We here at Apotheosis Studios have some very great friends. In the wider world of ambitious creators bringing their ideas to Kickstarter, we are among some truly exciting projects. Despite appearances, we're not super competitive. We support each other constantly, as each of these projects really excite all of us.

One such project is that of Aldarra, a tactical board game by Arcane Minis. We've had a long look at the game in our rules breakdown in another post here on our blog, but there's still so much to know about Aldarra. I talked to Benny McLennan, Founder and CEO of Arcane Minis, and here's what he had to say.

Exclusive Interview with Arcane Minis

Arcane Minis is an exciting up and comer in the world of 3d printed minis. But no company starts as such. How did Arcane Minis get started?

Well, I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons for over 2 decades. Just over 3 years ago, I had gotten back in to playing with my friends while living here in South Korea. I took 5 brand new players and coached them through their first campaign. A few months after that, I took up 3D printing as a hobby because I saw the potential as a DM to use 3D printing to customize my sessions. A few months after that and I was inspired to have airships in my campaign, but no one had created any decent ones. So I set out to develop my own, which turned into a Kickstarter called Skies of Sordane. Here we are 2 years later and we are releasing our first board game!

The minis made for Aldarra, Skies of Sordane, and Airship Campaigns are detailed and wonderful pieces for any collection. Can you discuss the details behind the printing process, and how the quality of the minis always hold up from your initial concepts to the finished product?

Well, first and foremost, we never make anything that we wouldn’t use or approve of ourselves. We have delayed a few STL releases in the past purely due to me not believe the product to be of good enough quality to share with our backers and customers. Quality and communication are key for us. It helps to have a superb team of creatives working on art and sculpting like our lead artist Wallok and lead sculptor Osaka. Two of the many people that work on Arcane Minis projects that I simply couldn’t operate without them.

To finish a product, we go through a long process of validating files, making proper cuts and guides for customers to know what goes where and ensuring that the aesthetic of the product fits into not only our setting of Sordane, but other settings of similar theme.

The creative team has no shortage of grand ideas. A lot of them seem to draw your attention up into the sky. Between Aldarra, Skies, and Airship Campaigns, there's a strong theme in all of your releases, that take us skyward. What draws the projects of Arcane Minis skyward?

Personally, I love airships. We all do, I think. There’s such a rich world and story to tell when you can fly anywhere in a giant ship and defeat massive airborne monsters or fly off to an adventure in a hard-to-reach location. Airship campaigns really are quite unique in their function to traditional 5e or other RPG campaigns. They really put a lot of creativity in the hands of the players and a lot of improv on the DM. Which, as almost a fully improvisational DM myself, I love. Airships are just awesome!

Airship Campaigns is a project very close to our hearts here at Apotheosis Studios. 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons is where we live, and even when we aren't producing our content, we're rolling dice for adventures to have fun with. Could you share a little about the ideas behind Airship Campaigns? Where the ideas behind it began? What players can expect?

Airship Campaigns was an offshoot from Skies of Sordane. Skies was originally meant to be just an STL campaign. But, as we went on, it seemed there was a demand for how to use the ships in a campaign. So we added an addon. Airship Campaigns. Originally it was intended to be a 40 page rulebook on using airships, but it quickly grew to 100 pages with extra lore and goodies in there. After finishing that, we decided we really wanted to take it to the next level and add monsters and more world buildings, ships and items. So we made a mountain of new creature STLs and added another 100 pages and we are now at 220 pages, going to manufacturing within the next week or two and created nearly 100 creature STLs to fly along side airships trying to eat their juicy crew inside!

Now onto the main event, Aldarra itself. Your upcoming game is a very exciting and ambitious project. Where did the idea of bringing your skyship universe into an intense tabletop strategy game come from?

Ever since we did Skies, my dream has been to make a board game with airships in it. So shortly after Skies, we started development. It has been a long 2 years, especially with covid and trying to playtest and develop in that environment but we did it and we love the end product. It’s an in-depth, but fast paced combat strategy game and it’s just a fun time where you don’t have to spend 6 hours playing 1 game (once you learn to play of course!)

Not only that, but a board game with airships meant we got to design more and more of them. As they are smaller, they’re much easier to develop than the super massive ones. Still a challenge to make perfect, but it really allowed us to get our creative juices flowing with the aesthetics and world building of it all!

The replay factor for Aldarra is quite high, which is a big selling point for me and a lot of tabletop gamers. Between the different map tiles being laid out in a different way each time, the randomness of how power crystals can be generated and the encounters that players can have over the skies usually leads to unique and thrilling gameplay right out of the box. Was replay value a priority during the design and development of Aldarra? How was that implemented in the creation of Aldarra?

100%. We didn’t want a game you would spend hard earned money on being something you would only play one time and then having no replayability. Those games exist, and a lot of them are great. That’s not Aldarra. With Aldarra we wanted to give you a social experience that you didn’t have to think incredibly hard on, but it wouldn’t be a cakewalk without careful planning and cunning tactics. The mechanics we have in the game to make it replayable because each time you play, you’re going to play a different faction, get different Discoveries or Explore cards or even playing with 1 new person in the group can add a hugely different outcome to the game because if there’s one thing I’ve learned with Aldarra game testing, it’s that even though our game is heavily focused on combat, there is a large difference in play styles that different people have. Every game I play is very different and still a blast.

The strategy and detail of the rules is immense in this game. When players can perform certain actions. The limits of ships and where placement of your airship units can be. Was the intensity of strategy and detail of the rules a priority when designing and developing Aldarra? What was the play test process for a game of this level of complexity like? What was the feedback like to get the games system to where it is today?

The original complexity was far greater. My original ask from my partner developers, Forever Stoked Creative, was to make a very complicated, in-depth RTS type game that would last many hours. But, as we got into the development process, I realized that what was really important was the social aspect. We all lost a lot of that at the start of the pandemic (basically when we started developing this) and since then, it definitely was more of a focus to not only have in-depth strategy and big brain moves, but we wanted it to feel like you were socializing as part of the game. So as time went on, we definitely kept a bunch of the strategy and mechanics, but we removed a lot of the time-sinking micro managing mechanics of the game. I would love to do a deep dive on the development process some day as well when we have time. It was an eye-opening experience as a first time game designer working with Matt and FSC. It has been wild!

Us here at Apotheosis Studios are eager to see Aldarra in action. Our partnership means our very own Jamison Stone and Satine Phoenix will be playing the game in person! How did this exciting testing opportunity come to be?

Yes, we feel exceedingly lucky to be partnered with many amazing people and we were super thrilled when the prolific map makers Cze and Peku introduced us to Jamison and Satine. Jamison was our main point of contact to set up the partnership and he couldn’t have been a nicer person. Really value the new relationships we have been able to build and cultivate because of this game. There are some really amazing communities and people out there that love seeing others thrive and succeed and I’m glad we could surround ourselves with so many people like that. It’s a fun time!

Arcane Minis are becoming heavy hitters in the world of table top gaming and this current release on Kickstarter is what's bringing their name up even higher. For more information about how to play Aldarra for yourself, check out our in depth article about the game itself!

Tune in to Apotheosis Studios' own Jamison Stone and ttrpg legend Satine Phoenix trialling this game for themselves right here, and put your pledges in to support Aldarra right now on Kickstarter.

Now we want to hear from you. Have you put your pledges in to back Aldarra for yourself? Are the other projects by Arcane Minis drawing your attention? Let us know in our discord server or in the comments below.

Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com, they write all kinds of gaming press, while they write news about the League of Legends Card Game on RuneterraCCG. On Youtube, they can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes, or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere. Find where they dwell by climbing their Linktree.

Blog

Apotheosis Studios' Exclusive Interview With Arcane Mini's Benny McLennan

Exclusive Interview with Arcane Minis

Apotheosis Studios