Hi everyone!

It's the final hours for our 25th anniversary celebration. We're about to break the $170k stretch goal and have a few final fun tidbits for you!

Countdown Show This Afternoon

The Four Posters of Covers

As part of this project, we're putting together a historical record of all the Goodman Games cover images. The goal is an appendix in the history book showing the full list of titles released over the last 25 years, with covers.

As preparatory work, we've put together four posters showing all of our cover images. Well, almost all. We aren't showing all the variant covers for every title. But the posters show at least one cover for every title, and for some titles with "lots of important variant covers" (like the DCC core rulebook), we've shown as many as we can.

We've also repeated a few covers where it makes sense. One poster has "all the Dungeon Crawl Classics" covers; another poster has "all the D&D support." For the first 66 DCC modules, they fit both categories, so those modules appear on both posters.

Regardless, the result is four awesome posters and a herculean effort to pull together records that have remained disorganized for 25 years. Kudos to our graphic designer Jason Edwards for embarking down this path.

Here are the four posters as they stand now. There are a few mistakes (we're actively proofreading daily) and still a few covers we're digging through the digital archives to find. We thought you'd enjoy seeing this huge dose of nostalgia.

You can add on posters to your pledge if you'd like a set!

Thanks for the support everyone. See you on the countdown show!

Hello everyone!

It's the last couple days for this anniversary celebration! We've told a lot of stories and anecdotes. For today's update, let's focus on The Fantastic Art of Goodman Games. Phil Reed is doing an amazing job of curating and designing this book. There is sooooo much art to work with!

We've posted several galleries on our web site profiling the amazing artists we work with. Erol Otus, Doug Kovacs, Sanjulian, Brad McDevitt, Stefan Poag, Peter Mullen, Jennell Jaquays, Will McAusland, Jim Holloway, Jeff Easley - it's been an amazing privilege to work with them all. You can find those galleries here.

For today's update, I'd like to share images from a few artists who don't yet appear in those galleries. For no good reason other than, we just haven't found the time! Here, then, let's show off some amazing art:

The Goodman Games Art of Ian Miller

I've been a lifelong fan of Ian Miller since first encountering his art in early Games Workshop books. It was such an honor to have him contribute to a couple of our titles.

The Goodman Games Art of Jim Pavelec

Jim lived in Chicago at the same times Doug and I did. When the right project comes along, his style of horror-fantasy is just so perfect. Here are a couple images he's done for Goodman Games.

The Goodman Games Art of Jim Roslof

Jim Roslof was TSR's first art director. He is probably most famous for painting the cover to Keep on the Borderlands, along with hundreds of other TSR illustrations. He did a lot of work for Goodman Games. Here are a few of his images that we just can't forget.

The Goodman Games Art of Russ Nicholson

I've admired Russ's art since first encountering it in the Fiend Folio. Russ was a very nice guy who was always happy to contribute. He did dozens of drawings and paintings for us over the years. Here are a few of my favorite illustrations from him.

There's a lot more where that came from - and you'll find it all in The Fantastic Art of Goodman Games!

So tell us in the comments, readers - which of these is your favorite image?

Welcome to all the new backers! Today's update is about some of our signature items: doom gongs and wizard vans! Does this qualify as... "marketing"? "creative content"? "convention decor"? Or, as Wayne put it, "Joe's life-size DCC playset"? Whatever you call it, it sets us apart.

But first, in case you missed it, here is the next of our Gamehole Con videos reminiscing on the company history...

Doom Gongs & Wizard Vans

“I can see why you want to maximize your physical presence in a professional sort of way, especially for a convention as expensive as Gen Con, so people take you seriously as a serious game design company producing serious products for serious gamers,” Michael says. “And then there's us, who show up with a doom gong and a ziggurat and a wizard van. We do bring some of that old TSR energy. If you're not having fun while you're doing it, why bother?

The legs of the gong stand are covered in plaques commemorating the winners of our annual Gen Con tournaments. Stu quotes Harley discussing the many gongs throughout the world:

“There are like 20 Doom Gongs out in the world," Harley says. "There's one in Germany. I think there's one in the UK or Brazil. They bring them to conventions, and you ring it when your character dies. Did Wayne Snyder think he was gonna create this thing that would be imitated by other folks? That it would wind up overseas? But what a cool gift. What a cool contribution to this this shared culture.”

You may have seen some of these gongs in the wild!

There are others, too. How did the gong come about? This is how Wayne tells the story:

“Joe said, ‘I wanna do this gong thing. Can you build a thing to hold a Gong?’ But he had no idea that I had worked at the amusement park and used to build shit like that. So I was like, ‘Yeah, man. I can do that.’ I spent that summer in the warehouse, and it was just boiling fucking hot in there. I work outside, but it's extra hot in a building. Shaving foam, carving stuff, you know, painting and doing epoxy. But there's this kick ass band, they're doing really well for themselves, called Book of Wyrms. They had their practice space there. So, I'm carving this big pediment portal looking thing with demon skulls on it, and there's a space metal band playing live 30 feet away. It was fucking great.”

And then, of course, there is the Wizard Van. The dream started 20+ years ago, and we first attempted it as a stretch goal on a swag Kickstarter around 2013 or 2014. In 2015, we mocked one up for the yearbook cover:

In 2019, Stefan painted his awesome Space Van art, and we put it on a T-shirt and GM screen for Gen Con.

In 2021, Doug painted Shana's wizard van as the poster art for the following year's Road Crew.

And then finally, at Gen Con 2022, the Wizard Van came to life!

Stu has so many great quotes from Wayne about the van:

“It's not fast, but it sounds like it's fast.”
 
“Joe said, ‘You know, I think I wanna have the van in the exhibit hall.’ And we kinda talked about it a little bit. I'm like, ‘You do not want my van. It gets leaky. It's loud. It's rusty. It's like tetanus is happening all over the place.’”
 
We used to joke about building the Joe Goodman playset. The ziggurat started as a joke, then it was like, ‘What’s next? The ziggurat? That's exactly what we're gonna do.’”
 
“It’s crazy that it's so recognized. There's 70,000 people at GenCon but people recognize that van. It’s one of the centerpieces of the whole show.”

Readers, tell us in the comments! What's your favorite memory of the Doom Gong or Wizard Van?

Happy Monday, gamers!

So many things to discuss today. First, we've broken $150k and added our 15th stretch goal! The goal is 25 entries to match back to the 25-sided die. Now's the time to add 25-sided glitter die if you haven't already done so. Look at this mesmerizing video - you too could have such a glitter die if you add it on now!

Over the last couple updates we've covered much of Goodman Games and DCC RPG early history. Now let's fast-forward ahead to a year we all remember: 2020. For us, it led us to online cons and a whole new way of engaging with fans. As Stu writes:

Joe was generally optimistic as he headed to the GAMA trade show in Reno the second week of March 2020. On the first day, Monday, March 9, coronavirus was in the news, and people were talking about it, but it didn’t seem serious and folks were mostly focused on business. But by Wednesday, some of the booths were empty and people were leaving early. Rumors swirled that the airport was going to shut down. The governor of Nevada declared a state of emergency on the 12th, the day the show wrapped up. Joe luckily had driven out, but many others were stranded in Reno for several days.

“I remember the drive home from Reno, it was all very pessimistic,” recalls Goodman, “I called Brendan and said we needed to run an online convention. Clearly, nobody was gonna be able to go near other humans for months.”

Joe was right. On March 14, Luke Gygax announced that Gary Con was canceled. GenCon held out hope that things would get better by August, but canceled the convention on May 19. All the other shows followed suit. Covid was bad news for an industry that generates a huge portion of its sales at the crowded conventions that were no longer possible in a new era of lockdowns and social distancing. At least, that’s how it seemed in the uncertainty of those first months.

Brendan LaSalle worked some event-organizing magic, though, and got Goodman Games’ first phlogiston (read: online) convention, Cyclops Con, up and running in a little over a month, beginning on April 17 and running through April 20. That’s a remarkable turnaround for a company that remains fairly analog in its approach to things!

Gaming sessions, social hours and seminars were run via the videoconferencing software Zoom, which enjoyed a massive influx of users during the initial months of the pandemic. Some Zooms were broadcast on a central Twitch stream throughout the convention weekend. Around 600 people attended. “It was huge for an online convention,” says Goodman, “We got all these messages from people saying that it was so mentally helpful after having been locked up for four weeks not talking to other humans.” 

It wasn’t perfect, and Zoom was a mess, but it somehow all worked out well enough. The social hours were open Zoom calls. Doug painted a special background for the Cyclops Bar on short notice for everyone to use. Brendan wore a cyclops mask. Other people happened to have cyclops masks, too. “We were all hanging out at the Cyclops bar,” says Goodman, “50 people, part of the DCC community, on Zoom, just hanging out. It was like a lifesaver for a lot of people.”

In its own weird way, Cyclops Con taught us a lot about ways to bring the community together. Eventually it led to the first Dungeon Con several years later, and the DCC Demo Con online event idea that premiered in 2026. Dungeon Con continues to evolve... but perhaps that's a topic for another day!

In the meantime, everyone, we are entering our final week. Please tell your friends about this campaign and make sure you've grabbed the 25-sided die and any other add-ons you need!