Scenario book structure and guest designer Lisa Smedman
over 4 years ago – Sun, Apr 19, 2020 at 03:30:26 AM

Hello! Today I want to tell you about guest designer Lisa Smedman! She is a very prolific fantasy and RPG author who also happens to be super into Gloomhaven. She reached out to us a while back about possibly writing some novelizations for Gloomhaven. And while that didn't quite happen, I was like, "Hey, you should design some Frosthaven scenarios instead!" and Lisa was totally on board for that.

Lisa has published 23 novels, including many in the D&D Forgotten Realms setting and Shadowrun. She also designs RPG content, teaches college courses on game design, designs tabletop war games, and her first card game, Merchants of the Sands, will be published soon as well! I think that definitely qualifies her to make some fabulous Frosthaven content!

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All right, so now I wanted to spend some time talking about the structure of the scenario book. In Gloomhaven, we showed you the entire map on a single page, and had text and section breaks that sometimes spilled over into a second page, but it was pretty self-contained and very space-efficient. We had 95 scenarios to display, and we didn't want to make the scenario book too giant.

I think it worked out pretty well, but there were some flaws - mainly that there were no surprises. It was hard not to notice what monsters were going to show up in the next room and exactly where they were going to be placed. You could calculate the exact number of hexes you needed to get that treasure chest before the door even opened. The excellent Scenario Viewer app solves these problems, but we also started looking for an analog solution as well.

So we started trying different things in the community-driven campaigns and Forgotten Circles. In that, Marcel advocated for a section system that did a lot of good things. We gave the players one page up front with how to start the scenario, and guidelines on when certain things happened (opening doors, time passing, etc.), what section to turn to next to see what happens and what the next room looks like. These sections were then just mixed around in the second half of the scenario book, such that when you flipped over and looked at them, any other information on the page was irrelevant to the current scenario. We were able to hide things from players, which allowed for more surprises and intricate puzzles within a scenario.

But I think it went a little too far. We hid too much, leading to some very valid criticisms regarding how much setup was required in the middle of scenarios and how much flipping back and forth between the sections in the scenario book was required. It also took up a lot more space, both because of the nature of the sections and because the scenarios were a lot more complicated. In Gloomhaven, we got 95 scenarios into 120 pages. Forgotten Circles' 22 scenarios took 64 pages. Not that that is a bad thing, but when we're talking about over 100 scenarios in Frosthaven, it is a consideration. I'd prefer not to give you a 300-page scenario book. That would be an unwieldy amount of pages.

So, we want to keep the mystery, but cut back on the unwieldy-ness of it. The first solution is just to give you all the setup information for the scenario up-front. Not the monster placements, but what monsters you need, even if they're not in the first room, all the map tiles and how they will be placed on the table, and every overlay tile you will need for the entire scenario (even doors and corridors). You'll see a larger map with the initial room, and then a smaller map of the entire layout, with each map tile clearly labeled.

It will look something like this, except this image doesn't have final art assets for anything, so don't judge that too harshly.

The other major fix, in order to combat the need to flip back and forth in the book and to cut down on the number of pages in a single book, is that we'll be splitting up the scenario book into two separate books. One book will have this first page of every scenario, so that you can always keep that open for reference on all the info those pages provide, and then there will be a second book to hold all the sections. This second book will be similar to the Forgotten Circles structure, but also keep in mind that, for the most part, these scenarios will be less complicated and require less section referencing than that. For instance, this first scenario only has one other section when you open that door (plus a conclusion section when you complete the scenario).

If you want to see more of this structure, I'll be using it in the latest community-driven campaign, which is going on now. People seem to be liking it a lot, but if you have any feedback on it while you are playing through those scenarios, let me know!

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#TeamAlgox made up some ground today, larger due to Pepe's repurposing of a Queen song, which I appreciated.

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Today we have the puzzle solution for the Voidwarden. There were a couple ways to do this one, but I didn't see a solution I liked better than my own, so that is what I am sharing.

And now today, we have a special puzzle, made by Marcel (who also designed the two Geminate puzzles and the first Drifter puzzle). It is a very complex puzzle for the Diviner, which, instead of the normal rules for having an attack mod deck full of +0s, you can see your and the monster's attack decks, so that you can manipulate them! There's a lot more to keep track of here (note that you also have an item), but the solution won't be posted until Monday, so you've got two days to figure it out.

Let's talk more about the guest design process, and welcome two new guests: the designers of Grimrock and Druidstone
over 4 years ago – Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 11:22:22 PM

Happy Thursday everyone! It's hard not to just shower you with praise every day about how ridiculously successful this Kickstarter has been, but I figure that might get old after a while. But, since I haven't said it in a while, thanks! You all are the best, and you are going to make this game the best, and I am just so happy that so many people want to experience another journey with me into this crazy fantasy world to meet robots and psychic crabs (and giant, horned yetis, of course)!

I thought I'd talk a little bit more about the guest design process today, but first, there are new guest designers to introduce! Petri Häkkinen and Antti Tiihonen are the designers of the Legend of Grimrock video game series, which both blew my mind when they came out in 2012 and 2014. I am a big sucker for old-school, first-person, grid-based dungeon crawls, and these are the best that have ever been made.

Then, when they released a turn-based tactical combat game last year, Druidstone, and mentioned how similar it was to Gloomhaven, it was an instant-buy for me and another great video game experience. Though I've never met them, I feel like we've had a conversation through our games, and so I reached out to them about guest designing and was thrilled that they accepted!

So, look, I don't want to make it seem like I am trying to sell you something, but Legend of Grimrock 1 and 2 are on sale on Steam right now, and if you love Gloomhaven, I guarantee that you will love Druidstone. So, you know, if you're looking for a way to fill some time in quarantine, well, those are some suggestions.

So what will Petri, Antti, and the other guest designers be doing exactly? Well, to start I should explain that the ordering of the Frosthaven scenario book will be very similar to the ordering in Gloomhaven. The first half or so of the book will be filled with scenarios from the main campaign - branching trees of scenarios that are unlocked in a specific order that will lead you towards various conclusions. There are 62 of these scenarios (there may be 3 additional at the end, but that's heavy spoiler stuff, so we'll ignore that for this discussion) and I have already plotted them all out. Most have been fully designed, scenario stickers have been drawn, the writing is wrapping up - everything is coming along nicely.

But Frosthaven wouldn't be complete without side scenarios. There will be quest chains unlocked through personal quests, through random dungeon cards, through events, and through various other secret means. This stuff is all very much not done, if I am being perfectly honest, but that's where the guest designers come in, at least in part. I will still have a hand in creating a lot of these scenarios, especially if they are critical to, umm, certain secret stuff, but I am depending on the guest designers to provide some cool, smaller adventures that are ancillary to the main campaign.

So, once the Kickstarter ends, and I have some time to put together a packet of information for them about the world lore and the various components and monsters in the game they'll have access to, then we'll start to work together on coming up with exciting scenarios or chains of scenarios. It will ideally be an open conversation where they come up with ideas on what they want to do in terms of mechanics and theme, and I help them figure out how best to fit it into the world and structure of the game (e.g. is it a personal quest, or a random event, or something else?). I'll also be on-hand to help with the nitty-gritty of monster placement and scenario balance if needed.

And then, once we're all happy with the scenario and how it fits into the larger game, we'll work on the other assets like the scenario sticker art and the flavor text, and that's how we make a scenario!

And so the last question is, are all of these guest designers actually increasing the amount of content you will be getting? For sure they will. It won't necessarily be a ono-for-one, where each new guest designer means a new scenario you wouldn't otherwise be getting. If a designer's idea works for something I was planning on doing anyway, I'll plug their scenario into that part of the game, but I expect a lot of the content generated will be on top of my plans. For instance, if you look at the original Kickstarter for Gloomhaven, I'd say around 75% of the content that was introduced through guest designers and the scenario design competition was extra stuff that wouldn't have been replaced by my own work if it hadn't been there in the first place.

More designers absolutely means more content, and it means better, more varied content as well. Every single one of these guest designers  is highly intelligent and skilled at what they do, and every single one of them will make the game better in their own unique ways. Each new addition to the list is a cause for celebration!

Oh, and one more thing! The next scenario of the community-driven campaign is live, so go check that out as well!

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#TeamAlgox was soooo close, but now #TeamUnfettered continues to surge ahead! Today that was mainly due to Beyoken claiming the points I promised for their Necromancer solution for the Unfettered. How will the Algox close the gap now?

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And today for our puzzle solutions, we have actual minis for the Jaws of the Lion characters! The Brute can finally rest!

The next puzzle is for the Demolitionist, another damage powerhouse. An extra note here, in case it is unclear, the top and bottom borders of the displayed map are walls.

Let's talk about the campaign tracker, and a new guest designer!
over 4 years ago – Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 08:22:07 PM

Hey, so you may have noticed the prevalence of video game designers in this week's updates, and we're going to cap it off with one more - someone with more experience designing Gloomhaven scenarios than anyone else in video games: Mike West, creative lead for Flaming Fowl, the studio behind Gloomhaven Digital!

Before co-founding Flaming Fowl, Mike worked as lead design for Lionhead Studios on the entire Fable series. With Gloomhaven, Mike has demonstrated his prowess over the system, developing balanced, randomized dungeons for the new adventure mode, as well as designing new monsters and bosses to live within that mode. Gloomhave Digital is in great hands, and I'm sure the Frosthaven guest design will be as well.

And just a reminder that Gloomhaven Digital is available as an add-on in this campaign. It is $18, a price that includes all taxes and is cheaper than any sale price that has been offered on Steam (the retail price is $25). We will be delivering the Steam keys for the add-on as soon as possible after the wave 1 pledge manager closes in June.

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Earlier this week, I asked what you all wanted me to talk about in these updates (and I'm still open to suggestions!), and one of the topics that sounded like a great idea was the campaign tracker. You may have noticed it in the components graphic, and I've mentioned here and there in interviews, but I wanted to go a little more in-depth on what it's all about.

So, first of all, I'm going to show you a picture of the current design, but you have to keep a few things in mind. This is absolutely not the final design. This is something I threw together at the last minute right before the campaign went up because our real graphic designers were busy on other stuff. So, really, it's just a proof of concept, and should be treated as such. The number of scenarios is obviously way off and it will probably be significantly bigger or maybe even be two separate trackers - one for the campaign scenarios and one for the side scenarios. Either way, I just wanted to use an image to help explain, and so don't read too much into them.

So the thing is, I really liked the flow-charts that were made to keep track of the Gloomhaven scenarios. The fact that the campaign is a little hard to keep track of is certainly valid criticism, and I wanted to fix that going forward with Frosthaven. The problem was, of course, that that flow chart is full of spoilers. Discovering how the story plays out is part of the fun, and you don't want to see the entire structure of the campaign up-front. Which is why I turned to the brilliant system in Pandemic Legacy I keep calling an "advent calendar".

It's essentially two heavy card stock sheets, one of which is punched so that you can open little doors and see what is hidden between. In our case, each time you unlock a scenario, you will be told to punch out a door, and what is hidden between is the name of the scenario and how it fits into the campaign, with arrows going to and from the scenarios it is connected to.

In addition, we are looking into take one more page from Pandemic Legacy's book and having the stickers for the scenarios included in the window too. This will just be more convenient, but also reduce spoilers even further by hiding all of these stickers up-front, so you don't accidentally look at the stickers sheet and learn the name of some late-campaign scenario. It's a small thing, but it is nice.

Now, the inevitable question here is about replayability and how we are introducing another destructible element to the game. And if these advent calendars hold stickers, is that also how the removable stickers will be packaged? And the answers to those questions is still a little unclear, but that seems like the most logical solution to us. If we present the removable stickers for the scenarios in the same way, then that item, which will be available later through our web store and retail, can function as a recharge pack if you want to punch out your scenario flow chart again.

So hopefully now you have a better idea of how the flow chart will function and how it will aid in your campaign.

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#TeamUnfettered went in a creepy direction yesterday with this photo montage. And #TeamLurker explains why they are having so much trouble in the contest. I'm still pulling for you!

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The Demolitionist pulls through, destroying the Ruined Machines in today's puzzle solution. It did require one kind of obscure rules resolution, but that's one reason why these puzzles exist - to better learn all the intricacies of the game.

And now the final member of the Jaws of the Lion takes the stage - the stoic Voidwarden. Many of her abilities rely on the strength of her allies, but she finds herself alone. Perhaps she can get her enemies to fight each other...

Just a small note that the Curse condition, like Muddle and Strengthen, would have no effect on the attack modifier deck.

Forteller spotlight and three new guest designers
over 4 years ago – Thu, Apr 16, 2020 at 03:44:42 AM

Greetings everyone! Most of this update I'm going to turn over to Forteller Games to tell you more about the audio narration they're doing and their production process, but first I wanted to tell you about new guest designers!

Alexander JL Theoharis, Joe Holmes, and Zac Cohn are the guys behind Satire's Extended Battle Goals and the custom Curseborn class for Gloomhaven. We thought the extended battle goals were great and approached them about using some of them in Frosthaven and Jaws of the Lion. That then grew into a more significant partnership, and they ended up helping out significantly on the development of Jaws of the Lion and designed the first four scenarios - most of the tutorial section - for that game.

They want to do something similar (but smaller) for Frosthaven and give players a "scenario 0", if you will. A chance for new players to get more familiar with their character and the mechanics of the game with much lower stakes involved. It won't have any impact on the campaign and can be easily skipped if you don't need it.

Alexander, Joe, and Zac will also be helping with events, quests, and, yes, more battle goals. And also other secret stuff that I don't want to spoil for you! They've generated some really great content for Gloomhaven and Jaws of the Lion already, so I'm looking forward to seeing what they do in Frosthaven!

Oh, and one more thing before I hand things off to Forteller: I'll be doing a Reddit AMA on r/boardgames next Monday, April 20, so I hope to see you there!

And now Forteller, in their own words:

Hey all, we’re Forteller Games, a six-person self-funded team of career technologists with a passion for gaming, both digital and physical. Our love of board games and tabletop RPGs runs deep! So naturally, it’s led us to develop a platform that could bridge the gap between the tabletop and digital gaming experience.

What Is Forteller?

Forteller is a platform that offers an enhanced gaming experience comprised of professionally voice acted and musically scored audio narration. Simply put, we’re a full-service audio production & software development company that makes original audio content to bring the designer’s world to life.

Through a mixture of script writing and story architecture, we make it easy for game designers to connect with their audience through new mechanisms. Part of that is ensuring we work with the best talent available. Many of our voice actors have been in large AAA projects like: World of Warcraft, Horizon Zero Dawn, Borderlands, League of Legends, Hearthstone, and many more.

Our Current & Upcoming Projects

We’ve had an exciting year that’s allowed us to get involved with four amazing board games. We want to keep you informed on our latest projects, so here’s what to know.

Gloomhaven Narration

We have the main story campaign ready on the Forteller app, with scenarios 0-51 available to buy. As for the side scenarios, we’ve heard you loud and clear, so we’ve started pre-production on them. Scenarios 52-95 will be released this summer! Even better, these scenarios will be included in all Gloomhaven purchases at no extra cost to you. After all, we’re gamers first, and we don’t want to DLC people to death.

You can listen to our Gloomhaven audio on SoundCloud or access it on our app. Let us know what you think!

Frosthaven Narration

For Frosthaven, we’ll be producing 100+ scenarios, as well as 14 Solo Scenarios. We’ll also be introducing a fully composed music soundtrack designed just for Frosthaven, making your gaming experience one of a kind. It will be available once Frosthaven is released.

In the meantime, have you heard our audio for Frosthaven’s prologue and the first scenario? We just dropped the trigger 1 audio this week. Check it out on SoundCloud.

Other Products

We’re providing audio narration for other games you might be interested in. First, in June, Succubus Publishing will be retiring its audio app and moving Middara’s audio files to our platform, where you can listen to them for free as you play.

Additionally, Forteller is producing audio narration for The Isofarian Guard. It will be released next year; we’ll update you on the exact release date via our social media pages—such as Facebook—once we know more.

Our Audio Production Process

Curious about Forteller behind the scenes? Here’s a rundown of our process. First, we review the game’s scenarios to get a feel for the characters. Then we write a script, mapping the characters and their personalities to it. We then start the search for the best voice actors, going through 30-40 auditions per role. We work with our partners to whittle down the role to one actor, and then live direct through a virtual studio when necessary.

This is where the fun begins! We use digital audio workstations (DAW), like Adobe Audition CC and Pro Tools, to bring the tracks together. Combining ambience, Foley, music, and other sound effects can bring the world to life. To do this, we use a combination of our own custom libraries, personal voice effects, and stock libraries that Hollywood studios and video game companies use.

Once it’s done, the final audio is imported into our content pipeline. We then use real and raw assets from the board game to enhance the scenario and story tracks. Now it’s ready to be released for you and your friends to enjoy on your next game night!

Guild Mode

Last week, we announced a new feature we’re including in the app: Guild Mode. This lets you create a game session and invite your socially distanced friends to join and listen to the audio from their devices. All you have to do is buy the audio files for the game you plan to play, and then pick Guild Mode to get your virtual gaming party started!

We originally planned this feature for 2021 as part of a membership package. But with the state of the world, we’ll offer it for free during a time when it’s not realistic to meet in person. When it makes sense, we will be clear about when the membership program will roll out and what other features that will bring. Short term, we want you to enjoy our app and stay "social" with proper distancing.

Supporting Forteller

You can add-on the Frosthaven Forteller narration in the pledge manager, or back one of the tiers that includes Forteller. And if you are interested in the Gloomhaven audio files, you can get them directly from our website to use on a mobile device.

Additionally, we’d love if you’d interact with our posts on social media, such as our Facebook, Instagram, and Youtubepages. We enjoy hearing your feedback! You can also join our Discord channel, where we make exclusive announcements and polls. And if you have a favorite game that you’d like us to do audio narration for, be sure to let us know, as well as the publisher of that game. We’ve only gotten this far thanks to many of our “Forfolk” making these supportive moves, and we appreciate it!

Before we wrap up, we’d like to thank Isaac and Cephalofair Games for giving us a chance to bring one of our favorite worlds to life. And we’d also like to thank you, the board game community, for your support—as it’s what has allowed us to turn our ideas into the audio narration platform we envisioned.

Sincerely, the Forteller Games Team

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And #TeamUnfettered surges forward a bit, largely thanks to a lot of fan art on Reddit and Board Game Geek!

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So, yes, I screwed up again with the puzzle. I had to modify the Hatchet's puzzle halfway through the day yesterday, so here is a solution for the updated version, with a bonus discussion about the character mats for Jaws of the Lion. You may notice they are different. We're toying with also changing Frosthaven character mats to the same format, so let me know what you think of them in the comments!

And now, the Red Guard has a chance to shine in the latest puzzle. Can he do as much damage in three rounds as the Hatchet did?

Hint/clarification: The bottom of Blinding Sickle can be used to just generate light, since the first ability is a non-targeted effect that can be used even when no enemies are adjacent.

New characters in the puzzles and new guest designer Tyler Sigman
over 4 years ago – Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 03:11:52 AM

Hello all! Two weeks in and we have raised $7.4 million! Stupendous!

I don't have too much news today. We're adding some new characters to the puzzles - those from Jaws of the Lion, which is a smaller, more easily approachable Gloomhaven campaign that will be hitting stores in July. More on that down in the puzzles section, for those who are interested.

I also just want to let you know that we do have a number of updates from other people working on the project in the works that should be very interesting. This week, we'll hear from Forteller about their team and production process, and then we'll also hear from Monica Paprocki, who cosplayed the Banner Spear for us at PAXU, to learn about that process. And next early next week we'll have that Broken Token update that a lot of you have been asking for.

So what else would you like to hear about? I'm happy to dedicate other updates to learning about other aspects of the project if people are up for it, so let me know in the comments.

One other thing we definitely need to talk about today is our new guest designer, Tyler Sigman! Tyler is the designer of my absolute favorite computer RPG, Darkest Dungeon, which has certainly had a huge influence on the creation of both Gloomhaven and Frosthaven.

I think it's biggest impact was just showing me that it was possible to break out of to break out of the stale, traditional RPG combat system with something that was engaging and innovative, but still felt familiar and thematic. I was running into a similar problem with tactical combat board games. It all just felt very stale, this concept of moving and rolling dice to attack over and over until one side was dead. Tyler and Darkest Dungeon planted that seed that there had to be a better way.

Not only that, if you're looking for influences for the new town-building aspect of Frosthaven, you don't have to look much farther than Darkest Dungeon either. I couldn't be happier to have Tyler join the team. And if you haven't played Darkest Dungeon, you really should try it out!

And finally, I need to invite you once again to the final live art show with Tatiana Quigley, which is going down at 9pm EDT on Facebook. Last Thursday, for the second installment, she made a little comic about the interactions between the Drifter and the Geminate. It went in a sort of... Animal Crossing direction.

Tonight she'll be tackling the Blinkblade and the Deathwalker, so please join us!

Oh! One other thing to mention! The next road event is up for the community-driven campaign, so please participate and go vote on that!

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All right, so for puzzles, I've decided to start throwing some Jaws of the Lion characters to mix things up. You also may start seeing some more monster types in there, like with the polar bears in the last puzzle. I'll do at least once cycle with the four Jaws of the Lion characters, but let me know if you want to see more or whether you'd rather stick to the Frosthaven characters. Marcel also has a Diviner puzzle if anyone would be interested in that?

Anyway, on to the Necromancer solution. I actually had a different solution than the one in the video, but this was posted by Beyoken on BGG, and I liked it better than my own solution, so that's what I filmed. If Beyoken has any team affiliation, let me know, and I'll give the team 50 points, which could be a huge deal!

And now, the first Jaws of the Lion video, featuring the Hatchet, a ruthless killing machine. Can he fell the great Steel Automaton?