For the second year in a row, we caught up with Free League CEO Tomas Harenstam to talk about the past year, the company’s Gen Con announcements, its views on the RPG market, and Humble Bundle with Alchemy VTT (for last year’s interview, see “ICv2 Interview – 2023”).
ICv2
: We last spoke a year ago here at Gen Con, where we talked about the state of the RPG market at the time. How has it changed in the past year?
Tomas Harenstam: I think things are still going well. We’re not seeing any slowdown or anything. I think there’s more interest in games other than D&D. There’s more interest in different games, which is good for us. From our point of view, things are going well. The big release this year was Mutant Year Zero – Zone Wars. How’s that going?
It’s going well. We do RPGs normally. This is a miniature skirmish game, but very RPG-ish. It’s character-heavy and closely related to the Mutant Year Zero RPG. What’s interesting is that people who have tried it seem to like it. We’re doing a demo at Gen Con and it’s going well. We’ll probably continue to develop it like that. Dragonbane had just been released at the last Gen Con. How has it been over the past year?
It’s great. It’s a new fantasy title, a totally unknown brand. The license is unknown, so it was interesting to see how it would develop. It launched here last year and was very well received. It’s just continued to develop since then. We’re launching here again this year, with a new campaign. Bestiary has launched, which is one of our bigger titles for us right now.
We came to the game room before the exhibit hall officially opened and it was packed so it seems to be working well.
Yes. We’ve been working with Lurking Fears and hosting events both here in the game room and in the main convention center, but also in another hall at the JW Marriott. From what I can tell, every hall is full and people seem to be having fun, which is great.
You’ve just announced Alien RPG Second Edition (see Alien RPG 2E), which will include miniatures, so you’re expanding your miniatures business.
I felt the miniatures were a nice addition to the Alien RPG line in the same way that Zone Wars ties into the Mutant Year Zero RPG, and many RPG players are considering using or already using miniatures from elsewhere.
Internally, we feel it’s a lot of fun, it brings something new to the game, we don’t need the miniatures, but we’re really excited about it because we think it adds a great feature to the game, another level of gameplay and it works really well.
You plan to start with crowdfunding and then start trading, what is the timeline for this?
We’ll see. We don’t have an exact date for the Kickstarter yet. It’ll probably be in the fall. Probably around October. There’ll be a fairly long pre-release period to get feedback and hear from the community. Then we’ll launch the Kickstarter probably around October. We’ll have it at retail here (Gen Con) next year.
Tell us about The Electric State. We reported on it a year ago (see “Electric State”). It was funded on Kickstarter and is now available in trade. To refresh our readers’ memories, what is the game about?
It’s a road trip, road movie kind of game. It’s based in the world of Simon Stålenhag, who did Tales from the Loop. It’s a Tales from the Loop-centric game. It’s a different world, but it has the same vibe. It’s a really cool game. It’s a little bit niche for us, but it’s really cool. The road trip kind of feel is something that we haven’t really explored in RPGs before.
Of course, there’s also going to be a film by the Russo Brothers, who are also developing a feature film based on the game. The RPG will come out before the film, so hopefully the two will work well together and people will enjoy the game as well as the film.
Last year, you talked about the pace of releases. What are your plans for 2025? Will the number of releases be roughly the same as this year, or will there be something different?
That’s it. We try to support all of our game lines. Currently, we have 14 different game lines. That’s a lot. We aim to have at least 1-2 releases per game line per year. For the lines we want to focus on, we aim to have at least 2 releases. That’s our goal.
You recently announced that you’ll be running the Humble Bundle. Tell us about that.
It’s a partnership with Alchemy VTT. We work with VTTs like Foundry, Alchemy, Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, and many others. This is a partnership with Alchemy. Alchemy runs Humble Bundle on the VTT module for a number of our titles, mostly Free League titles. Alchemy has been a good partner for us. So has Humble Bundle, and we’ve had a good relationship. I’m excited to see where this partnership takes us. Of course, we hope to get more people to take notice of our games and try them out virtually.
What charities have benefited?
Direct Relief. They do good work.
