Good day! A long time ago, it was fated that we would make a new edition of Gloomhaven, taking a well-loved game, and making it better in every possible way. It was a difficult journey, full of hardship, but with fulfillment complete, the verses written about this voyage are finally complete, and they can now be passed along to you.
This is an item already in your copy of Gloomhaven that we wanted to reward you with for completing this journey with us. Thank you!
With that said, we’ve still got two more waves to complete, so let’s move on to updates on the other projects.
RPG
I wanted to take some time this week to give you a better idea of where we’re at with the RPG project. Earlier this year, when the initial book layout was coming together, we took a look at what we had and made the internal decision that the book could be a lot better. We were rushing to finish, and the result just wasn’t up to our standards.
We wanted to spend some time making things more visually interesting and cleaning up a lot of language and rules for clarity and space. It was also a huge priority for us to enable players to experience the RPG using just the book by reducing the overhead of playing without cards. This was accomplished by cutting back some ability card complexity and mapping the modifier deck to playing cards, which we’ve discussed in previous updates.
All of these things take time and effort, of course, and we have been making steady progress in the intervening time towards completing all these goals. Completing this RPG project is our main priority, and we are getting close to finishing the files needed to start pre-production.
The main efforts we are finishing up are:
Mechanical text review. We brought a rulebook expert in to make sure all the rules of the game are consistent and easy to understand. He has a few more sections to finish up.
Table updates and layout changes. As we've made improvements to the RPG and content has changed, tables throughout the book have needed updates both visual and structural. We are still currently working through these.
Indexing. We’ll start this as soon as all other book text is finalized.
Ability cards. With updating skills and system tweaks, the ability cards similarly need to be updated to match.
Art layout. In addition to the technical / gameplay-oriented layout, we’re working on integrating artistic elements into the RPG components in a visually exciting way. We’ve shown a lot in the spreads provided in previous updates.
Other materials. The GM screen, deluxe set box, and other packaging are the last step in all this, as they are dependent on the rest of the project being done.
In the coming weeks, we’ll keep you updated as we work through these efforts. Eventually we’ll move into pre-production, where there will be further efforts like packaging prototypes and pre-production samples, and we’ll get more into those then.
Miniatures
Normal progress continues on the miniature front. The factory has sent 37 miniatures across digital mods, red wax samples, and PU samples since last update, which have all been reviewed by us. Here are a few more images of some sculpts!
One other thing to mention is that I acknowledge support wait times have been longer than normal, which is obviously not ideal. We have been implementing further processes to speed things up, and the wait times are decreasing. I want to apologize for the delays, and thank you for your patience as we work through this.
That’s all we've got for this update. Catch you next time!
