Time for Another National Novel Writing Month

November 01, 2016

Well, it's that time of year again. The orange-colored candy in the supermarket makes way for pumpkin-related paraphernalia, and I find myself with a desire to write. Last year I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo for the first time because I was under a lot of pressure to get all the story text for the Gloomhaven scenarios written, and I needed some motivation to get it done. I didn't get it all done, but the process was still helpful, and I felt I succeeded in my task, despite falling short of the 50,000-word goal. That number really feels arbitrary to me, and I see the month of November more as an opportunity to hang out with friends and get any amount of writing done. Of course, now that Gloomhaven has been sent off to the printers, is it possible there is nothing left I need to write? Of course not. Just the other week I was talking about making some extra content to release as a PDF once the game has been released. There's definitely a good amount of writing required for that. And even more, there's always the possibility of *gulp* expansions. I'm not very good at being coy, so I will just come out and say that at midnight last night I sat down and started writing the story for a new campaign that I hope to make an official expansion to Gloomhaven. I've been entertaining the idea for a while now, but now it is finally taking shape. So yeah, I'm not going to go into any details about it at this point, but I did want to spend some time to talk about expansions in general, mainly because when I conceived of Gloomhaven, it was created as an expansionless game. The whole idea was that it would be a game so big, it would essentially function as a normal-sized game plus 5 or even 10 expansions. By putting it all into one giant box, I would get to tell one cohesive, epic story - not some fragmented thing that was a slave to staggered releases. When people initially asked me - during the Kickstarter, no less - whether I had plans for expansions, I would retort that if they understood the magnitude of the game, they wouldn't be worried about expansions. There's plenty of content already in the box to keep people entertained for a good, long time. And I really do want to give my players plenty of time to sit back and explore the game. I don't plan on releasing any concrete information about this expansion until Gloomhaven has been out in the market for a significant amount of time. The next game I am releasing, of course, is a stand-alone Euro game, and the Gloomhaven expansion should come along well after that. Eventually people will be eager for more stuff, though. They will explore every corner of the map, and I hope that at that point, they'll be ready for the next campaign. In addition, it's something I am just eager to get down on paper, even if it won't see the light of day for a long time. I love to create, and creating a good, epic tale is no different. It's an exciting story, and I'm eager to see where it goes. We'll see how much I can get down in the next month, but the good news is that there is much less pressure this time around. I can take my time and have fun, which is really the most important part of any job.

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