We have a super exciting announcement for you today, but first we'd like to wish everyone out there the best of luck. The COVID-19 pandemic is an impossible topic to avoid, especially considering the nature of the announcements in this post. But we hope and pray that everyone out there is staying safe and healthy in any way you can. We especially want to send love to those in the healthcare, shipping, and retail industries. You are having to deal with unprecedented troubles on a day to day basis that the rest of us can't imagine. Thank you for being amazing.
Now, to the announcement: We are hosting two events for Gen Con 2020!
Now, that obviously comes with the huge caveat of Gen Con 2020 proceeding as planned. We have yet to hear anything that would indicate that the convention will be cancelled or postponed. Until such time, we will continue to stride forward under the assumption that the convention will be happening and that we will be there to test out some Day 20 content!
For those of you that joined us for our events last year, there is a bit of old mixed with a bit of new. We will be bringing back the Four Seasons adventure for another round of play testing. Last year's Four Seasons game was an excellent trial run that gave us some great feedback. We've streamlined and tested the adventure more since last year. If all goes well, we are hoping to have some very good news for those in attendance of that even! ;)
But we can't just do the same thing year after year, so we will also be bringing a brand new adventure with us to test: The Gauntlet. Like last year's Fortress, this one will be focusing on tactical combat and interesting battlefields to test players on their fighting acumen. The Fortress was a blast, but we found that it was just too expansive an adventure for a single four hour slot. We don't want to try and water down what that adventure has to offer; it wouldn't give us the feedback we need, and it probably wouldn't be as fun. So instead we are creating a brand new adventure that is focused on fast-paced, episodic combats that can flow one into the other with minimal narrative.
That's not to say that narrative is bad, and we think the adventure will still bring a ton of thematic, cinematic moments to the table. But for a high-combat adventure to run smoothly in four hours, it needs to be streamlined. The Gauntlet is designed to emulate the white-knuckle fun and action you get from boss-rush video games, or those third-act all-out fight scenes in a super hero movie. It pits the players versus encounters that use novel mechanics to make them feel appropriately epic without requiring powerful magic items or min-maxed characters to succeed. If we can do things right, players should walk away from the table feeling like action heroes.
As we get closer to Gen Con, we're going to be diving in to some of the fixes we've made to Four Seasons along with developer insights on The Guantlet's mechanics. Both adventures should provide overall insight into how we, as a company, want to deliver fresh and exciting D&D 5e content. The past year has been a thrilling learning experience, and we hope to see you in a few months to continue learning and rolling dice together!
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