In the Gothenburg of the 1980s, decades before Tomas Härenstam would become CEO of the tabletop role-playing game company Free League Publishing, he discovered American games in a hobby shop. “I was completely blown away as a big comic book nerd,” he admits. Although Sweden has a rich and storied history of tabletop role-playing, often the most recognizable worlds and characters come from further West. Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Marvel superheroes all could be played in licensed ’80s TTRPGs.
These licensed games not only shaped the role-playing mechanics we see today, they created many fond memories for players like Härenstam—you could bring Hollywood to your home in a rule book long after the film left your theaters and you memorized all the famous quotes with your friends.
The tabletop gaming industry has transformed since the ’80s, and if tabletop players vote with their dollar, there’s never been a better time than the present day to play in licensed games. After Free League Publishing worked with analog game designer Francesco Nepitello and intellectual property holders to Kickstart The One Ring, a Lord of the Rings TTRPG, it broke records to become the highest-funded game of its kind in history, raising nearly $2 million. That high-water mark lasted only six months before Magpie Games raised $10 million for an Avatar: The Last Airbender TTRPG (they were expecting around $3 million, Dicebreaker reports). Trade publication ICv2 estimates 2020 TTRPG sales at $105 million and growing rapidly.
While Francesco Nepitello developed the newest, expanded edition of The One Ring, Härenstam and his team were releasing modules for their newest licensed game—an Alien adaptation—and secretly began to write and test a project that means the world to Härenstam, the intellectual property rights to a Blade Runner game. “Blade Runner is more of a state of mind, a place to go, more than a story,” Härenstam tells WIRED. It’s a great fit for an improvisational, setting-driven medium like a TTRPG. But designing these Hollywood games often requires Hollywood rules, and a new set of relationships to property brokers, cross-platform world-builders, setting designers, and custodians of cult classic films.
Licenses have an initial cost of purchase, followed by a royalty to the license owners, alongside the tick-tick-ticking countdown until a license has to be renewed. Renewals, Härenstam explains, create situations where designers are never entirely confident in the future of their game in the ever changing world of big media spending. Will an IP holder let all the licenses expire so they can negotiate rights at a higher price after a reboot is released? Will a movie studio restrict designers to only exploring a fantasy world after their movie ended, so that the early lore can be saved for prequels?
WIRED sat down with Nepitello and Härenstam to discuss the challenges, surprises, and behind-the-scenes hustles to acquire intellectual property during this whirlwind of development.
From Magpie Games’s Avatar game to the new Dune game to your projects, it looks to be the peak time for TTRPGs working with preestablished worlds. Would you agree?
Tomas Härenstam: It's an interesting time. We've often been discussing, "How big is this market, what's the kind of ceiling we will bump into?" And I think The One Ring, but even more so the Avatar Kickstarter, showed that the ceiling is well above what most of us thought.
Francesco Nepitello: There's a difference between now and just a few years ago. Mainly, many companies and IP holders, as far as I know, were not so keen on going to Kickstarter for licensed games. Normally, people made the assumption that with a big IP, you don't need to go to Kickstarter because you can sell a game anyway. The One Ring and, of course, The Last Airbender showed that the combination of the two things can be explosive.
What’s the first step when you're looking into acquiring a license? What aspects of IPs make your team think, “Hey, we can turn this into a tabletop-friendly product?”
Härenstam: It has to start with a passion for the IP itself. Alien and Blade Runner are two of my favorite film series and franchises out there. Francesco, I know you have a deep passion and understanding for Tolkien's works. I think you could never do these things if you didn't. Then you start a discussion of "How can this be a game?" You need to have that basic passion for the franchise, or it's never going to be a good game, no matter how well you polish it up. That's really, for us, core to doing licenses.
Is there a moment when you really felt like you were able to translate something well into a tabletop game and you saw the fans connect with that, such as Lord of the Rings fans?
Nepitello: When we first designed the game, we found that removing limitations often leads to an unfaithful gaming experience. The easiest example of all of them is the use of magic in The Lord of the Rings. Some people think that there should be magic users in the game. If you create a game system that allows them, you are not being really unfaithful to the sources because there are wizards in Middle-earth, but the gaming experience is going to be completely different. It's not going to feel like The Lord of the Rings, where there is basically one wizard in the story. So we said, “OK, no magic users are allowed.” Everyone was happily surprised to find that they could not play wizards and sorcerers. Luckily, it seems that our audience has embraced our very focused view of Middle-earth.
Despite the wealth of world-building that goes into these IPs, there must be some elements that you have to create yourself: the price of in-game goods, the commissary meals, etc. What tools do you use to fill in gaps?
Härenstam: We do fill in the gaps, so to speak, but you really need to consider why you're doing it and be sure it's in line with the game experience. Money in role-playing games is a whole can of worms in itself. In the first Alien movie, Brett and Parker discuss that they want a bigger share for that run. The way they talk about their shares gives us a point of comparison. This is a game where the blue-collar guy was working hard to scrape some cash together to get by, and you want to keep that. It’s more important to get that feeling right than the specific details on how it actually works, because it's not a case where more detail is always better.
Nepitello: There is only one mention, I think, in The Lord of the Rings about money, so there is a monetary system. But the question we asked was, “Do the characters in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit care about money or not?” The same question was asked, "Do they care about wearing heavy armor?" In both questions, the answer is no. And so we created rules that allow for that. In our game, you have standards of living that are different between the different cultures, and it's an abstraction that tells you if you can afford to stay the night in an inn paying for all the customers at the common room, or if you just have to ask for a glass of water and be content. It dispenses with the trouble of keeping account of how many coins you have.
Who decides what is canon in licensed games—for example, in your current work with Blade Runner?
Härenstam: We submit everything to Alcon Entertainment, the custodians of the universe and the IP. We submit things to them for feedback, and we have a back-and-forth. It's up to them to decide what we can and cannot put into the game, but it's been a good process. Constructive discussions have been going on now for the last year on different topics, from world details to canon to the color palette of the art. Our setting writer is Joe LeFavi, who brokered the deal, so together we talk to the IP managers to get a coherent picture of what this world is like. We have five to 10 submission steps and a discussion at each step. We want to create a coherent world so that it makes sense, and we are happy to cooperate with others creating stories in-universe as well. For Alien: Colonial Marines, we worked with the company making the video game Aliens: Fireteam Elite. We both added things from each other's games that work together well and are nice little easter eggs.
Disney is such a giant, and the scale of the upcoming Marvel TTRPG feels different from other releases, with the agglomeration of IP and the amount of money they're likely to put into it. What do you think this signals for the rest of licensed games, and will large releases alter the economics and the price point of IPs behind the scenes?
Härenstam: I know Matt Forbeck, a good friend of ours, and I'm looking forward to the game. Of course, Alien is now also part of Disney. Our partner, 20th Century Fox, was acquired, so we're also part of the Disney family. It's been going well so far; the process has been smooth, and I don't see any warning signs. The Marvel game, as far as I understand, will be published by them directly, which is a different kind of situation than normal licensing. That's super interesting to follow and see how that is received, and if there is an even greater interest from fans. There have been other cases of publishers of other media who have been releasing tabletop role-playing games as a way to support them. Carnival Row, which came out three years back, actually released a tabletop RPG PDF alongside it.
The Green Knight also had a limited-edition tabletop role-playing game that you can buy from A24 directly. So there's a film studio offering play sheets as rangers and bards with game mechanics that mirror the movie’s themes, which is new and cool.
Nepitello: I like the production values. It looks like they made it look like an '80s game. Going back to the influence of companies like Disney, I don't see much of a problem there, from the point of view that role-playing games, in general, need a minimum level of quality to be presentable. It's not something that you can just turn out automatically, taking some well-established mechanics and doing another one. Well, you can, but nobody's going to notice it. I think that production values and game mechanics need to be interesting to actually capture the eye. If you buy an IP or a license, and they agree with you to do something with it, it's in their interest to allow you to do your job the best way possible, so I don't really think they're going to squash smaller companies just because they can get more money from a bigger company. That happens with board games, but in general that's because board games are expensive to manufacture, much more than role-playing games.
Free League designed Blade Runner, your newest licensed game, for the last year and a half during a series of especially dystopian events. What about the present do you think you're bringing into this TTRPG and this version of Blade Runner?
Härenstam: I feel that sci-fi with dark themes and tones can be helpful during these times, because it gives you a place to think about these things and the language to discuss them. There are a lot of things about the world of Blade Runner that people today may relate with. More than you might realize. Not only the pandemic but also corporate interests, politics, even the environment, and the extreme weather events that we've been seeing. It all helps you to empathize and imagine what kind of ways we and the world could go if we don't act. So being able to explore those topics and see light during even the darkest of times is a state of mind we probably need right now, more than ever.
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