Hey everyone, Jason here.

The last 24 hours have been a real rollercoaster of anxiety, and I fear the ride isn't over yet. The massive and wide-reaching tariffs announced by the U.S. administration this week are going to destroy thousands of small businesses, and I'm going to do my level best to make sure The Gauntlet isn't one of them.

The tariffs aren't going to stop us from fulfilling The Between, but I've decided to pause rolling out the pledge manager and preorders until I've had time to talk to our lawyer and our printing partners to figure out how the tariffs are going to affect things. We had planned a number of add-ons for the preorder page, but now we have to assess the feasibility of doing those, and at what cost we have to sell them. We don't anticipate shipping costs for BackerKit pledges being higher than what we originally estimated on the campaign page, but they're almost certainly going to be on the higher end of the estimated range now.

We have some flexibility built into our business model (we learned a lot trying to fulfill Trophy RPG during Covid), but anyone who tells you they can easily adapt to manufacturing costs increasing 54% overnight is lying to you. We have to be very careful right now—any mistake we make in the printing and fulfillment could be an existential one. And so that's why I've hit pause until we can figure out what exactly is going on, and how we're going to be affected.

I will add that I'm not interested in discussing the politics surrounding this, or whether these tariffs are going to stick. The president is known to be quite mercurial when it comes to this kind of thing, but we can't count on these tariffs going away, and so we have to plan accordingly.

Speaking not just of us, but of the entire industry, I ask that you give the game creators in your life some grace over the next weeks and months. Everyone is scared (pity the poor board game people—they're fucked if these tariffs last); no one wants to see the business they've spent years building evaporate overnight because of an unnecessary trade war. Also: please do not "helpfully" recommend that we simply print our stuff in the United States. It's not that easy. There are only a handful of book printers in the U.S., and they are incredibly expensive and difficult to employ if you're not a big publishing house. As for non-book components, the U.S. is simply not set up for that kind of machine tooling for game parts. It's unrealistic, period.

On the lighter side of things, and in an effort to not end this update on such a bummer note, The Bad Spot recently started a new actual play of The Between! It's pretty incredible, and is the first AP to use the rules of the new edition of the game. Check it out 

Thanks for your patience while we try to figure out this unprecedented situation. 

-Jason

Hi, everyone! Jason here. I've got a lot of stuff I want to talk about today—insights to every part of our design and development process—and so please read on!

Before I dive into things, I want to invite you to join us on Discord. There are lots of good reasons for doing that—it’s always fun to hang out with people online who are friendly and who share your interests—but one that doesn’t get talked about much is that everything we do in The Gauntlet is right out in the open on Discord. Game development, game running, design thoughts—I love doing it all with our community. It’s just how I  like to work, and I’d love to have you there, part of the conversation. So much cool stuff gets developed out of our Discord server—it’s the beating heart of what we do—and that leads to the next thing I want to mention…

Sprigs & Kindling, the Gauntlet fanzine created by folks in our community, has just released Volume 2! This issue is all about The Between, featuring 145 pages (!!!) of material for The Between, including new playbooks, new Threats, new Masterminds, original artwork, and MUCH more. It is 100% FREE, so go grab it on the Sprigs & Kindling website! 

As we inch closer to our PDF release, I want to dive into the changes I’ve been making for this new edition of the game. We’re not just putting out physical books of The Between as it already exists. If that was the case, we’d already be at print (and there wouldn’t have been a need to even do a new edition of the game). I want the BackerKit Edition of the game to reflect my original vision for The Between back in 2018. I had a lot of ideas back then that I couldn’t make happen, either because of a lack of space and resources, or because I simply didn’t have the game design know-how to make it happen. Fortunately, we’ve had 5+ years of playing this game, learning what makes it tick, and understanding what it’s doing at a really foundational level (this is truly where The Gauntlet community comes in—I mean it when I say we design out in the open, and part of that is watching people play the game over the years, hearing their feedback, and iterating). We do this for every game, playing it for multiple years in a digital-only format so that we can learn the most we can about it for the ultimate, physical book release. It’s a slow process, but an important one (and one not enough TTRPG developers do, frankly). 

With that well-earned foundational understanding of the game in-hand, I now know how to do everything I want to do. And we’re going to do it in this edition of the game.

First up is one of my major design goals for the new edition: Hargrave House Rooms. In the current edition of the game, Hargrave House—the actual, physical space the Hunters live and work in—exists very much in the background. You might touch on it now and then via the Dusk Phase prompts, but for the most part, it’s just set dressing—and barely that.

In this new edition, Hargrave House is much more in the foreground. I’d go so far as to say the house, and the many hunters who have lived there over the years, is its own character in the story. The way we accomplish this is something entirely new: The Hargrave House Night Phase.

Now, when doing the Night Phase, you have to choose: a London Night Phase or a Hargrave House Night Phase. A London Night Phase is more or less the same as it exists in the current edition. A Hargrave House Night Phase is a whole new beast.

When you choose to do the Hargrave House Night Phase, we actually set the Hunters aside for that phase—we don’t see them at all during the phase. Instead, the Keeper presents a Hargrave House Room. A Room is structured somewhat like an Unscene—it’s a series of prompts. It explores a different hunter from the house’s past, and in particular something that happened to them in that room. Below are the Room prompts for The Map Room.

As you can see, the first prompt is a Paint the Scene that helps us understand the room as our present-day Hunters do. The remaining prompts explore the incident with the former hunter. The entirety of the Night Phase is just going around the table in turn, narrating whichever prompt you’ve been assigned. Once you’re done, the Night Phase is over.

Now, I earlier mentioned that we don’t see the present-day Hunters in this phase, and that’s true. But that doesn’t mean the events of the phase have no bearing on the present-day story in London. Far from it! First, players get to add something to their Personal Quarters based on something that was narrated or revealed during the Room prompts. So, let’s say in the first prompt, someone said there’s a really intriguing map of ley lines in the Map Room. Later, a player can say, “I want that ley line map” and then add it to their PQ, which they can then later use for a die roll. Or maybe another player says they want to take the pipe Godfrey Rathermere was smoking when he encountered his double from another world. And another player wants to take the knife Rathermere used to defeat his double. And so forth. The idea here is that the events of the past echo into the present in the form of objects lying around the house the Hunters can use.

But wait, there’s more! Each Room also comes with an Unlock! This is a new move or resource all the Hunters have access to. Below is the new move that unlocks after you narrate the tale of Godfrey Rathermere:

This is a very powerful (and dangerous!) move the Hunter can now leverage in their battle against the horrors stalking the streets of London. 

As an aside, I'll mention we've commissioned artwork for some of these rooms to pepper throughout The Between and Shadow Society. Some sketches from Ania Apart: 

But as in all things, there is balance: just because the Hunters have taken the night off with an HH Night Phase doesn’t mean the Threats have. We are reworking all Threats so they each have a countdown. Essentially, a set of boxes that are marked off one by one each Night Phase, and when all the boxes are marked, something terrible happens. In some cases, as with the Figg family, the Threat just gets away and can’t be resolved. In other cases, as with Sally No-Face, the Threat becomes a Servant of the Mastermind. But in some cases, more bizarre and dangerous things happen.
 
For example, in the Limehouse Lurker, if 5 Night Phases pass and the Threat is not resolved, the Keeper gets a new reaction: The Feast of Blood. Vampires, perhaps drawn by the power or novelty of the Lurker, or perhaps awakened via the increased bloodshed, begin stalking the streets of London en masse. With the new reaction, the Keeper can twisty any problem into a vampire problem. The city becomes absolutely lousy with the bloodsuckers. 

In the Demon of Kilburn Abbey, the demon’s actions and movements are normally restricted to the abbey itself, but if 3 Night Phases pass, the demon is turned loose on the city, making it much more dangerous. 

And so the Hunters have to always be mindful of the clock: the Threats aren’t slowing down just because they are. 

The third biggest change I’m making to the game is how the Masterminds and overall campaign structure work. Importantly, I’m introducing a brand-new concept: the Mastermind Question. Mastermind Clues are no longer a timer for the campaign; now, they are actual Clues that are collected in order to answer the Question of how the Mastermind intends to destroy the Crown. 

To make things even more interesting, when you Answer a Question about a Threat, if you get a 12+ on your roll, the answer is also a Mastermind Clue. This has a profound and powerful impact on the story: the Threats are no longer just a series of disconnected problems throughout the city. There is a chance that the events of the Threat are directly connected to whatever the Mastermind is planning. 

The overall effect of this change is that the events taking place in London feel much more cohesive with each other, much more of an interconnected story. This was a major design goal I had for this edition of the game, and I’m very confident I’ve nailed it. The game just feels… better with this change. 

Once the MM Question is answered, the Keeper immediately introduces the Confrontation. The Confrontation is a special Threat where HH takes on the Mastermind directly. In the current version of the game, the Keeper had to make all of that up whole cloth, but in this new version, we give you some tools. You still have to come up with how to present the mystery using the answer to the MM Question, but the Locations, Side Characters, Clues, and other elements are prepared for you in the form of the Confrontation Sheet. 

I want to spend some time on the art and visual design of this book. When putting together these books, we’ve had two big problems to solve in terms of visuals: 1) How to make a disparate collection of art styles fit together in a single product and 2) how to create visual consistency between three different books.

As you can see from the illustrations below, the different settings each have a unique art style that doesn’t necessarily match the others. 

We’ve added some extra complication in that we want the playbook illustrations to have a very striking, modern look as compared to the rest of it (see examples below). 

How to make this all work? Well, it’s a challenge, but one that our team is up to! I’ve enlisted the help of a few people, including Mike Martens and Ben Mansky, to help develop the unique look of these books, and to tackle the aforementioned challenges.

Mike's approach to creating visual coherence is to create what is essentially a design bible for The Between. Fonts are a major part of that—each book will have the same typefaces and fonts, ones that have been chosen to retain an antique feel but with modern readability, and ones that are transferable throughout the game's 5 settings (London, Louix XIV France, old El Paso, the turn of the century, and Appalachia). Color is also a major focus. 

Mike has created a palette for each book (including cheeky color names, lol) that, along with the fonts, will be used to create visual cohesiveness throughout.

This is an example of how it will look in practice. Each entry will have a dark introductory page, followed by lighter pages that contain the various elements. This visual language will be repeated in all the books, but with colors selected for the respective book. 

 

Another way we're going to create visual harmony is through the use of collage. Ben Mansky is being brought on to design and lay out all the handouts for the game. Ben's style is one that uses collage and "found" art assets to create a striking and varied, but coherent, look. You can see what I mean via the below examples. 

Elements of collage will also be incorporated into the books, adding texture and a sense of place.

The design bible will also be used for accessories. Below are these design principles applied to the upcoming Unscene Cards (more on those in a bit). 

I hope you've enjoyed this deep dive into what we're doing behind the scenes. I've spent more time on the writing and game development than I originally thought I would have to, which is going to make getting the PDFs out in April tough. I still feel confident the core book will be out by then, with the other two to follow shortly thereafter, maybe early to mid-summer. In any case, we'll keep you updated as we know more. Delays are always a bummer, but I'm much more interested in putting out the absolute best game we can (and I still feel very confident the actual books will be out by December—I gave us a lot of wiggle room there). And I have to say: this version of The Between rocks.  I've been running it for The Bad Spot (those actual plays will be available soon), and I couldn't be more excited about how this game feels to play. You'll be glad we took the time.

Pledge manager and preorders will be open by the end of this month. I keep pushing it back as the scope of things change; in particular, there's an add-on I'm really excited about: the Unscene Cards! What we discovered in playtesting is that the Unscenes really benefit from a physical thing that can be passed around between players, and the Unscene Cards are our answer to that. This is a deck of cards that contain the Unscene on one side, and a portion of the London map showing where the Unscene takes place on the other. It's a really neat addition to the game, and if you're looking at something to spend your extra pledge money on, this is a good one! We'll have a couple of other small goodies to add on, but the Unscene Cards are the big one.

Phew! Thanks for taking that journey with me. Bran reminds me that if you added on Brindlewood Bay or Nephews in Peril, please fill out the form. 

Take care! And see you on Discord! 
-Jason