MASTER OF GLOOM
Isaac Childres’ Gloomhaven is one of the most striking board games to hit the tabletop in years, offering a sprawling adventure with highly ambitious legacy elements. More astonishingly, it’s only the designer’s second title. We take a tour around the fantasy world with the fast-rising star
Interview by Matt Jarvis
Where did the idea for Gloomhaven’s world and mechanics come from?
Haha, that’s a big question! Gloomhaven’s world just came from a wealth of experience designing my own D&D campaigns, full of weird monsters and bosses. I never used source books and always went for creating my own worlds. I just love building that sort of stuff, so when it came time to dream up a world for Gloomhaven, I was happy to sit down and dream big.
The mechanics came from a variety of places, of course. Using the core concept of a brain-engaging dungeon crawl, I cobbled together mechanics from many different games and refined them until it felt complete and streamlined.
Gloomhaven is one of the first major legacy games not designed with the input of Rob Daviau. Why did you decide to make the title a legacy game?
Well, I did have a little input from Rob; he helped design one of the scenarios.
The main thing I have to say about the legacy concept is that it never felt like a challenge because I was using it to solve problems – I wasn’t using them just to say I made a legacy game. I wanted to create a campaign game where it really felt like there was a dialogue between the player and the designer, much like you get a dialogue between player and DM when you are sitting around the table playing D&D. I wanted to evoke that feeling that as players explore the world, they are making permanent changes to it. They are presented with a choice, and going one way means that they can’t ever go back and do things the other way. That was really what I used legacy for: permanent, dynamic decisions.