Eldfall Chronicles feels like it appeared overnight, suddenly showing up in American hobby stores after distributors caught wind of a hot new skirmish wargame with gorgeous miniatures that had grown up quietly in Slovenia. I spoke to Žiga Gantar, co-creator of the Eldfall Chronicles universe, and CEO and creative director of publisher Freecompany, to discover how it came to be.
“I started working on Eldfall when I was studying in Japan”, Gantar says, enrolled on a Masters degree in East Asian studies alongside his now-fiancée Tjaša Gaber. “I couldn’t play many wargames because I was away from home, so I started working on my own”.
Eldfall Chronicles’ origins
Work started with the setting, the world of Calad. “History is in general my hobby,” Gantar says, “in my home university I spent a lot of time studying European history”, and while in Japan he “spent a lot of time studying culture, history, not just Japanese history, Chinese as well, Korean as well”. This is the origin for Eldfall’s setting, a fantasy world with distinctly East Asian influences where “everything is intermingling, cultures are cross-pollinating”.
Gantar and Gaber hadn’t long returned from Japan when COVID hit, and “university kind of wasn’t a thing anymore”. “Me and my fiancée decided If there’s ever going to be a time to work on a game, it’s now“. “Tjaša predominantly went into graphic design, writing, things like that – she’s been writing most of the lore for us”. Gantar focused on world building and illustration. “It was quite a journey going from miniature painting and sketching on paper to full-on digital art”.
Before COVID restrictions had fully lifted “we started putting our own money into getting the first minis made, opening a company, stuff like that”… “I started working with 3D sculptors to design things, art directing”. He admits “we took a huge risk”.
Eldfall’s miniatures are beautifully designed, though the style isn’t exactly to my taste; they give me the vibe of characters in a high budget Chinese MMO created in the Unreal engine, and I tell Gantar as much. “Definitely some of the influence comes from there”, he says, “when I was younger MMOs were the thing. On top of that I’m a huge fan of games like The Witcher and the From SoftwareGames, everything from Dark Souls, Sekiro, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, those gritty aesthetics”.
I can see his point. The Western-coded factions, like the Helian League, remind me of Eastern media representations of Western fantasy archetypes, from Berserk, to Dark Souls, to the Japanese book covers for the Game of Thrones series. The studio also aims to make its miniatures more realistically proportioned than other wargames. “A lot of wargames go one to four, maybe one to five head to body ratio – we often go with one to six, one to seven”.
Unicool miniatures
While Eldfall miniatures aren’t excessively busy with details, the details they do have are extremely finely rendered – they’re more detailed than I can easily paint. That wouldn’t be possible without a high quality casting process; it feels a bit miraculous that two first-time game developers with no experience of model production managed to find one. “It was a mixture of tenacity and luck”, Gantar says. “We tried a number [of manufacturers], at least 12 that we exchanged materials with, checked what they can do, how helpful they are”.
It was around the time of the first Eldfall Chronicles Kickstarter campaign in 2021 that the team was contacted by Unicool Plastic Manufacturing. “From the get-go, they were way more helpful as people than many other manufacturers”. The firm’s chief engineer “offered to test out a new material with us”, and after some back and forth tests to develop the specifications, “we were the first game on the market using Unicool Hard Plastic, or Unicast as they now call it, for our whole range of models”.
I’ve built Unicast miniatures from both Eldfall Chronicles and Corvus Belli’s Warcrow; it’s light, strong, is similar in hardness and flexibility to HIPS, and it captures fine detail like traditional cold pour resins. “It’s only been evolving”, Gantar enthuses, “before there were some problems with the material, like bent parts – especially with long thin weapons, and we really like to make realistic weapons – it pushed the Unicool guys to work on the material, and the latest version is really awesome”.
Skirmish and dungeon crawl
Eldfall Chronicles has grown into quite an unusual product line. There are two main branches – the dungeon crawler board games, such as the existing Northern Winds set or the currently-crowdfunding Apocrypha, and then the skirmish wargame. The miniatures are cross compatible between the two lines, and while individual minis aren’t cheap, starting to play the skirmish game is, because a playable party consists of just four figures.
“Obviously we want you to buy more miniatures,” Gantar chuckles, “But at the same time, we wanted to bring the starting point low, so anyone can start playing the game”. I’ve not played enough of Eldfall to give it a scored review, but my first impressions are very promising. There’s a strong sense of characters having detailed and defined roles within the party, needing to coordinate their limited activations to achieve the mission. With every model so specialized it’s very important to consider the capabilities of your opponent’s force, as you can run into very hard counters for certain strategies that you’ll have to think your way around.
“We play a lot of RPGs”, Gantar says, “I spent a lot of time with things like Divinity, so I really like the whole idea of isometric exploration, and that’s kind of the vibe I also wanted for Eldfall: I wanted people to make their own parties, outfit them however you like with upgrades and things like that”. The model pool for list building is broad, since many models work in multiple factions and there are plenty of mercenaries, but so far the dedicated list for each individual faction is quite shallow.
More minis are coming: “in the future we are doing more reinforcement packs, more new factions, new faction starters”. Fans are already keen to get play modes that will allow them to use more of their collection in a game, though Gantar doesn’t want to do this just by lifting the points cap: “it would just bloat it up, you don’t get any added value from it”.
Variant playmodes are a big part of Eldfall; about a third of the range is made up of monsters which are controlled by AI and show up in cooperative or semi-co-operative missions. “PVE is huge for some communities, there’s a lot of people who don’t want to straight up compete”, Gantar says, adding that Tjaša is one of them. “She likes to play things in an adventure sense, like together we’re going after a monster”. It’s another aspect of the game that comes from Gantar and the wider team’s love of RPGs.
Eldfall Chronicles Apocrypha
Freecompany’s current focus is its second dungeon crawler board game, Apocrypha, currently seeking funds on Gamefound. There’s no need to own Northern Winds to be able to use this one, and while it’s set up for co-op with four players, it includes a true solo mode, allowing you to play through it with a single hero.
The core version of Apocrypha is a little slimmer than its big brother Northern Winds; to make it more cost friendly for board gamers it swaps out a lot of miniatures for cardboard standees. A pledge comes in at just under $100, with four hero minis and a hulking great boss. There are options to spend a lot more and get a lot more miniatures, of course, and every model has skirmish game rules as well.
Given the recent spate of controversies around delayed and incomplete crowdfunding campaigns, I ask Gantar how complete the project is and what remains to be done after crowdfunding closes. “The project is around 90 to 95 percent finished behind the scenes”, he replies, “we are in the process of [doing layout] and editing for production, also finalizing miniatures, optimizing them, things like that”. “We’re just patching up holes, seeing where some lore can be added, or if we need to remove some lore somewhere because it tells too much”, he adds.
Despite the bevy of cool miniatures coming in this release, Gantar says “for me personally, it’s really interesting from the story point of view”. “You have a monumental grand library in the Sand Kingdoms; beneath it there’s a sealed away section, and things have started to stir there, knowledge that shouldn’t have been written has started to appear in those sealed archives”.
The entity known as the Librarian cannot enter the archives, so they’ve tasked a group of mortals to delve in for them and return with these apocrypha. “Our party of heroes have a hidden goal; a part of their party went missing 17 years back, in a previous prospecting expedition into the archives, and they are now back to see what happened”.
In terms of new gameplay, Gantar thinks the team have done very good work with “a really cool taint and party progression mechanic”. There are other parties in the archives who “can steal loot from you if you’re too slow, if you take too much time doing side quests”. That gives a sense of urgency to your delves. You’ll also have to manage the growing taint that afflicts your party as they’re exposed to profane mana. “Those were kind of difficult things [to design], but also surprising in a really good way how they turned out”.
The Gamefound campaign for Eldfall Chronicles: Apocrypha is open until November 24.
Meanwhile there’s a growing chance you’ll be able to acquire the existing range from your friendly local game store. When I spoke to Gantar he had just returned from the colossal SPIEL convention in Essen, Germany. “I was really busy with business-to-business meetings”, he says, “most of the time I spent in my small cubicle office on the booth”, talking to European, American, and even South Korean distributors. “SPIEL was quite a step up from last year”, he reflects, “we’ve started being recognized by other players in the community – it’s really nice”.
There are a few Eldfall players in the Wargamer Discord community if you’d like to find some more knowledgeable nerds to talk about the game – and if you’ve painted any of the miniatures, please share them in our mini-painting channel!
Source: Wargamer
