Welcome to the first in a series of articles about the next Iron Kingdoms Adventure Board Game from Privateer Press, Widower’s Wood.

During the weeks leading up to the Kickstarter launch and as the campaign continues, I’ll be giving you a look behind the curtains at how the game was developed. In this installment, I’d like to give you an overview of how things first took shape.

The seed that would grow into Widower’s Wood was planted during the early design work for The Undercity. We were brainstorming story concepts when three ideas took shape as subplots we wanted to explore in the game. The first two—the smuggling of strange alchemical substances and the disappearances around the city—made it into the final game. The third concept was a tribe of gatormen that were being affected by alchemical runoff. It was even partially playtested with some scenarios featuring gatorman villains, but we felt that the gatormen deserved to have a bigger spotlight so we saved the idea for later.

As we wrapped up work on The Undercity, conversations started about what the next product in the Iron Kingdoms Adventure Board Game line would be. One thread of that conversation turned into the Black River Irregulars Heroes expansion, which I will tell you more about in the future. The other thread of that conversation focused on the gatorman-related content that had been pulled from The Undercity. This was all happening around the time of the release of the Iron Kingdoms Unleashed Core Rules. Our ideas about how to use this gatorman content quickly coalesced, drawing inspiration from the way Unleashed and Full Metal Fantasy show two different sides of the setting in the Iron Kingdoms Roleplaying Games. Unanimously, we agreed we could use the gatorman content to make a new core game featuring monstrous heroes and villains.

Next, we had a series of meetings to discuss who the heroes and villains would be, to determine what would be interesting for the setting and what would inspire interesting abilities in the characters themselves. Because I had already created a gatorman grunt and a bokor as villains—and we had already featured a heroic gatorman and bog trog in the Iron Kingdoms Unleashed Adventure Kit—we were convinced the cold-blooded denizens of the swamp should be the bad guys.

After all, if you’re delving into the dark recesses of a forbidding swamp, what’s more terrifying than an alligator? The answer is bipedal, humanoid gatormen wielding terrifying weapons and the fell powers of black magic.

Deciding who the heroes would be took a bit more time, and I’ll explain who they are and the story of their origins in the next installment. Stay tuned to Privateer Insiders, Facebook, and Twitter posts, and widowerswood.com as we get ready to launch our first board game Kickstarter on February 16th, 2016.