Time to Tie Up a Loose End - 12 Heroes

By varusSMK, in Descent: Journeys in the Dark

I know I'm not the first to ask for this, but given the release of Legends of the Dark and past indications of no more physical content releases for D2e, FFG seems to be a good position to tie up the most frayed loose end in D2e - our 12 missing hero miniatures. There are two relatively straight forward ways to go about this, either of which I would welcome.

1) Enter a licensing and production agreement with a 3rd party, freeing them to manufacture and sell the miniatures pursuant to the terms of the agreement. FFG makes money and gets to negotiate the terms without having to manage any of the business.

2) Release the designs (either from 1st edition, or alternatively, 2d edition if they exist) under an open non-commercial license and allow people to 3D print / manufacture their own for personal use.

These designs are already money made and money spent. If FFG has no intention of profiting from these designs further, then please just make the miniatures available.

This would likely inspire more sales of the conversion kit, and you could even add the 12 heroes to RtL as a $4.99 unlock. I would gladly pay that.

Perhaps most importantly, it would claw back some goodwill from your community that has expressed no small amount of unhappiness with Legends.

Thanks for the consideration.

you hope FFG creating 12 miniatures for 5 bucks ? Only for few fans ?

You are aware this a total lose for them ? Maybe at 5$ the miniature, it could be worth the try, since they can do them at demand using 3d impression process, but don't expect more

No rugal, you misunderstand both of these common business practices.

In #1, FFG makes money off the licensing agreement itself by selling the rights to manufacture. Their only expense is ink and legal time.

In #2 they simply make the design available for download online, slap an open license on it, and let people 3D print to their hearts content. FFG prints nothing. They could literally do this in 24 hours if they felt so inclined.

Road to Legend would require a small amount of developer time to set up unlocks, but my understanding is the 12 heroes were already baked into the backend already, so this would be a money maker (though likely not a large one).

I dunno... aren’t there almost 60 heroes in 2E now? It would be nice to see everyone converted but I’d rather have a smaller number of heroes that I could each get to know well.

Edited by Artaterxes
28 minutes ago, varusSMK said:

No rugal, you misunderstand both of these common business practices.

In #1, FFG makes money off the licensing agreement itself by selling the rights to manufacture. Their only expense is ink and legal time.

In #2 they simply make the design available for download online, slap an open license on it, and let people 3D print to their hearts content. FFG prints nothing. They could literally do this in 24 hours if they felt so inclined.

Road to Legend would require a small amount of developer time to set up unlocks, but my understanding is the 12 heroes were already baked into the backend already, so this would be a money maker (though likely not a large one).

Sorry, I'm french, so sometimes I may be wrong when reading english

1 - half of these are already avalaible : Glyr, Varikas, Mad Carthos, Red Scorpion, Laughin Buldar, Tobin Farslayer, Landrec the wise, and Kirga are official artworks. We miss only Aurim, Hugo, Bogran artworks are missing.

About official hero abilities, some are official looking from some BGG links.

2 - we already do this, I created them through hero forge.

About Road to legend, I don't care at all, so I can't help.

But if you wish official hero sheet as download or even small print, since FFG now ANA, forget it, you won't

18 minutes ago, Artaterxes said:

I dunno... aren’t there almost 60 heroes in 2E now? It would be nice to see everyone converted but I’d rather have a smaller number of heroes that I could each get to know well.

Around 80, but there is by far more warriors, and top few mages and healers, so there is never enough.

This game needs few things to be alive without any end : new campaigns book and it is many hours of game again.

When one played as much as me, new heroes, classes, and monsters is never enough. Never.

Literally, I am only requesting the designs for the 12 hero miniatures from FFG that were not included in the Hero and Monster packs. I (like many) have the missing 12 hero cards from the conversion kit , and those are all the artwork and rules that are needed.

I appreciate fan made content (like heroes through Hero Forge), but I want original miniature artwork from the game, and I want the legal permission to print because that respects the intellectual property.

Once again, FFG has the designs from 1st edition in house already and could release them to us tomorrow with an open non-commercial license if they so chose. That would be a terrific holiday gift for everyone. Then we could all have those elusive 12 1st edition minis that never appear on eBay.

@Artaterxes I hear you buddy. The number of heroes is overwhelming until you've played for a looooong time.

Edited by varusSMK

Btw, @rugal - I really appreciate your trying to be helpful and contributing so much to the community. That's very cool of you.

Several of the minis can be found if you can get your hands on a copy of Runewars (revised edition or earlier).

Bogran, Varikas, Red Scorpion, and Carthos are in the base game, Landrec is in Banners of war. I think most (if not all) of them are in Runebound 2nd edition.

These games are out of print and not the easiest to find.

9 hours ago, varusSMK said:

In #1, FFG makes money off the licensing agreement itself by selling the rights to manufacture. Their only expense is ink and legal time.

This is completely a thing, Paizo does something similar with drivethrucards.

https://www.drivethrucards.com/browse/pub/5549/Paizo

Which makes me particularly sad about how lost legends has been lost.

I'm not surprised that FFG isn't changing gears to do it here. The only thing which makes me sad is that they stopped cross promoting their games.

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Edited by Bucho
8 hours ago, Bucho said:

I'm not surprised that FFG isn't changing gears to do it here. The only thing which makes me sad is that they stopped cross promoting their games.

That was a great idea, I love the idea of dunegonquest when heroes had inside sheets to play them for descent V1 and Runebound v2.

Why they did not do that again is a sad mystery

13 hours ago, rugal said:

Why they did not do that again is a sad mystery

True story, Runebound 3rd really could have used the sales pitch 😭

33 minutes ago, Bucho said:

True story, Runebound 3rd really could have used the sales pitch 😭

More over since Red Scorpion and Eliam new artworks and miniature were added into this game and no descent

They're in act two of Legends :) :) :)

But joking (or maybe not) aside there are quite a few fan threads here on fan conversions and options for proxying the minis, some of which are such a neat solution maybe we don't need FFG to do it (as they've said there's nothing new coming for 2e it's pretty much set in stone that it's not happening)

The other possibility I've been pondering is Descent 3 happening in the future- it's maybe interesting that Legends has completely new heroes, maybe 2e still sells enough that it could actually still be too soon for 3e (if 2e gets reprints maybe so, if not maybe not- but remember reprints can be quite slow to materialize, like my long wait to eventually get Formula D)