For the second consecutive year, we caught up with Free League CEO Tomas Harenstam to talk about the past year, his company’s Gen Con announcements, his view of the RPG market, and their Humble Bundle with Alchemy VTT (see "ICv2 Interview – 2023" for last year’s interview).

ICv2:  We last spoke a year ago here at Gen Con, and talked about what the RPG market was doing then. How has it changed over the last year?
Tomas Harenstam:  It's still, I think, doing well.  We haven't seen any real slowdown or anything like that.  I think what's happening is that there is a large interest in games that are perhaps not D&D.  There's an increased interest in lots of different games, which is nice for us.  From our perspective, things are going well.

Your big launch this year was Mutant Year Zero ‑‑ Zone Wars.  How's that been going?
It's been doing well.  We normally do RPGs.  This is a miniatures skirmish game, but it's very RPG‑ish.  It has strong characters and it's strongly connected to the Mutant Year Zero RPG.  It's interesting to see; people who are trying it seem to be loving it.  We're running demos here at Gen Con and it's been doing well.  We'll probably continue to build on that.

Last Gen Con, Dragonbane was just coming out.  How's that done over the last year?
That's been great.  That was a new fantasy title, a completely unknown brand.  It's not a known license or anything like that, and that was interesting, to see how that would go.  It launched last year here, and it was great, and it's continued to build on that since.  We're running it here this year again; we're doing a new campaign; the Bestiary is out.  That's one of the bigger titles for us now.

We're here in your game room before the exhibit hall officially opens.  It's packed, so I guess it's working well.
Yeah.  We're working with Lurking Fears to run events here, both here in our game room and the main convention center, but also se have another hall over at the JW Marriott.  They all, as far as I know, seem to be packed, and people are having fun, so that's great.

You just announced an Alien RPG Second Edition (see "’Alien RPG 2E’").  That is also going to have miniatures, so you're expanding on your miniatures business.
Just like Zone Wars ties into the Mutant Year Zero RPG, we felt that miniatures is a good addition for the Alien RPG line.  A lot of RPG players are looking at using miniatures from other places, or already using them.

Internally, we feel 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 level of gameplay to the game that we feel will be working really well, so we're excited about it.

That's going to start on crowdfunding and then to trade.  What's the schedule for that?
We'll see.  We don't have an exact date yet for the Kickstarter.  Probably be during the fall. Probably we're looking at something like October.  We have a pretty long pre‑launch period to get feedback and hear what the community says. Then we'll launch the Kickstarter around probably October.  We're looking at a retail launch, potentially, here [at Gen Con] next year.

Tell us about The Electric State.  We reported on that a year ago (see "’Electric State’"); it went to Kickstarter, but now it's going to trade, so to refresh our readers' memories, what's that game all about?
That is a road trip, road movie-type game.  It's also based on a world by Simon Stålenhag, who did Tales from the Loop.  It's very Tales from the Loop‑centric.  It has that same feel, although 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‑type feel is something we haven't really explored in RPGs before.

 Of course, there is the film coming up by the Russo brothers, who are doing a major feature film on it that is also on the way.  The RPG will come out before the film.  Hopefully, the two can work well together, and people will be enjoying the game as well as the film.

Last year, we talked about your pace of releases.  What are you looking at for 2025?  Is it going to be about the same number of releases as this year, or will there be any difference?
Something like that.  We try to really support all the game lines we have.  We have something like 14 different game lines now.  It's a lot.  At least one or two releases per game line per year is what we're really looking at and for some of the lines that we want to focus extra on, at least two releases.  That's what we're aiming for.

You also recently announced that you're doing a Humble Bundle.  Tell us about that.
That is the partnership with the Alchemy VTT.  We work with a bunch of VTTs: Foundry, Alchemy, Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, and even some others.  This one is with Alchemy; they are running the Humble Bundle on VTT modules for a large selection of our titles.  It's almost all Free League titles.  Alchemy is a good partner to us; Humble Bundle is also, we've had a good relationship.  We'll see where this can take us.  Of course, the hope is that more people will get eyes on our games and try them out virtually.

What is the charity that's being benefited?
It's Direct Relief; they do good work.