For the second year in a row, we caught up with Tomas Harenstam, CEO of Free League, to talk about the past year, his company’s Gen Con announcements, his view on the RPG market, and their Humble Bundle with Alchemy VTT (see “ICv2 Interview – 2023” for last year’s interview).
ICv2
: We last spoke here at Gen Con a year ago and talked about how the RPG market was doing back then. How has it changed in the last year?
Thomas Harenstam: I think it’s still going well. We haven’t seen a real slowdown or anything like that. I think what’s happening is that there’s a lot of interest in games that maybe aren’t D&D. There is an increased interest in many different games, which is nice for us. From our point of view, things are going well.
Your big start this year was Mutant Year Zero ‑‑ Zone Wars. How is it going?
It’s going well. We usually do RPGs. This is a miniature skirmish game, but it’s very RPG-like. It has strong characters and is strongly tied to the Mutant Year Zero Roleplay. It’s interesting to see; people who are trying it out seem to love it. We’re doing demos here at Gen Con and it’s going well. We’ll probably build on that.
Last Gen Con, Dragon Curse just came out. How has it developed over the last year?
That was great. That was a new fantasy title, a totally unknown brand. It’s not a well-known license or anything, and it was interesting to see how that would go. It launched here last year, was great, and has continued to build on that since then. We’re launching it here again this year; we’re doing a new campaign; the bestiary is out. This is one of the bigger titles for us at the moment.
We’re here in your playroom before the exhibition hall officially opens. It’s packed, so I think it’s working out well.
Yes. We partner with Lurking Fears to do events here, both here in our game room and in the main convention center, but we also have another room at the JW Marriott. They all seem to be full from what I understand and people are having fun, so that’s great.
You have just Alien RPG Second Edition (see ““Alien Roleplaying Game 2E”“). They also sell miniatures, so you can expand your miniature business.
Just like Zone Wars follows on from the Mutant Year Zero Roleplaywe found that miniatures are a good addition to the Alien RPG Line. Many RPG players are considering using miniatures from other places or are already using them.
Internally we think they’re a lot of fun. They bring something new to the game. You don’t need miniatures, but they add a nice feature, another layer of play that we think will work really well, so we’re excited about it.
It will start with crowdfunding and then move to commerce. What is the timeline for that?
We’ll see. We don’t have an exact date for Kickstarter yet. Probably fall. Probably planning something like October. We have a pretty long pre-launch period to get feedback and hear what the community says. Then we’ll probably launch Kickstarter in October. We’re planning a retail launch, possibly here (at Gen Con) next year.
Tell us about The electric stateWe reported on it a year ago (see “Electric State”), it was on Kickstarter, but now it’s on sale. So to refresh our readers’ memory, what is this game about?
This is a road trip, road movie-like game. It is also based on a world by Simon Stålenhag, the Stories from the LoopIt is very Stories from the Loopcentric. It has that same feel, even though it’s a separate universe. It’s a really cool game, a bit of a niche thing for us, but really cool. That road trip feel is something we haven’t really explored in RPGs before.
Of course, we also have the Russo brothers film coming up, who are making a major feature film about it, which is also in the pipeline. The RPG will be released before the film. Hopefully the two can work well together and people will enjoy both the game and the film.
Last year we talked about your release pace. What are your plans for 2025? Will it be about the same number of releases as this year or will there be differences?
Sort of. We really try to support all of our game series. We have about 14 different game series now. That’s a lot. We aim for at least one or two releases per game series per year, and for some series that we particularly want to focus on, at least two releases. That’s our goal.
You also recently announced that you’re offering a Humble Bundle. Tell us about it.
That’s the partnership with the Alchemy VTT. We work with a number of VTTs: Foundry, Alchemy, Roll20, Fantasy Grounds and even a few others. This is with Alchemy; they run the Humble Bundle on VTT modules for a large selection of our titles. They’re almost all Free League titles. Alchemy is a good partner for us; Humble Bundle too, we have a good relationship. We’ll see where that can take us. Of course, we hope more people will see our games and try them out virtually.
Which charity benefits from this?
It’s Direct Relief; they do good work.
