Gloomhaven RPG Will Have More Than 600 Miniatures

Crowdfunding on Kickstarter competitor Backerkit on June 20th, the official tabletop RPG of the popular Gloomhaven boardgame will come loaded with more than 600 miniatures.

There will be a core set of 250+ minis, with add-ons offering many more.

Miniatures tend to push Kickstarters into the upper echelons, and with Gloomhaven's existing following it seems likely that this will very easily (and quickly) join the million dollar Kickstarter club. Already 30,000 people have signed up to follow the campaign, and it's still two months away.

The RPG book and card set itself will contain 8 ancestries, 16 classes, plus backgrounds, skills, and attributes.

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[Rhineglade]

I love painting miniatures, but 600 at once is a bit daunting. I made a resolution this year to clear out as much of my backlog of unpainted miniatures as possible. As part of that resolution, I've cut down on the number of new miniatures I've purchased to concentrate on the ones I've had for a while. I haven't bought a new miniature since early March, though I received a few for my birthday.

Although, everyone does need a hobby...

 

[Willie the Duck]

Gloomhaven has a card based resolution system. Each character has a deck which has good and bad results. There are a couple of cards that cause you to shuffle your deck after drawing them. The monsters have their own deck as well.

The mechanics of Gloomhaven would make for a great skirmish game. Sure running 5 or 6 hands of cards would be complicated, but the strategy element would be great.

A fundamental play consideration of Gloomhaven is how many times you get to go through your deck before exhausting (you permanently discard a card every time you re-shuffle your deck into your hand, as well as for other reasons like avoiding damage or extra-powerful effects). Thus how many rounds it takes to complete a scenario-objective is a primary design unit. I am curious how they are going to either 1) build that into a more open RPG environment (where GMs will be home-brewing scenarios and such), or 2) not building it in and still keeping the game aesthetically Gloomhaven-esque (as opposed to any old TTRPG just set in the Gloomhaven world).

 

[SteveC]

A fundamental play consideration of Gloomhaven is how many times you get to go through your deck before exhausting (you permanently discard a card every time you re-shuffle your deck into your hand, as well as for other reasons like avoiding damage or extra-powerful effects). Thus how many rounds it takes to complete a scenario-objective is a primary design unit. I am curious how they are going to either 1) build that into a more open RPG environment (where GMs will be home-brewing scenarios and such), or 2) not building it in and still keeping the game aesthetically Gloomhaven-esque (as opposed to any old TTRPG just set in the Gloomhaven world).

Just to continue on my previous post talking about decks of cards: you actually have two of them. One is the deck that basically replaces die rolls. The other one, that Willie the Duck is talking about, contains actions you can do. You have a relatively small number of them, and gradually deplete them as a mission (basically a series of encounters) progresses. You can eventually run out of cards, which I agree is going to be an interesting thing to see about how that is handled by the RPG.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I expect this to be the first $10M crowdfund in the RPG space

 

[prabe]

Just to continue on my previous post talking about decks of cards: you actually have two of them. One is the deck that basically replaces die rolls. The other one, that Willie the Duck is talking about, contains actions you can do. You have a relatively small number of them, and gradually deplete them as a mission (basically a series of encounters) progresses. You can eventually run out of cards, which I agree is going to be an interesting thing to see about how that is handled by the RPG.

Just to be clear, since I dug up the rulebooks to get this right: The cards you turn over for results are the Modifier Deck; the ones that are the things you can do, which you discard one of every time you rest (or to avoid damage) are the Ability Cards.

 

[SteveC]

Just to be clear, since I dug up the rulebooks to get this right: The cards you turn over for results are the Modifier Deck; the ones that are the things you can do, which you discard one of every time you rest (or to avoid damage) are the Ability Cards.

This is 100% correct. If anyone is interested in how this works, there are many, many videos of actual plays of Gloomhaven that show this all off.

Some additional relevant info: as you develop your characters, you earn the ability to add or remove cards from both of these decks to improve your results. You can remove some bad cards from the modifiers deck, for instance, or add better ones. Similarly, you gain additional Ability Cards for you deck that are better as time goes on, but you keep the same deck size.

I think it will be really interesting to see how this works in practice, since they seem to be leaning into this process for the RPG rather than just bolting the creatures or classes onto another RPG. I think that could be awesome or bad in practice, and that's why I'm excited about seeing how this develops.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Some additional relevant info: as you develop your characters, you earn the ability to add or remove cards from both of these decks to improve your results. You can remove some bad cards from the modifiers deck, for instance, or add better ones. Similarly, you gain additional Ability Cards for you deck that are better as time goes on, but you keep the same deck size.

I think it will be really interesting to see how this works in practice, since they seem to be leaning into this process for the RPG rather than just bolting the creatures or classes onto another RPG. I think that could be awesome or bad in practice, and that's why I'm excited about seeing how this develops.

Also how people react to it. Much of the removing or adding cards* is just playing around with probability -- akin to taking your D20 and slapping a sticker with a second '19' over the spot that normally says '8'. Normally in a TTRPG I would say something like 'if you want to improve my success chance, just lower the target number by a point or two, stop dinking around with these roundabout ways of accomplishing the same thing.' However, in Gloomhaven, it feels different (enjoyable) to be faffing around with meta-mechanics all over the place.
*Some of it is akin to adding a 'trip' rider to your attack roll, but those are the exceptions

 

[prabe]

Also how people react to it. Much of the removing or adding cards* is just playing around with probability -- akin to taking your D20 and slapping a sticker with a second '19' over the spot that normally says '8'. Normally in a TTRPG I would say something like 'if you want to improve my success chance, just lower the target number by a point or two, stop dinking around with these roundabout ways of accomplishing the same thing.' However, in Gloomhaven, it feels different (enjoyable) to be faffing around with meta-mechanics all over the place.
*Some of it is akin to adding a 'trip' rider to your attack roll, but those are the exceptions

Some of it's that. Some of it's doing things like just removing the 2 from a d20. The condition additions are usually nicely thematic.

 

[Staffan]

Also how people react to it. Much of the removing or adding cards* is just playing around with probability -- akin to taking your D20 and slapping a sticker with a second '19' over the spot that normally says '8'.

Well...

 

[Clint_L]

I'm a minis guy, and I am 100% backing this! I paint pretty efficiently, but 600 at once is still a daunting prospect. I got about 200 from Reaper 5.5 and that took me just shy of a month so this...will be months of fun!