Our friends at Beadle & Grimm’s are at Gen Con this week- go say hello if you’re attending! But even if you’re not in Indianapolis for the convention, you can still find out what they’re up to. I sat down recently with two of the company’s founders, Jon Ciccolini and Bill Rehor, to discuss their upcoming release of the platinum edition of Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall, as well as other projects near and dear to their hearts.
Me: You’ve got a lot of big projects coming up this year. Let’s talk about Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall, which recently went up for preorder.
John: Arcana Unleashed, this is a sort of a two book release by Dungeons & Dragons, right? You’ve got Arcana Unleashed, which is for the players, and it has all of the player options. It has the subclasses and the spells and the feats and everything else. And then there’s a second book that is Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall, and that has the high level adventure, the level 10 to 20 adventure. It also has information about the Fae and about the city of Eltabbar, gives the DM additional information about that world. And so we decided to take that book and create a platinum edition for that, for the DM who’s running the adventure, so that they have all of the premium elements needed to make that an incredible immersive experience at the table, like our Platinum Editions usually do.
Me: How do you decide what goes into one of your boxed D&D sets?
Bill: I think there’s two really, two guiding principles that we try to adhere to when we first sort of all get together. You know, we all read the adventure, we all come together, and we just start throwing things against the wall to see what interests everybody. And I think there’s two different guiding principles there.
One is the practicality of what’s going to make the DM’s life easier, what’s going to make the game more immersive for the players, what’s going to minimize prep time, what’s going to make things clearer and more understandable, what moments can we sort of accentuate or help the DM to accentuate. There are all sort of practical things about what we would want as a DM just to play the game in the best possible way. And then I think there’s another thing there which is a little more elusive, which is the idea that we want to surprise the purchaser in a really positive way.
We want to come up with at least one or two things in that box that maybe they wouldn’t have thought of on their own, that isn’t the most natural, intuitive thing that you would do. But when they see it, they go, oh hell yeah, let’s pull that out of the table, that’s going to be fun.
John: One of my favorite photos of my D&D group is all of them standing at the table wearing their (The Wild Behind the) Witchlight fairy wings. Our Platinum Edition of Witchlight came with a set of fairy wings and, you know, everyone had to put them on. You know, they were dying to put them on and we took a picture. Those are those are moments with friends and loved ones at the table that hopefully our Platinum Edition is creating.
Me: One of the things that your boxed D&D sets always have are bonus adventures.
Jon: There are a couple in Deadfall. These are a little bit longer than some of the bonus encounters that we’ve done. And what was fun about this is because the adventure is level 10 to 20, we had an opportunity to sit down with Wizards of the Coast and say, “OK, where where does it make sense for us to add content?” And one idea that we loved was creating an adventure that takes place before theirs begins, that establishes the party as being part of that that spy culture in Fae, right? Establishing them as spy players and giving them a deeper connection to wanting to bring down Szass Tam.
Bill: The written adventure is 11 through 20, and then we’ve created an adventure for 10th level characters to give you a launching off point if you want.
Me: I’m a big fan of what you do at Beadle & Grimm’s, but there are definitely detractors out there that are saying that the Platinum Edition of Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall is too expensive. How do you respond to that?
Jon: A Platinum Edition is something that’s going to be played over at least 20 sessions, right? 20 nights of entertainment. So if you take 20 nights of entertainment, at minimum, and you’ve got five people at the table for players, and a DM, it comes out to about $5 per person per night for that night of entertainment. Like, where are you going to get a better value for that kind of investment in your D&D game?
The second thing is, in every single session, some element is going to be used, whether it’s a battle map, or it’s the DM screen, or it’s the encounter cards that are hanging on the DM screen, or it’s a handout, or it’s it’s a badge that you’re given. You’re always getting value for that investment, every session.
Bill: What we are sort of catering to is people who have more money than time. Quite frankly, you know, if you want to run an immersive campaign, and you’re finding yourself short on time to prep the thing, to create handouts or battle maps or whatever, we’re doing a lot of that work for you. And giving you the opportunity with a much smaller amount of prep time to present a game and create a tabletop experience for everybody that is on a much more immersive and detailed level than your current amount of time allows. For a lot of people that ends up feeling like money really well spent.
Me: Your Platinum Editions are your most deluxe releases. How do you decide when something is going to be Platinum?
Jon: It’s usually based on the adventure content, right? Is the adventure something that a DM is going to feel, “tThis is an epic adventure, I need the Platinum Edition of it.” You know, when you look at Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, it’s a very exciting product, but it doesn’t have a long lengthy written out adventure for the DM to run beginning to end. When we looked at that, we were like, yeah, that I think that’s a Silver Edition. But then when we look at Deadfall and said, “Oh no, this is 11, levels 11 to 20, this is a big epic experience, we should go Platinum for this.”
Me: Gen Con is this week. Will you be bringing Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall?
Jon: We didn’t feel like we had what we needed in order to properly present this at Gen Con. We will have some copies of a lot of our other products like our Dungeon Master’s Guide Premium Map Collection, our Forgotten Realms Premium Map Collection, our Keys from the Golden Vault, and we will have some Ravenloft: Horrors Within there as well.
Bill: The other big focus of Gen Con for us this year is Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! So we put out a book of adventures based on our TV show, Faster Purple Worm! Everybody Dies Volume 1. And that has done very well, was received very well. So we’re working right now on Volume 2. So (at)Gen Con, we’ll have three live shows, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night. For those who don’t know, the whole premise of Faster, Purple Worm! is a bunch of first level characters go off on an adventure, meet an epic monster and get demolished.
And we’ll be sort of pre-launching the Kickstarter page for Volume 2 at that point. So Jon and myself, and Paul and Charlie and Matt, all five founders, are running at least one table game each at Gen Con where we are playtesting adventures from the new book. We are trying some adventures with other level characters this time. So there’s a couple of second, third, and fourth level adventures in there. You still die.
We’re trying out some new things and we want to make sure that it all works. For those people who signed up for those games, they’ll get an opportunity to kind of check these things out and see what they look like in sort of mid process of getting put together.
Me: Speaking of original adventures, you’ve got your first D&D sourcebook delivering from Kickstarter later this year.
Jon: Yeah, so Skullduggery is a urban campaign companion book, and the content is stuff that the DM and the players can do to really enhance and switch up their urban setting. I’m running an adventure in Eberron right now in the city of Sharn, and I’ve got a bunch of players who are using some of the content from Skullduggery. And it’s been really fun.
We have a bunch of new subclasses. We have feats. We have origins. We have species. We have spells. We have new equipment. We have new magic items. And it also comes in the back with a level one to nine adventure.
Bill: For the people who really love it, I think it’ll become a springboard to creating your own homebrews or adding some of this stuff into your own homebrews. But yeah, it’s great to be able to just sort of break open a book and just go, let’s go. Let’s find out.
Me: You’ve also been making original board games.
Bill: A couple of years ago, we created our first completely original board game called Ring of Chaos. And then last year, we did an expansion set for that called Rising Fear.
We also put out a big boxed edition that combined the two called Total Chaos that has sort of all of the new rules and old rules all combined into one big box. So that was a Kickstarter last year, and that will be shipping at the end of the year. And then we’ll have it available on the website as well.
We’re really, really happy about the way that turned out. And we’re sort of learning, using those learnings to carry over into a completely new board game called Boarding Party that will have its own Kickstarter at the end of the year. It has some similarities to Ring of Chaos, but lots of very different things and mechanics in it that make it really unique. It’s really snarky, funny, fun board game with some really unpredictable elements to it that’s really, really fun. Charlie and our team is heading that one up, and he’s doing a really terrific job with that.
Jon: We also continue to create Magic the Gathering products. We’re going to be at MagicCon in Atlanta in the Fall, and we will have some fun things there to offer. Some new things people haven’t seen before, as well as some reserve stashes of a couple of things that sold out. We’re always looking for new releases that align with Magic the Gathering releases as well.
Paul: It sounds like working at Beadle & Grimm’s is pretty amazing.
Bill: It really is. It’s pretty dreamy. Not only do I get to make games, but I get to make them with my four closest friends in the world. And that’s about as good as it gets.
We all met when we were 21…well, except for my brother. Which was a very, very long time ago.
Jon (laughing): We met pre-television.
Bill: We were all in acting school together in New York, and we realized that we all had this hobby in common together, and started playing D&D together. We were just a group of guys playing D&D for decades before we even thought about starting a company. This was sort of a mid-life crisis thing that we thought would be a cool sort of side hobby project, and we’ve been fortunate that it’s been successful enough that we’re all doing it full time now.
The Platinum Edition of Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall is currently in preorder, with a retail price of $509 but for a limited period is available at a sale price of $458. It is scheduled to ship out in November of this year.
Besides the products mentioned in this interview, Beadle & Grimm’s have a lot of other games, sourcebooks, accessories, and boxed sets that they are working on, so be sure to head to their website to read more about them! And if you’re attending Gen Con, be sure to stop by their booth #836. And, as mentioned previously, they will be doing live shows there as well.
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Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.
