Fan-made Gloomhaven expansion raises more than $300,000

polygon.com:

When I finish a nice board game, I like to pack it all up, put it on the shelf, and maybe — just maybe — consider trading it to a friend for something new. Some fans of the hit game Gloomhaven had other ideas. They found a writer and an artist, spent months in a Discord server working on a full-size expansion, and then started selling it online. So far they’ve raised more than $300,000 for The Crimson Scales. The game’s original designer, Isaac Childres, tells Polygon he’s thrilled.

Gloomhaven is a roughly 20-pound campaign in a box. It’s an action role-playing game with nearly 100 scenarios that doesn’t require a game master to run, and it’s been snatching up awards since it first arrived in people’s hands in 2017. It’s given birth to a whole genre of similar experiences, ranging from hard science fiction to fantasy experiences, like this one set in the world of Vampire: The Masquerade. Shortly after the game’s first printing shipped, Childres put all of the images and other assets used to create Gloomhaven into a folder on Google Drive for anyone to download and put to good use. Eventually he slapped a Creative Commons license on it and moved on to the game’s first proper sequel, Frosthaven.

“To me,” Childres said, “it wasn’t so much about, This content you can use, this you can’t. I want people to be making new content, making new stories, and creating new monsters and new character classes and stuff like that.”

Nick Sims and Motti Eisenbach decided to take Childres up on his offer. What emerged was a full-fledged expansion with 66 new scenarios, 100 items, 11 unique classes with 11 new miniatures, a bunch of new monsters, and original artwork.

“I see my part of it, at least, as a love letter to Gloomhaven,” said