Good day! I hope you had a wonderful weekend. We are entering the fourth week of the campaign and are rounding 20,000 backers, which is fantastic! I am pleased all of you have joined the festival! And Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs is currently our most backed item, which is also great to see!

We had a great game of the RPG yesterday with the Old School crew. Mostly taken up by some nasty combat with drakes, which definitely brought the tension of exhaustion into the system. But then, in the second half, we got to a lot of interesting and unexpected story beats. You can watch it here.

Today we're starting the week strong with a lot more exciting streams. First of, at 10am PST (fast approaching!) we have a panel with Vincent Vergonjeanne from Lucky Duck Games and Price. Lucky Duck produced the official companion app for Frosthaven, but they may be talking about some new stuff, so I wouldn't miss that if you're a fan of app-assisted Gloomhaven!

Then we've got Monica Paprocki from Geeks A Gogo to talk about her experience cosplaying for Cephalofair Games and what she's working on next. That'll be at 4pm PST, then right after at 5, we'll have Tabletop Minions back on to continue painting miniatures.

And, as always, I'll give a shout-out to the puzzle at the bottom of the main page. This is a difficult one for the Spellweaver designed by Sam Muriello. Also, I think I forgot to ever link to the discussion of the previous puzzle for the Tinkerer. Also that Tinkerer puzzle was designed by MadMullet.

And then finally on my list of announcements, Drew and Dennis wrote up an in-depth look at the new Two Minis class in Gloomhaven: Second Edition. Since it is a locked class, I'm just going to link you over to the BGG thread rather than post it all here, but it is a fascinating read, as Two Minis received some substantial updates, but we kept the fundamentals the same.

                               

Okay, one more thing: we have an interview with Forteller. Forteller provides an immersive audio experience and helpful game aid for Gloomhaven, Jaws of the Lion, Frosthaven and the upcoming Gloomhaven: Second Edition. 

Translating these games from the tabletop to an audio medium requires a variety of different tools, inspiration, and an experienced team. We asked the Forteller team to tell us more about Forteller and creating the audio experience for Gloomhaven and Frosthaven. 

The honest answer here is that we truly hope that the games and audio bring people together in a way that really harkens back to our traditions as humans. Storytelling is one of the oldest forms of entertainment. Whilst storytelling around a campfire has slowly transitioned into playing games and roleplaying with each other to create those stories, really the tradition is the same. We think that anything that brings people together is something to be honored. 

Gloomhaven/Frosthaven and the upcoming RPG have brought hours of joy, togetherness, and fun to people around the world. Forteller’s aim has always been to enhance that experience and honor the stories told by the interactions within the game. 

We want to allow gamers of all walks of life to enjoy the content and have a more accessible means of understanding and enjoying those stories. 

Issac’s world is an interesting one to riddle through… many of the context clues in the writing provided the skeleton for how the world could sound. We started with the creative elements of the art and picked kinds of music that we felt matched each different location or character. 

Gloomhaven and Frosthaven are a mixing pot of cultures and situations, not unlike our own countries of this planet we call “Earth”. Music is always something binding and we really wanted to push the idea that music from any culture can sort of bridge the communication gaps and inspire beauty, emotions and in some cases even war. 

The inspirations for instruments range wildly from ancient throat singing to giant full orchestral pieces and everything in between. The instrumentation was important because we felt that the music needed to have a window for each represented culture in the game’s writing. Whether it was a culture like the Lurker’s where wind instruments were unlikely or figuring out just how a Savvas would sound if they were singing without lips. 

Drawing inspiration from the design elements was the real catalyst. It culminated into something beautiful, comedic, and tragic which feels like a fully realized world to us.

Absolutely! Gloomhaven (the city) is an established tradeport and takes many audio cues from bazaars and bordellos that have existed in cultures across our world for centuries. The city of Gloomhaven really has so much to explore both from a figurative and literal level which created the fun challenge of filling it with unique sounds and ambience. 

As a game, it really has some of the finest attention to detail in its enemy and character designs. That is where Forteller’s focus went initially. We really went through and made sure that each character or enemy had a voice that was uniquely inspired by their individual situation. 

Forgotten Circles and Jaws of the Lion (complete narration for those are both available!) are continuations on the stories told in the world of Gloomhaven and both provided unique challenges since they have their own personalities but needed to maintain the “Gloomhaven Feel”. 

A majority of that cohesive feeling comes from the narrator himself, Phillip Sacremento. Phillip has endeavored to make Gloomhaven feel unique amongst audio narrations. His voice and commitment allows us a consistency across all the Cephalofair narrations we’ve created. 

To date, there are over 150 different voice actors from every continent in the world (barring Antarctica, which I hope to change someday) that have been involved between all four of our Cephalofair audio narration projects. Across our Forteller universe, we work with over 1,000 actors. 

We have endeavored to have as many unique voices as possible and I think each of them brings a wonderful new piece to the Gloomhaven puzzle. Every new entry in the series provides expanded lore to the world and that has been the most exciting part of making Gloomhaven come to life... figuring out all of the intricacies and how to bring them to life. 

The actors that we work with are often passionate gamers, fans of the series, and some even helped write parts of the game (Hi Alex!). It reflects in their performances and honestly has been such a labor of love from everyone. Thank you so much for lending us your voices! 

All projects are great learning experiences that allow us to reflect and build on each other; but to fully answer the question I have started at the beginning with Gloomhaven. 

During Gloomhaven, we learned what we wanted to do with the format and how to put together the world and tell compelling stories within the Gloomhaven universe, it set the tone and pace and drove the team to think bigger. 

Forgotten Circles was the next installation. It allowed us to further our efforts to make interpersonal stories and create characters that really focus on telling their stories. Because of the way that Forgotten Circles is told, it feels SO different but also has a few really wonderful moments that explain the lore of the Gloomhaven universe in a meaningful way. From a sound design perspective it was a daunting challenge which breathed new ideas and thoughts to the process. 

Jaws of the Lion required us to limit our focus and make compelling sound design with a limited scope. This taught us many lessons along the way about emphasizing the smaller stories in a grander way to establish an overall feeling that could persist between stories. Jaws of the Lion continued to establish the deeper parts of the Gloomhaven world and those stories that are told allowed us to make more intimate connections to the lore. 

Frosthaven shifts the focus to a unique and challenging biome that is a bit less inhabited (Or so you’d believe) that is variable in so many ways. The game has everything! Mechanical sounds, furry guys, small things, huge evil stuff, booms, clatters, love, war, tears,and laughter. 

Like the Frosthaven box, all these feelings and emotions are hard to fit inside the figurative box! So instead, we had to think outside of it. Frosthaven became about getting the characters to feel like an enemy and a friend or vice versa when the moment was necessary and that is something Jaws of the Lion helped us hone in on: context matters and almost every interaction in the main storyline is about context. 

Go play it and you’ll see what we mean; if you don’t have it yet - well get the reprint right now and don’t forget the audio narration! 

Returning to Gloomhaven with a bevy of new characters, an expanded production team, and four Cephalofair projects worth of knowledge is exciting for us because we can apply all of that knowledge into it! 

Since Gloomhaven: Second Edition has brand new scenarios and stories, we are excited to keep learning more about this world and we are honored to be trusted with breathing more life into it through sound. Gloomhaven is one of our favorite games and you can bet your gold on

the Forteller team bringing a passionate and mindful approach to each and every part of the game. 

Gloomhaven: First Edition was Forteller’s first released narration and in a way it’s like coming home, we are always happy to work with the Cephalofair team. We absolutely can't wait to get our hands on this one…both from a project standpoint and from a gaming perspective. Playing all of the new classes in the Gloomhaven storyline? WITH AMAZING MINIS? YES PLEASE.