Good day! Welcome to the new backers who pushed us over the 20,000 backer mark, we are happy you have joined us!

If you missed the stream with Lucky Duck yesterday, Vincent announced that they will be working on a helper app for Gloomhaven: Second Edition! It will more-or-less offer the same functionality as their Frosthaven app, which they have improved significantly since its initial launch. You can hear all the details in the Twitch video.

We also brought on Monica Paprocki to talk to Price about cosplaying for Cephalofair and the costumes of Gloomhaven. She has become a mainstay in our booths, and talks about her experiences there, our upcoming shows, and also her work with Geeks A Gogo. You can watch the video here.

And then we've got so many more streams today! Drew started a Gloomhaven: Second Edition stream an hour or so ago, so I'm a little late notifying you of that. He is doing his Drew thing, playing three characters and once and interacting with chat, and that's playing on the main page now.

Then Nikki, designer and resident expert on Buttons & Bugs will be running through a scenario or two of that at 1pm PST. I believe the plan is to show off the characters we haven't highlighted yet, at least doing a Spellweaver play, but maybe we'll see some Silent Knife or Bruiser action as well.

And Nikki will be back on with Joe at 4pm PST as well for the Tuesday Fireside Chat. We'll talk more about Buttons & Bugs and really whatever else we feel like.

And finally, we've got one more stream for you today! Tonight at 6pm PST I will be reunited with my friends TJ and Richmond at Brambeard Gaming in an attempt to complete our Gloomhaven Digital campaign that we started over two years ago. We played pretty consistently up until my son was born. We've been talking for a while about starting it up again, and we figured what better time than the middle of a crowdfunding campaign? The stream will feature some late-game spoilers, so be mindful of that. I think I'm playing a Squidface now? It's been so long, I can't quite remember, so we'll all find out together tonight.

Also here is your discussion page for the Spellweaver puzzle.

                         

Over a week ago, I promised some more detail on RPG character progression. To be honest, this is the part of the game that has been developed the least, but I'll do my best to give you an idea of the current vision. Most testing has focused on level 1 characters so far, but we do still have a solid idea for how this will go, based largely on how character progression occurs in the board game.

So let's talk about the five main ways your character will progress as you play through a campaign of the RPG. (Also, if you haven't yet, reading the post on character creation would hep in understanding some of these concepts.)

Each level after the first, characters will gain two +1 increases to their attribute scores. These can be allocated in the same or different attributes, but no score can exceed their current level plus 2.

This is also pretty straightforward. Characters will earn experience from the GM as they defeat monsters and complete quests, and there is the same values for leveling up as in the board game: 45 experience gets you to level 2, 95 gets you to level 3, 150 to level 4, and so on all the way up to level 9, the max level. Each time you level up, you get to choose a new class card to add to your pool of available cards, just like in the board game.

Where things differ a bit is with the ancestry ability cards, which you don't have to chose from up level up. Instead, you simply get a new ancestry card added to your pool every odd level. So at level 3, not only do you get to choose a new class card, but you also get a new, more powerful ancestry card to play with.

Skills are similar to ability cards in that you get a new one at every level. This skill can be chosen from the initial list you have at level 1, which is based off your class and ancestry, but you will also gain access to new class and ancestry skills as you level up. The concept here is similar to a wizards spell book in D&D. We don't want to overwhelm new players with too many options at level 1. But each level you get to add one new cool thing to your repertoire from an expanding list of options, so that by the time you reach the higher levels, you will have a lot to keep track of.

And then, of course, you will also get a perkmark each time you level up, which can be used to improve your modifier deck. What is new here, though, is that now modifier cards have both an attack modifier value and an attribute modifier value, so each perk improves your attack modifier in ways you'd expect from the board game, but each perk will also slightly improve the numerical average of your attribute checks. You can see this on the (preliminary) perk list for the Bruiser, where the number in the hexagons represent the attribute modifier values.

One thing to also note from this perk list is that there are not non-AMD perks. For the most part, these don't work as well in the more free-form RPG, and a lot of this design space is covered by skills anyway. Also, there are no additional perkmarks gained from battle goals or legacy retirements, so a character will only ever get eight for their perk list.

To compensate for this, we've empowered GMs to hand out additional perk cards for good roleplaying or really whatever they are impressed by. Currently, each of these cards is a rolling +1 in an attack, but provides a rolling bonus to a specific attribute in a check. So if you were making an athletics check and flipped a "+2 athletics" card, you'd get an extra 2 on your check.

A character's backgrounds are less fluid, but that doesn't mean they can't change. Backgrounds are things that define your character, and sometimes, those things change. Maybe you've moved on from your traumatic past or some new event in the campaign has left a permanent mark. At the discretion of the GM, characters may gain or lose backgrounds (though, generally, if a player loses a background, they should gain a new one so they have at least four). The backgrounds gained can of course come from selection of backgrounds available in the game, but there is nothing stopping a GM from making new background cards as well!

Money and items are, of course, the other side of character progression. As players defeat monsters and finish quests, they should also be earning money that they can spend on a wide variety of things. They can buy and equip new combat equipment, of course, though what items they have access to is dependent on where they are doing the buying. And like any good adventure game, most of your best equipment is probably going to be found in the middle of an adventure, not a shop.

Characters can also invest in non-combat luxuries: a base of operations, faster travel, crafting equipment, hirelings, etc. Most of this is still in development, but we are excited to use these concepts as a spring board to bring the world more fully to life!

I've seen the retirement question a number of times, so I also want to address this here. The concept of retirement was introduced in the board game to give players a mechanical reason to switch things up and try new characters. But this is an RPG, and players don't need that strict of guidelines! When you create your character, you're probably going to dream up some reason for them to be out adventuring as a mercenary, and part of the campaign should have you working toward that goal. But this is all just normal role playing. Likewise, if you get tired of your character and want to try something new, just talk to your GM and figure out the best way to sideline (AKA retire) one character to bring in another.

As this is normal procedure for an RPG, we didn't want to bog it down with extra rules or restrictions. So, yeah, there is character retirement, but it just happens whenever you want it to.

That'll just about do it for RPG spotlights, but let me know if you have any additional questions in the comments, and I will do my best to answer them. Catch you next time!