Hello everyone!

We're happy to be able to share the final entry in the Last Train to Bremen Behind the Scenes. Before we get to that, we wanted to take a moment to say 'thank you' to the backers who have completed their pledge manager so quickly. In under a week, 75% of backers have completed their surveys. There's still ample time for backers to finalize their pledges, but we kindly request that the backers in the $120 Dedication pledge level promptly answer their pledge questions so that they may be included in the book. We will begin reaching out directly very soon so that we can move forward on manufacturing.

We also want to announce a small bonus we've been working on. Thanks to your feedback and requests, we're in the final stages of setup to share the 2024 version of Last Train to Bremen with backers of the campaign and late pledges. We know that you are excited to sit down and play, and this should help while our team is still working on the final files. Once the files are ready and sent to the manufacturing team, and we've made the necessary accessibility adjustments, we will share them with you.  We will keep you updated on the progress, but you should expect to receive a download notification from BackerKit later today for the 2024 version.

Late pledges are still open and will also include the bonus PDF.

Now, enjoy the final Behind the Scenes for the Last Train to Bremen!

- Darryll

Back when the campaign was active, I promised you all a backstage peek into some of the visual design and layout for the original run of Bremen, and now I’m here to share some of the original visual development conversations I had with Conner Fawcett, our fantastic illustrator. For those of you who like these behind-the-scenes previews, buckle up — you’re in for a treat.

Even before I began preliminary conversations with Conner, I knew that every member of the band would have their own icon. I came in with a clear set of goals and outcomes: these distinct icons needed to be immediately recognizable as animals, easy to differentiate from one another at a moment's glance, and just as legible in light-on-dark printing as in dark-on-light.

We committed to forward-facing designs pretty quickly, and from there, it was a process of sharpening and refining. Conner has a fantastic eye for shape language, and combining this with the simple engraved textures, these icons ended up taking on an almost masklike quality. That idea of mask-work found its way back into the game text very seamlessly, with Weaver and me incorporating the concept of stepping into these roles in the same way actors put on costume pieces.

In the end, we also ended up adding two additional designs for Fox and Crow, the ‘tutorial’ characters. I felt strongly that the tutorial should exist within the world of Last Train to Bremen, but that these characters should feel meaningfully distinct from the quartet of PCs. We landed on the circular borders as a design choice to separate them in that respect.

I had a very broad sense of the visual language I wanted for Bremen’s layout, but at first I had a pretty hard time putting it into words beyond “turn-of-the-century Americana, but a little bit punkish." I drew inspiration from numerous historical playbills and vaudeville posters – but Conner rightfully pointed out that we needed to combine that with the cluttered, utilitarian jumble of train tickets and manifests.

Due to some of the technical (and budgetary) constraints during the original self-published run, I knew that I would be handling the layout myself, but Conner provided some preliminary mockups as starting points. They then handed me a whole array of assets (frames, borders, boxes, the works) and let me Frankenstein them all together into something approximating that aesthetic. I’m so grateful that they trusted me to take all their hard work and chop it into teeny tiny bits with an ungodly number of layer masks.

When first talking with the Possum Creek team about publishing Bremen, we all knew we wanted to bring Conner back for additional interior art and a brand-new cover — something to really catch the eye and jump off the shelf. Fortunately, they were game to dive right back in and really push the vision to the extreme.

Along with the same vaudeville stylings from the digital edition, we added a lot of old matchbook covers to the inspiration pool for the new cover art. The original cover design was very understated, and we wanted to stay in the world of iconography but push it to something a little more striking:

We committed pretty early on to the Apelles palette — black, white, yellow, and red, to keep the imagery feeling fairly harmonious. What wound up being surprising was just how much we fine-tuned the design within that color world: we went through probably 15 or 20 different variations on the cover with slightly different coloration before committing to the finished design.

And of course, this is to say nothing of the new interior illustrations. If you follow Conner on social media, you’ve already seen these, but in case you haven’t – a quick teaser:

Wowee! Look at these! Absolutely stunning! The woodblock carving texture is truly out of this world. Conner voiced early on that they were eager to push themselves with the new illustrations, and judging from the final results, I would say that goal was an absolute rousing success.

All in all, Conner and Ruby have been a razor-sharp design team to work with for the new edition — each building off the other’s ideas and working to help reinforce the aesthetic and the original thematic vision of Bremen as a game. I’m excited for the Possum Creek/Steve Jackson teams to take my work and Conner’s work to completely new artistic heights within the box set.

That’s the update for now, but we’ll send more updates once we have more to share.

Until then,

Caro