WIRED sat down with Nepitello and Härenstam to discuss the challenges, surprises, and behind-the-scenes hustles to get intellectual property in this development whirlwind.
By Magpie Games’s Avatar new game Sand dunes games for your projects, this seems to be the peak time for TTRPGs to work with pre-set worlds. do you agree?
Tomas Härenstam: It was an exciting time. We often discuss, “How big is this market, what kind of ceiling are we going to touch?” And I think The One Ring, but even more so than Avatar Kickstarter, showed a much higher ceiling than most of us thought.
Francesco Nepitello: There is a difference between now and just a few years ago. Basically, many companies and IP holders, as far as I know, are not keen on getting Kickstarter access for licensed games. Usually people assume that with a big IP you don’t need to go to Kickstarter because you can sell a certain game. The One Ring and, of course, The Last Airbender have shown that the combination of the two can be explosive.
What is the first step when you are looking for a license? What aspects of IP make your team think, “Hey, can we make this a desktop-friendly product?”
Härenstam: It has to start with a passion for IP. Alien and Blade Runner are two of my favorite series and franchises. Francesco, I know you have a passion and deep understanding of Tolkien’s works. I think you can never do these things if you don’t. Then you start discussing “How can this be a game?” You need to have a basic passion for the franchise, otherwise it will never turn out to be a good game, no matter how well you polish it. For us, that’s really the core of licensing.
Is there a moment when you really feel like you can translate something well into a board game and you see fans connecting with that, like Lord of the Rings fan?
Nepitello: When we first designed the game, we found that removing limitations often resulted in a dishonest gaming experience. The simplest example of all of them is the use of magic in Lord of the Rings. Some people think that there should be people using magic in the game. If you make a game system that allows them, you’re not really disloyal to the sources because there We witch in Middle-earth, but the gaming experience will be completely different. It won’t feel like Lord of the Ringsbasically yes one the wizard in the story. So we said, “OK, no magic users are allowed.” Everyone was happily surprised to learn that they couldn’t play magicians and witches. Fortunately, it seems that our audience has accepted our very focused view of Middle-earth.
