pickup for our fulfillment partner in China. For the UK and Australia, the product is ready to ship, but is less than a full container, so waiting on the play surface books to finish printing.

Another important factor for ocean freight at this time is that our freight partners are rerouting all ships that were headed through the Suez Canal to go around southern Africa to avoid Houthi violence. This will add 3-4 weeks to delivery. Currently this is only affecting our shipments to EU/Rest of the World, but this sort of thing does have the possibility of slowing things down worldwide if it persists.

We are still in production on Buttons & Bugs and the Frosthaven Play Surface Books. We estimate both of these will be finished in production around the middle of next month. We had a slight issue with the sizing of the box for the books, where the final proofing copy didn't exactly match the width of the Frosthaven box itself, but we've adjusted the files, and the factory is now chugging away.

We're also still hard at work bringing things together for all the art and graphic design we need for the new edition of Gloomhaven. Dat has been making a lot of phenomenal new character art, which I'll just have to leave for you to discover in the game, because spoilers. All the narrative text in the game, roughly 125,000 words (the vast majority of which is new writing) has been organized and is in the middle of editing. Like with any big box 'Haven game, there are a lot of moving parts, but pushing this forward to completion is going to be our main focus over the next few months.

Well, some of our main focus. Danielle's focus will of course be to continue progress on the RPG. She has reviewed the outlines submitted by all the narrative writers and sent them off to work on their first drafts. I'm very excited to see what they come back with next month!



Note to retailers: The retailer pledge manager for waves 1 and 2 will be closing and charging payments on Jan. 5th. If you haven't yet received access to the pledge manager for whatever reason, please contact [email protected] ASAP so we can get you access.

One final note: If you ordered a Laserox wooden insert for Frosthaven, that started shipping directly out of Hungary last week, and so you should be receiving a shipping notification if you haven't already. This is a separate shipment from other Frosthaven items and was factored into the shipping cost.

Oh, and if it's of interest, I wrote up a little recap of our time at PAXU on the Cephalofair website. Also enjoy this great video from Above Board about Frosthaven!



I wish you a happy New Year fully of Buttons & Bugs, Gloomhaven, and the RPG. I'll catch you back here in two weeks!

Good day! We've got a short update today, as we're all out at PAXU, and there's not a whole lot of news.



The main headline is that we got a few pre-production copies of Buttons & Bugs in hand last week, which is pretty exciting. This is important because it's a final chance to review everything and catch any last production errors. There are a few things to correct with the factory, for instance, it printed darker than we'd like, and the friction on the dials is a little low, so we're working with the factory to solve those. Otherwise, it is looking very slick, and if you want to take a look at it yourself, we'll have the copies at our PAXU booth (#2936) to demo!



Also, if you are going to be out at PAXU, please come join us in the TTRPG Live Play Theatre (room 114), Saturday at 11am ET for a live play of the Gloomhaven RPG with myself, Jasmine Bhullar, Jerry Holkins, and Laura Stringer, plus Gloom Master Alexander Theoharis. And if you aren't at PAXU, you can still watch it on twitch.tv/PAX3 at the same time (or after, of course). I assure you, it will be magical!



Did I say a short update? Because we also have Danielle's next designer diary entry to share with you:

Hello again Mercenaries!

It’s that time of the month when I talk about the behind the scenes aspects of the Gloomhaven RPG. Today I’m going to talk a bit about the core of the game rules, the modifier deck, and answer some questions while I’m at it.

I have seen a couple of questions about the physical components of the game and how that impacts the gameplay and design. The Gloomhaven RPG will be using several card decks for play. The first and foremost deck is the Ability Cards which act as both your character’s stamina and a bulk of the actions they can take during combat. The second most important deck is the modifier deck. Both these decks are unique to Gloomhaven and honestly, I think they are so well-designed that we have no need to figure out a way to do away with them. So how do we handle folks who can’t afford to get these physical components on top of the core rulebook?

The first answer is that we’ll be making PDFs of the cards available for people to download. These will be printer friendly, and folks can cut them out, or just use Ability cards on a sheet and pencil in when they are discarded, lost, or active. Folks can easily print the modifier deck, cut the cards out, and paste them onto index cards, playing cards, or even just use the pieces of paper. Or they could make their own modifier deck with cardstock and markers, we’re cool no matter how you do it

Some of you might think that this is a step we could bypass by figuring out a way to not use the modifier deck at all. I did consider dice, and came up with a workable system using Fudge dice (the d6s used by FATE systems). This was fine until a character got a perk that would change out a card in their modifier deck. I could have come up with a way to change up how we did that kind of advancement. Maybe with special abilities that let you roll the dice again to add to the first result to mimic the rolling function and a reusable ability to add an element or condition to an action. But overall, that would be a lot of work to modify a system that, in my humble opinion, already works rather nicely. So we decided to keep the elegant card system and ensure that they will be easily accessible to players who can’t afford to buy the physical products. Of course, we’ll still have some beautifully printed card packs that come bundled with the core rulebook or to purchase separately if you like having the glitzy version.

There were some other questions about what system we’re using for the non-combat section of the game. We opted for a system that uses the same modifier deck for a reason. We want all the rules about how you take actions in the game to be the same across all areas of play. You say what you’re going to do, you flip a card to add its number to your base. That’s the most basic part of the system and we want to preserve that mechanic across all parts of play. If we tried for a different system for combat and non-combat, we would run into all sorts of issues with confusion and limited actions during combat. Right now, with using the same basic system for all aspects of the game, we can have non-combat style actions in the middle of combat and have them flow seamlessly. For example, in the middle of combat, I could try to intimidate the cultists who sprang a trap on my mercenary group. While my Spellweaver doesn’t have an intimidation Ability Card, I can still choose to take that action, flip a modifier card to add to my character’s Influence Attribute score and compare it to the enemies’s influence check. If successful, I might get Advantage over them, or if I beat them by enough, they may just stand down. It would be hard to get that kind of smooth action if we used two different systems.

I’ve given you a tiny sneak peek into our Attributes, so I’ll go ahead and give you all of them so you can mull over what kinds of actions you’d take using each: Athletics, Finesse, Focus, Influence, and Knowledge.

Next month, I’ll cover the Attributes in more detail, along with the way you make checks, how you may get modifiers to those checks, and some standard difficulties.

                         

And that's it from us. As is now customary, I'll end with the progress graphic for our projects, though there are no updates from last time. I'll catch you in two weeks for more Gloomhaven Grand Festival news!