We caught up with Free League Publishing CEO Tomas Harenstam at Gen Con for our annual interview, and talked about the changing RPG market, tariffs, and Free League's product pipeline for the rest of 2025 and 2026.
ICv2: The big event in the RPG business over the last year was the launch of Dungeons & Dragons 2024. Has that changed the RPG business?
Tomas Harenstam: For us, it's fairly consistent, but it's interesting to see what's going on out there. There've been some large Kickstarters. large projects that are interesting to see, like Daggerheart and the Cosmere game (see "Cosmere Is Most-Funded Tabletop Game"), and others. It's interesting to see how that plays out.
People are telling us the pie is growing, that the number of RPG players is growing. Are you feeling that?
Yeah, we're definitely seeing an influx of new players, still people discovering our games. Even our older games are still being discovered by new players. Especially coming here [to Gen Con], you get a real sense of new players coming in and getting excited about the games.
Over the last couple of years, you've expanded from book product into miniatures. Although books aren't tariffed, miniatures are. Is that affecting your business?
A little bit. We did a bunch of big production runs for starter sets at the beginning of the year. That gave us a bit of a scare when the tariffs happened. Now, it's still a little bit uncertain what's going to happen, but for the moment, it's OK.
Of course, it has entered a big uncertainty, especially for box sets (miniatures, but also all box sets) since we produce them mainly in China. We are open to other options, but we don't really have a new option in place yet. It's difficult to make that move, especially with the big uncertainty that's still there.
The game had been out for five years, which is not very long but still long enough, and we felt there were things we wanted to change, and add, and modify. We just felt that the time was right. We had a new cinematic adventure coming out anyway, called Rapture Protocol (see "Free League Invokes ‘Rapture Protocol’"), that was Kickstarted along with the Evolved Edition. We felt we needed to work a little bit on the mechanics of the game, and that just started the ball rolling of other changes that we wanted to do.
I know some players felt it was too early for a new edition. We did get some feedback on that, but the new edition is completely compatible with the first one, with minor tweaks. If you want to play first edition adventures with the new rule book and the other way around, that works. That has alleviated some of the fears that the players' collections would be useless and they'd have to buy the new stuff.
How did the Kickstarter do? What's the status of fulfillment?
It did well: it's actually our biggest Kickstarter, in terms of the dollar amount, that we ever did. It was around $2 million. The previous biggest one was The One Ring.
There's a starter set, there's a new adventure, a new core book, and a miniature set. All of that is now in production, so it's out of our hands for the moment. It's going to backers in October. Then we're looking for a November retail release. That's a big release for Q4.
You mentioned briefly the different products. What's the range of products that's going to launch in November?
There's a new core rule book, obviously. Then there's a new Starter Set with a new adventure, and it has a miniature in it. It adds a new type of map that is more compatible with playing with miniatures. Then there's a miniature set that goes along with the new adventure, Rapture Protocol. Those are the four main items.
We did a Kickstarter last year. There's two new books coming. The first one is Mythic Carpathia. It's a geographic expansion into Eastern Europe and adds that folklore and lots of new strange creatures to contend with.
Also, a Starter Set is coming out for Vaesen. Vaesen is doing really well, especially with new players and not our typical demographics. They’re different, younger players. It seems to be more female players enjoy that game. We want to give more people chance to try it out, so we're making a Starter Set as an easy access point. That's also coming right before Halloween.
Coriolis is an older game, one of the first Free League games. Actually, Free League came from an earlier edition of that game; the name Free League is from a faction in the game Coriolis. It's part of the DNA of Free League.
This is a new edition that's being released very soon. August 12th is the official release date (see "Coriolis’ Heads to Retail"). We actually have it here at Gen Con, like a little prerelease.
One big release next year will be the Invincible RPG, a superhero game based on the Invincible comic and animated series. We hope to have it here at Gen Con next year. That's a big thing that I'm working on right now. Looking forward to that.
That IP is super‑strong, between the TV show and the comics. The super‑fat comic collections sell like crazy.
It's a fantastic property. Working with the team at Skybound has been great. We have Adam Bradford doing a lot of the writing. He knows that universe in and out. We have a really great team. That the series is going now doesn't hurt, of course. It's been super‑fun to work with. For me, it's a dream to make a superhero game. I've been wanting to do that for a long time. This is a lot of fun, seeing it come together.
