Jon Ciccolini and Bill Rehor On the Future of Beadle & Grimm’s

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In this interview, D&D Fanatics’ Jason Volk sits down Beadle & Grimm’s co-founders Jon Ciccolini and Bill Rehor to discuss the past, present and future of one of tabletop gaming’s most iconic and high-end publishers.

The two also discuss the Faster Purple Worm, Kill! Kill! franchise, actual plays, the challenges of working with Wizards of the Coast and the upcoming Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall Platinum Edition.

[Please note that the transcript below has been edited for clarity and length.]

On Rolling Up New Characters

Jason Volk: Thanks so much for joining me. Welcome to our chat about Beadle & Grimm’s and the upcoming Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall Platinum Edition. Before we jump into that, for those who don’t know you, could you give a quick introduction of yourselves?

Bill Rehor: So I’m Bill Rehor. There are five founders of the company. I’m one of them, and we all wear a ton of hats because we’re very small, and none of us are particularly adept at anything. (laughs) I’ve been the project lead on a couple of D&D boxes. I created the Ring of Chaos board game for Beadle & Grimm’s, and I write some adventures for the Purple Worm books. So there you go.

Jason: Nice. How did you end up getting into D&D in the first place?

Bill: My brother Charlie, who is also one of the founding members, is three years older than me. When I was ten, I think, he started playing D&D with his friends. Being the younger brother, I had to insert myself into that and get involved. I distinctly remember that very first game of him running me through, I think it’s called In Search of the Unknown. That was the first module we ran out of the box. I’ve been hooked ever since. I’ve played D&D my whole life. Jon [Ciccolini], Matt [Lillard], Paul [Shapiro], and I all went to acting school when we were twenty-one, just out of college in New York. We quickly found we had this hobby in common and started playing together. We’ve been playing D&D regularly for decades before we even thought about starting a company together and doing this professionally.

Jason: Amazing! That’s awesome. How about you, Jon? Do you want to give a quick intro?

Jon: Yeah, Jon Ciccolini. Like Bill said, we all have a lot of hats. I focus quite a bit on D&D; that’s a focus of mine. When we play together, I’m the Dungeon Master, so that’s another distinction. I fetch a lot of coffee and take out the garbage. (laughter)

Bill: Important, important. That’s part of life at Beadle & Grimm’s. You do a little bit.

The Origins of Beadle & Grimm’s

Jason: Let’s jump a little into Beadle & Grimm’s. For those who don’t know, and I think most hardcore D&D nerds have heard of you, maybe you could tell us a little about the company.

Bill: Sure. We started way back when D&D launched Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. We came to them and said, “We have this idea for creating a platinum edition box set for the DM who has no time but has a little bit of income to create an immersive experience.” They said, “Let’s have you try that.” Waterdeep was our first platinum edition, and we’ve been doing platinum, silver, and legendary editions ever since. We’ve also branched out with other things. We’ve worked with Critical Role, Pathfinder, and created our own 5E content, murder mystery games, all kinds of different things.

The Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall Platinum Edition

Jason: That’s amazing. I know recently with some of the bigger products coming out, maybe we can jump into the Platinum Edition of Arcana Unearthed: Deadfall. You just released some new information about it, kind of at the same time information has been slowly leaking from Wizards of the Coast. I imagine we’ll learn more at Gen Con. What can you tell us about it?

Bill: When we saw this adventure, a level eleven to twenty, high-level epic adventure, we saw that D&D had this full end-to-end written adventure. We said that feels like a platinum edition to us, very much like Vecna: Eve of Ruin felt like a platinum edition. We said this is our big platinum edition for the year. It comes with a lot of things folks have come to expect: a ton of battle maps rolled up in a beautiful map tube, a box of WizKids pre-painted minis with alt decos specifically for our set, and the big box of all the other contents. That includes some hard metal artifacts, tons of handouts, a DM screen, the book itself broken out into easy-to-use booklets, and DM aids, player aids, and bonus adventures you won’t find anywhere else. A lot of high-quality materials that hopefully our customers have come to expect.

The Differences in Beadle & Grimm’s Editions

Jason: For those who don’t know the difference between a platinum, silver, and legendary edition, what exactly is a platinum edition for Beadle & Grimm’s?

Bill: For all these special editions, we are always trying to create a more immersive experience for the players at the table and make life easier for the DM. Those are the guiding principles. All our boxes contain immersive elements, like handouts, but not just a Xerox piece of paper. We work on them to make them feel in-world. The layout is in-world, the print looks in-world. We have hilarious conversations with production companies where we say, “No, you have to crinkle the paper this way to make it look like it was this.” Or we are trying to waterlog an old ship captain’s log so it looks waterlogged but is still readable. Those things are a lot of fun to create. When the DM can put those things out at the table, it draws your players in. It creates that imaginary sense of being there and being involved in a personal way that creates a better experience for everybody. We don’t make the silver or gold editions a lower level of quality than platinum. We try to keep the same level of quality for all of them; there is just more stuff. The defining difference with the platinum editions has traditionally been the WizKids curated mini set, where they give us a set of minis specifically chosen for that campaign for the biggest events. You have those minis to put out at the table. The big rolled-up map tube gives you nice big battle maps scaled for mini use to draw people in on those big combat moments, and then just more of everything else. There are more handouts, coins, trinkets, or props. One example we love to bring up is when we did Wild Beyond the Witchlight. The platinum edition came with fairy wings that everybody could put on when they attend the carnival at the beginning of the adventure. It is crazy stuff like that, but those kinds of moments bring everybody together and say, “This is the world you are in.” I think players really enjoy it, and it does make the DM’s life easier when the players feel pulled into the world. They feel like, “I am going to put down my phone and focus on this thing for a while,” and that makes everybody’s experience better. That is what we are hoping to achieve with all of these boxes.

B&G’s Biggest Production Challenges

Jason: That’s amazing. All your box sets are absolutely beautiful. I think one thing that has occurred to a lot of fans over the last year or two is just how difficult it is to actually produce these these days, given production issues and tariffs. Without getting too far away from D&D, there are the real-world pressures of producing these things. I don’t think people totally understand how much effort goes into it. How complicated is this? You are dealing with Wizards of the Coast, WizKids, manufacturing, source material, and expanding it. How challenging is it to put together a platinum edition like we see with the Deadfall Adventure?

Bill: Jon is sweating it out right now as I am answering. (laughter) The challenging thing with something like a platinum edition is because there are so many elements. All it takes is for one to be delayed, and the whole thing has to be delayed. Everything has to deliver on time, or else you are not on time. If there is even one hiccup where something went wrong and they are now late, we are not shipping everything out piecemeal. To create that fully curated package, everything has to run smoothly. It takes a lot of production partners that we have a lot of faith in and communicate with a lot, and a lot of planning to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. Shipping right now is a real challenge. With Kickstarters, I think customers are getting more insight into this whole process because with a Kickstarter, you are required to say, “This is where we are in production. This just happened; it is going to delay a couple of weeks.” I think customers have a little bit more insight into the production and shipping aspect than they had a long time ago. The other thing I would mention about the process for us is that we always start behind the eight ball. Wizards is a fantastic partner; they are great and collaborative. They want us to succeed, but it is not like we get to sit in meetings with them while they are developing Deadfall. We have to wait until they are basically done. We get the green light to start working on one of these things, and they are almost at the finish line. So we are racing to catch up and get our version of this product out as soon as we can. We are never able to hit the same release date that they do, but we are trying to get it as close as we can. It is an absolute sprint trying to get that to happen on each of these projects. We are a small company; there are really five of us running this thing. When Jon is the project lead for Deadfall, we all read it and contribute our ideas at the beginning, but once that is going, he is doing that on his own because I am doing my thing, Paul is doing his thing, and Charlie is doing his thing. It is an enormous cognitive workload to keep track of all of those things moving at the speed needed to hit the deadline.

James Bond Meets D&D

Jason: That makes sense, especially given how far in advance Wizards plans these things. Maybe we can chat a little about the adventure itself. I’m sure there is stuff you cannot tell us, but what is the elevator pitch of this particular adventure? I know we have heard from Wizards that it is going to be an espionage fantasy base, which is a really cool concept. What can you tell us?

Jon: We have been trying to say it is Mission: Impossible meets D&D, or James Bond meets D&D. It is definitely very much espionage. It is fast-moving and very high stakes. One false move, and the Zulkirs of Thay now know that you are plotting against them, and you and everyone you know are in danger. I don’t think it is a spoiler to say it should hopefully all end up in a massive combat with Szass Tam himself, trying to take him down. One of the things I love about an espionage-type adventure is the in-world handout opportunity. Here is your dossier on this person. Here are your instructions for your next assignment. Lots of opportunities to hand players documents that, under normal circumstances without a platinum edition, you are just hearing something read to you from the book. You hear the DM say, “This is what you have to do,” and you are frantically scribbling your own notes. With a platinum edition, you are handed a sheet that has the assignment, who you are going after, and what you need to do. They can hold it and refer to it three sessions later when everybody has forgotten what they are supposed to be doing.

Jason: That is very cool.

Jon: That is the fun of it. When they branch out in something like this, you start to see the value of some things on your stat sheet that you don’t normally use. Your Deception score, your Investigation score, those things are going to be put to regular use. It encourages you to create kinds of characters that maybe you don’t normally do. Or you are going to have a lot of fun playing a guy who is out of his element and has to struggle to talk his way out of situations or figure out how to maneuver through these very delicate espionage-type events. I love it anytime I am pushed as a player to try something different.

Running High-Level Campaigns

Jason: This is the second high-level campaign from Wizards of the Coast. You also produced a tie-in product for Vecna: Eve of Ruin. What was your take on seeing another high-level adventure? I know the online community thinks it is cool, but they say, “Another high-level adventure when most people only make it to level six or eight on average?” Very few people play high-level campaigns. What was your reaction when you heard they were doing another one?

Jon: I love the approach they are taking to that feedback. When people say they seldom get to play a character at level ten, one reaction would be to just write adventures for the levels people play. I think their approach is, “This is a whole different game when you play levels eleven through twenty. Everything changes when people have these kinds of powers, and you should give it a try. You should find out what this is like because there is a whole level of D&D that you are not experiencing.” I love low-level characters; it is my thing. But this does really change everything. I think it is great for people to have an opportunity to say, “Let’s just start at level ten or eleven and find out what this is like.” Play things you don’t normally do and see if it speaks to you.

The Bonus Adventures in the Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall Platinum Edition

Jason: As part of the Platinum Edition box set, you have added some additional adventure elements. Can you tell us a little about those expansion adventures?

Jon: I am personally really excited about the two adventures we added. The first one is set to occur before Wizards’ adventure even begins. It establishes the group as players in the spy community because it gives them a chance to prove themselves in a “go get this information” setting. It also helps to increase their motivation for taking down Szass Tam. We have Szass Tam do something in that adventure that will make it so that when you kick off Operation Deadfall, the characters should all be “Yes, we are in. Let’s go get this guy.” We also worked in the option for the DM to introduce a Bastion, like an espionage headquarters for the players. As part of the box, we have an espionage headquarters handout that you can give to the players. It comes with a map and an area where you can fill out what you want in that fashion. The ability to give the players a chance to ground themselves in the world, in the motivation, and as a party was a great opportunity. The other adventure works within their module, but it is level eleven, early on. It is another chance where, in the adventure, it was sort of a pause, a break. We thought, “If you are looking to introduce something here, here is another cool adventure that will introduce them to another aspect of Thay and the factions within Thay.”

On Working with Wizards of the Coast

Jason: When you came up with those concepts and other elements for the box set, how much leeway does Wizards of the Coast give you? Are they “go nuts,” or are they strict?

Jon: I wouldn’t say strict. I think they are very collaborative. They want to review things on every level, but it is very much in terms of helping us make sure we are in alignment with everything they are doing. It is not like they don’t want us doing this or that. They just want to make sure we are thinking through all the details of what we are doing and how it will affect the adventure as written. We have developed a very healthy process with them about that over the years.

Jason: Things have changed internally at Wizards. You are probably one of the companies with such a close relationship, having worked with them for so long. Have you seen any changes recently with losing Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford, and the new franchise model Dan Ayoub has been working towards? How have things changed with how you work with Wizards in the last year or two?

Jon: I would answer that by saying not as much as you would think. The team we work with has been pretty consistent. There was a major change a couple of years ago, but our approach hasn’t really changed. Get the information as early as possible on what they are planning, sit down, collaborate with them on where they think the opportunities are, and then put things through review.

Bill: Our relationship with them is always evolving. There is a certain level of trust that they have with us now that maybe they didn’t have with the first box or two. They are like, “These guys know what they are doing now, and we don’t have to look as closely because they have done this so often and they have proven they are not going to rewrite canon.” (laughter) You wouldn’t believe the stuff we get away with now. There was stuff we tried to pull in the very beginning, and they were like, “You can’t do that.” It has evolved quite a bit.

The D&D License and Original Content

Jason: That speaks to the quality of what you produce. I know initially with Fifth Edition, they outsourced to third parties like Green Ronin and Kobold Press. You could see them trying different publishers, but with you guys, it has been consistent. Things feel like they are changing internally at Wizards and how they approach publishers. We have Luke Gygax doing his own thing, and rumors about them doing second-party or licensing out the D&D brand to other publishers. We have stuff coming out at Gen Con with Joe Manganiello possibly doing his own setting with the D&D brand. Have you had any discussions about doing that as well, using the D&D brand to expand on what you are doing?

Bill: Those thoughts are always there, and we have those discussions with them. We have been playing around with starting to develop our own content that is 5E but not licensed D&D. We came up with the Skullduggery Source Guide, a 5E companion, resource, and adventure book that we are very excited about. The Faster Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! adventure books are licensed D&D products, and they have been super supportive about us creating those books. Volume One is now on D&D Beyond, which was really exciting. Volume Two is going to be a Kickstarter in August. That brand is continuing for us and has been a great way to play around in licensed content. I think their strategy for that is evolving, and we are part of the conversation. We are grateful to be part of the conversation. We will see where it goes.

The TTRPG Landscape and Future Focus

Jason: Outside of D&D, there is an explosion of other TTRPGs starting to eat D&D’s lunch. It feels like a golden age for TTRPGs with huge releases like Daggerheart, Draw Steel, and Shadowdark. Are you seeing that as part of your strategy as well? You have done other projects and collaborated with other brands. Is that going to become a bigger part of Beadle & Grimm’s going forward?

Bill: We are always open to those conversations, but right now, creatively, we are finding it very rewarding to be able to start creating our own content. We love supporting D&D products, and we will always do that. That is always going to be a huge part of our business. But with the time we have left over, we are pretty excited about the idea of creating a source guide or adventure like Skullduggery was, or creating our own sort of setting within the 5E world. I think that is probably where our energy is going to go. It is always hard to tell. Tomorrow we could get a call from somebody, and if the idea was creatively exciting, we might pursue that. But we are really excited about creating our own content. For us as a small company, using that commonly spoken language of 5E is a lot easier than trying to grapple with the idea of creating a whole new system and forcing everybody to learn a new language.

The “Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill!” Series

Jason: For people who don’t know what the Faster Purple Worm series is, could you give a quick rundown?

Bill: The idea of Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! is a TV show we did for the Dungeons & Dragons Adventurers Channel a few years ago. In every episode, four first-level adventurers go off on an epic quest, run into one of the most powerful monsters in D&D lore, and are summarily killed. Everybody dies every time, every adventure. Last year, we came out with a book of adventures based on that TV show called Everybody Dies, Volume One. It is 15 first-level adventures that all end with a cataclysmic demise. It sold really well, and people have been really excited. There are communities building up around playing these adventures. It is such a great game for when it is our D&D night but one of our five players can’t come. We can’t play our regular campaign, so we whip out one of these games. You play it in two or three hours, have a great time, it is fun and improvisational and silly, and then you can go back to whatever you do. We are doing a second book of that. At Gen Con, we have three live shows: Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Thursday is in the D&D Tower, and Friday and Saturday are at Gen Con proper. We are also doing a bunch of table games there. All five of the founders, including Matthew Lillard, are doing at least one table game. We have four or five players, and we run through one of the adventures we are currently preparing for Volume Two. We will be play-testing these games, letting people experience them mid-development, and getting their feedback. That will contribute to how the book comes together. It is a big push for us for Gen Con this year, and we are excited about it.

Actual Plays and Live Shows

Jason: You touched on actual plays. A lot of people have been introduced to Beadle & Grimm’s through them. Is that going to continue to be important for the company going forward?

Bill: We love doing the live shows, and we love that it is connected to this published content we are getting more of. It is great for us. It is hard to make time for it and hard to figure out when we can get everybody together to do a show. We are doing a show at Gamehole Con in October, and we are currently planning on going to Pax Unplugged. Those would be the next two shows after Gen Con.

Jason: Are there plans to do any ongoing regular series, or is it going to be more one-offs at conventions?

Bill: We would love to. It is really hard. We are five people running this company. When we did that TV show, we basically had to shut down the company for a month. (laughter) We love doing it, but it would be difficult for us. God bless these people like Aabria Iyengar and Critical Role who are able to keep doing shows week in and week out. I don’t know how they manage it.

The Future of D&D and 5.5E

Jason: In terms of D&D, you guys are very close to this. We have seen the launch of 5.5e. Where do you guys see things for D&D in the next couple of years? What do you think, Jon?

Jon: I am immediately self-filtering to see what I can and can’t say. (laughter) Gotta keep those NDAs. From what I am seeing, they are continuing to have a heavy focus on D&D. It is important for them to continue to build out their worlds in a way that if I want to play a certain genre, I don’t need to go outside of D&D to do that. If I want to play a domain of dread, a space-themed world, or whatever world I want to play, D&D is going to have something I can easily and quickly jump into and adapt.

Bill: I think the other thing I would say about 5.5 is that they are very happy with it and very committed to it. It has been received overall really well. It is not like Sixth Edition is around the corner. From what we can tell, this is D&D for the time being. I love it. I think they did a great job of advancing the rules in certain ways but keeping the language intact.

Jason: Most players agree it is an improvement. I know there was feedback from designers like Mike Mearls, who was surprised they didn’t make it more simplified, as it has actually become more complicated. Have you felt that with some of the work you are doing? We have this fairly crunchy game, but we are also seeing streamlined rules like OSR games. What is your take on that? Are they two sides of the same coin, or two separate streams?

Bill: A lot of times people say a game is rules-light and streamlined. We see a lot of these games where it is not very crunchy, and sometimes it can end up being harder on the DM than having a system where the rules are defined. You know how to adjudicate that. Now it is up to me as the DM to come up with something brilliant in the spur of the moment because you failed a roll. Every single time something goes wrong, I have to come up with something brilliant. It is a balancing act. You are saying it is easier, but as a DM, is it easier, or is it putting more burden on me to story-tell? With a more defined rule system, I know how that goes because it is written down here. It is very clear to everybody that it doesn’t work that way. When you take that away, you better have a DM that is very fair and equal around the table, or things can go sour pretty quickly if you don’t have that experienced GM who knows how to keep everything fair.

D&D As a Hobby and Career

Jason: You are doing this as a business. Do you find you still maintain that passion for role-playing games and D&D, even though it is a business?

Bill: For me, my passion for it has increased over time for a couple of reasons. One, we never get to play because we are so busy with the company. When we do play, it is so fun and exciting to finally be able to say, “For the next three hours, we are not going to talk about how the mechanics work or how we are going to sell this thing or make this product in China. We can just sit down and play.” I have come to really value those things. Also, with a deeper level of understanding of how these games work and what I treasure about them, it has increased my respect for these games in general. I am genuinely excited to be able to be a little part of this whole thing.

Jason: Do either of you have an all-time favorite D&D character that you still think about?

Jon: One of my very first characters was a paladin named Landor. Throughout my life, I have had avatars and usernames where that character has just populated over and over for decades. It is now part of how I approach things. That character will always have a special place in my heart because of how it has been intertwined with how I interface with certain things. But it also feels like my most recent character is maybe my favorite because I am always feeling like the way I play is growing, along with my commitment to the game and how I develop characters. The character I am playing right now in my Dragonlance campaign, I am really digging.

Bill: The company name Beadle & Grimm’s: Beadle was a character that Matt [Lillard] played in a campaign that Jon ran, one of the first campaigns we all ran together. Grimm was the barbarian that I ran in that campaign. It is pretty hard for me to answer anything other than Grimm.

What’s Next for Beadle & Grimm’s

Jason: Pre-orders are available for the Platinum Edition of Arcana Unearthed: Deadfall and it’s shipping in November. Anything else you want to plug coming down the pipeline?

Bill: Our boxed edition for Ravenloft: The Horrors Within is available. It is in stock and on sale. It is a fantastic setting if you like Strahd and the domains of dread. It is very cool. There is a lot of stuff in there that wasn’t in the last Ravenloft book they came out with, including Cthulhu, which is fantastic to see entering the D&D lexicon. It is a great boxed edition if you want to see what we do, and it is shipping right now.

Jon: Hopefully by this time next month, our Skullduggery Kickstarter will have shipped out, and we will start making it available on our store for people who missed the Kickstarter.

Bill: If anybody is interested in Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill!, those books of adventures, check out the website, join our mailing list, and you will get invited to our next Kickstarter.

Below is also the video version of the interview.

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