Good day! We're coming up on the final weekend! There's not too much going on, but we will have the latest episode of Old School going live tomorrow. Otherwise, we'll just be gearing up for the grand finale of the Grand Festival.
Plus, we've still got some stuff for you today. At 10am PST, Price will (finally) be talking to Chris at Brushwood Minis about painting Gloomhaven minis. You'll probably hear some tips and tricks and insights there. We had a couple false starts on getting this scheduled, and I may have announced it early in a previous update, but the conversation is finally happening!
And then at 4pm PST, stop in for the Friday Fireside Chat! Today I will be joined by Satire again, but a different iteration - this time with Joe and Alexander. Joe handled the writing of the entire main story for Gloomhaven: Second Edition, so we'll probably talk about that a fair bit. We'll try to keep it spoiler-light though.
The highlight from yesterday was the Gallant Globlin's play of the Gloomhaven RPG. The story was great, and the cast was a lot of fun, so check that out if you're interested:
Drew and I also got up to some Gloomhaven: Second Edition shenanigans yesterday. We did a nice, breezy jaunt through a crypt with Two Minis (me) and Triangles (Drew). I think the biggest news there is that we agreed that Drew's next and final game, which will be happening 8am PST on Tuesday, will be Drew, Dennis, and myself - the whole crew - playing the new version of the most notorious scenario, 72. At +1 difficulty. So we'll see how that goes.
It's Friday, so there is of course, a new puzzle down at the bottom of the main page. This is a challenging one for the Mindthief, designed by MadMullet.
And I am pleased to also now present you with another class preview from Drew and Dennis. This one is for Three Spears, which was one of the most extensive overhauls the classes got. Still very much the same feel (minus the infinite stamina), but with lots of new actions and mechanics. Since it is a spoiler class, I'm just going to link you over to the BGG thread, but it is definitely worth a read!
So, admittedly, I am running out of things to highlight for you in these updates, but I figured I'd just tell you about what I was doing yesterday, which was editing files for the reprint of Frosthaven and the printing of the Frosthaven playsurface books.
Now, Frosthaven editing is a little boring. We're just compiling the list of typos and quality-of-life improvements that have been coming in from everybody playing the game, and making sure those all get fixed. There's nothing major or game-breaking at this point - all the major errata can be found on our website or the BGG FAQ thread - and there also aren't any balance changes, but we want to do all the little things to make the game as good as possible.
But, anyway, what I thought could be interesting to show you is a little deeper look at the playsurface books, which I've also been editing in conjunction. So here is the spread for scenario 0:
And here's a PDF version, since it's so large, it's hard to see the details without zooming in.
Most scenarios will require 2 or 3 pages, but there are a good number that require 4 pages, as well, so there will be 4 books to accommodate that. It was important that each book only supply one page per scenario for a number of reasons:
First, we didn't want people to have to play over the spiral binding, like in Jaws of the Lion. It just provided too much extra complication and annoyance, and it's an easy fix to just split the books further.
Second, there would be a height issue if you try to do 2-page spreads across the same book. This is less of an issue in Jaws of the Lion because the page counts are smaller, but each of these books is around 100 pages. If you've got a 2-page spread on the first page, that's a one page height on the left and a 49-page height on the right, which get's pretty wonky. With each book only supplying one page, you can just fold them over, and so each one has a 50-page height, and there's no disparity.
Also using 2-page spreads can be limiting spatially, so you end up laying things out suboptimally and wasting space.
So we've got three pages on three separate books composing the scenario layout. A table of contents will direct you to what the main page of each scenario is (the page with the introduction and map layout), and then that page will tell you what other pages from other books you will need to grab, and how to lay them out to make your map. You may also notice small tabs on the edges of the pages that also help you to setup the pages correctly by matching up the tab on the corresponding page.
You'll also notice that all the text for the scenario is also in these books, so you will not need either the original scenario book or section book to play the scenarios if you have these. You've got all the introduction text under the main banner, then any door that supplies additional text will have a little arrow pointing to that text, and then the conclusion text will be elsewhere in the spread, but the scenario goal will helpfully direct you to it.
Also, the scenario key is much shorter, since, for the most part, you don't need overlay tiles! Stuff that doesn't usually get moved or removed is printed larger on the maps so that you don't need any additional components, while stuff that is more interactable, like traps, has a smaller icon for you to put an overlay tile on top of (much like Jaws of the Lion). So the scenario key only needs to tell you about monsters and the interactable stuff like traps and treasures. And if you're playing a class that can interact with the typically non-interactable terrain, the books will also come with a supply of tokens that you can place on the maps to indicate if something is no longer there.
Now, I could probably talk forever about all the different unique scenario rules that provided a host of unique challenges in translating them to this format - varying layouts depending on which way you go, larger scenarios that actually required 5 pages, disappearing and shifting map tiles - but I won't. I will just say that you can rest assured that we solved all the myriad of problems through some creative ingenuity (mostly on the part of the layout designer, Aaron), and if you're curious about a specific scenario, you'll just have to get the books and see for yourself.
And on that subject, if you are interested in picking these books up, you can add them to any pledge as an add-on when you're checking out or in the pledge manager.
Cool! So I talked about that for longer than I intended, and I need to get this update shipped out, so I will leave you there. I hope you have a great weekend!
