Cephalofair Games

CREATOR

4 months ago

Project Update: November update: mercenary pack fulfillment, new RPG content, and 10 years of Gloomhaven

Good day! It’s your first monthly update! We’ve got a lot of progress to share with you on the RPG, but I did want to spend some time addressing some feedback from the last update.

Mercenary pack pre-order

I am happy to report here that all mercenary pack shipments have arrived or will arrive soon at all fulfillment centers, and we are ready to provide more concrete information on fulfillment.

Before doing that, I would like to first acknowledge our lack of communication on fulfilling this pre-order and apologize for that. This was not a part of this Backerkit campaign, which is why you weren’t seeing updates about it here, but you also weren’t seeing updates about it elsewhere, so it is perfectly understandable to look for updates here and be frustrated by a general lack of information, especially when we had advertised the packs through these updates.

Our policy moving forward, with both this and future pre-orders, is to provide more prompt updates by email when timing on delivery changes. We will be sending out an email update on the mercenary packs to all pre-orders shortly, but we wanted to provide a fulfillment update here for you as well:

AU/NZ: All orders have been added to their queue and are expected to start shipping out before the end of week.
CA: Shipping will start next week on Monday, with all orders shipping out by the end of next week.
EU/UK/RoW: The container has arrived in the EU, with expected delivery to the fulfillment center on Nov. 7. Barring any container delivery issues, we expect orders to start shipping next week.
US: Shipping will start on Thursday, and the majority of orders are expected to be shipped by early next week.

We’ve also added this information to the mercenary packs product page and will keep it updated there as fulfillment continues.

Delivery timelines

Another thing I wanted to address was the sentiment of wanting a specific timeline on delivery—wanting to know when you will actually receive the projects that are still outstanding. This is completely understandable, and if we had enough information on all the variables in the process to give you a timeline that was 100% accurate and was guaranteed not to change, I would love nothing more than to give that to you.

Unfortunately, there are just too many variables. At this time, it isn't possible for us to confidently share a timeline without a very real risk of creating further disappointment. Our policy moving forward is simply to provide you with as much information as we can on where we are in the project and what still needs to be done, so that you can see progress is being made. Only once we have entered production and we have solid timelines from our manufacturers, freight companies, and fulfillment partners will we be able to give you an estimate on delivery dates that we can be confident in.

Support tickets

And the final issue to address is support tickets. I know this has been a pain point for a lot of people, and I am sorry. Between fulfillment of Gloomhaven and other issues like the mercenary pack delays, we were hit by a high volume of requests that we did not handle as well as we could have.

We are happy to announce that our support team has put in the effort to resolve the full backlog of tickets and get us to a place of less than 24 hour turn-around time, but I also wanted to share how we are improving things for the future:

We’ve set up additional reporting on support tickets that give us a better view of how things are going so we can react more quickly when it comes to things like bringing on additional temp help during peak times.
We're working with our international partners to get direct access to fulfillment data so we don’t have to contact multiple different support channels for each ticket.
We're also looking into additional methods of ticket filtering for more efficient resolutions.

If you have a new issue or an outstanding one that you don’t feel has been resolved, please reach out to [email protected] so we can take care of it for you.

Minis

We continue to make progress with the miniatures project, though there is nothing new to report this month. We expect to see more substantial progress in the coming months and will have more to report in a future update.

RPG

We’ve got a couple of cool things to share with you on the RPG, so let’s talk about progress on our major outstanding efforts. I also just want to once again note that this is the top priority for everyone on the team who is working on it, and we are doing our best to get this all together quickly, while also maintaining a high-quality presentation.

Ability cards: Layout and editing of all ability cards (which are included in the deluxe set) has been completed, and the first thing we wanted to share with you here is the spread of cards from everyone’s favorite rock thrower, the Cragheart!

You’ll see the layout is subtly different from their cards in the board game, incorporating flavor text and the bonus for using the card in an Attribute test. The RPG also just has a slightly different aesthetic than the board game, which we wanted to capture in the bordering and backs of the cards. The actions, of course, are also modified (and generally more powerful) to account for shorter combats and a different action economy. Francesca Baerald has once again provided some wonderful linework to help tie the aesthetic of these cards in with the core book. The resulting tapestry-inspired motif can be seen on the back of the card as well as in subtle hints on the front.

Art Layout: Arch here! I wanted to help demystify the “art layout” process for the RPG book. This is a process that I direct and coordinate with the help of Layne as well as our illustration collaborators. The focus is to make the book’s content look excellent while adjusting for printing requirements and overall usability. Some of this work carries through the whole book, like the filigree borders of the spreads. Other things need to be considered on a case-by-case basis. Different information sometimes can warrant a different kind of presentation for both aesthetics and usability. It’s so much more than just “making things look pretty” (though making things look pretty is an endeavor near and dear to my own heart). The process also involves a lot of technical knowledge and problem solving.

Here’s an early pass of one of the spreads in the World chapter. You may remember seeing some of these previews earlier in our process, and while it may look like a done deal, there are some visual improvements to be made. Mates Laurentiu’s illustration of the orchid scholar Anatexis is wonderful, but it doesn’t quite feel at home here yet. The index style and border treatments had not been fleshed out yet. Layne and I felt it needed to feel a little more bespoke.

We once again looked to the expertise of Francesca Baerald, known for her drawing and cartography skills the world over, to design a decorative filigree border as a nod to Gloomhaven’s dark fantasy setting. It’s the kind of margin art that you might find on esteemed medieval manuscripts, and it feels like something that even Hail would take a moment to appreciate. This introduced some new production considerations. We have a specific spacing allowance along the edges of all of our printed materials that must be observed. Currently, any section of this border could run off the edge of the page unintentionally, though the entire frame is clearly meant to be contained within the page edges.

Aw, thanks Anatexis. We’ve brought the border margins in. The typesetting has been revised to avoid awkward section splits, and the artwork has been thoughtfully worked into the page background as well as the border designs. We’ve developed an alternate page layout to accommodate a rich illustration on the left-hand side without the interruption of the section index and determined that the page number was a crucial item to be kept constant no matter what.

And finally, here’s what it looks like when the art is on the left-hand side. The section index on the right is back, the left-hand page number is retained, and Mates Laurentiu’s illustration of a pensive Nithram Harmon looks right at home.

Maps are crucial to our worldbuilding. Lots of good stuff in there. Francesca Baerald’s illustrations come with all the labels built in, which looks great on the big map boards we’re used to using in Gloomhaven and Frosthaven, but they might be difficult to read on a much smaller book spread.

This revision improves overall legibility while moving important words and details out of the gutter in the middle of the spread. This is important - it means that readers don’t have to physically crack and break the book’s binding to see everything. The labels have been replaced with live text for both clarity in print and the benefit of those using a digital version of the book.

Arch out!

Adventure chapter: I’m adding a new element to this list that I think is substantial enough to discuss here. The adventure included in the book has 25 scenes and 21 potential combats. While the rest of the book is largely art, text blocks, and tables, the adventure is more akin to the scenario book from the board game, with all the maps and extra information required. All the text and information is in its final draft, and layout is underway, but the layout process will be its own dedicated effort.

Community spotlight

As part of these new updates, we'd also like to spend some time each month to highlight some of the great videos, podcasts, and other art that has come out of it. This month, I want to give a shout-out to Youtuber Mahgatis, who is putting out a series of excellent, informative videos deep-diving each class in Gloomhaven. So far, he’s put together videos on the starting six, plus three locked classes. Here’s his video on the Cragheart:

10 years of Gloomhaven

A little over ten years ago, I put up an ambitious project on Kickstarter called Gloomhaven, and it drastically altered the course of my life in the best way possible. It was because of those initial backers, and the entire community that grew around them, that I was able to live my dream job designing games and build a company that now employs six other people who are all amazing and talented, as well as provides opportunities to countless other contractors.

These games—this world—would not exist without you, and for that, I can never thank you enough. Thank you for making the world of Gloomhaven what it is today and allowing us to continue to make cool things in it 10 years after we first started. I know we’ve stumbled a bit lately, but we are committed to improving our shortcomings and delivering fantastic products in an effort to truly show our appreciation of your support.

So that's going to do it for this update. I know there was some understandable resistance to moving to a monthly schedule, but I hope the content of this update speaks for itself, and it is a little more clear why we thought the shift would be a net positive. I hope you found it informative, and I’ll catch you next month with more!

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