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!