Melbourne-based tabletop games publisher Ghostfire Gaming was established in 2019 during a difficult time for the world. After years working on homebrew Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, a group of friends embarked on a journey to create a business around custom adventures, initially developing the Grim Hollow campaign setting, which proved to be a significant success.
In each year since Ghostfire’s launch, the world of tabletop gaming, production and development has changed dramatically. First came the global Covid pandemic lockdowns, which created manufacturing bottlenecks and delayed production worldwide. Then came the now-illegal Trump tariffs, which threatened to sink publishers with skyrocketing import costs.
Now, global manufacturing and shipping is set to be impacted again by the war in the Middle East, blockages in the Strait of Hormuz and the rising cost of petrol.
Ghostfire Gaming has weathered many storms in its early years, and it’s for this reason that it remains so confident in its future, and the opportunities that lie ahead for the tabletop games industry.
Ghostfire Gaming interview – quick links
Ongoing tabletop production challenges
‘I will say the company was kind of fortunate in a way, because it was right around Covid when the company was founded,’ Ghostfire Gaming’s Lead Developer, Mark McIntyre, tells ScreenHub.
‘By the time [we] were ready to ship out the Grim Hollow campaign guide, Covid was in effect and a lot of the shipping prices really boomed then. Because it was the first time around, there wasn’t as much of a jump [for Ghostfire] because we weren’t used to having prices lower.
‘That period of time, it wasn’t as much of a shock to us as maybe [to] other publishers that were more established. I think that ripple effect kept going for quite a few years because we launched many projects in that era.’
While there have been additional concerns along the way, including the the Trump tariffs which placed added costs on imports from non-US countries, Ghostfire Gaming has proved resilient thanks to its immediate experiences with inflation and high cost production.
‘If it’s going to keep jumping around, [we] just make a plan and go with it,’ McIntyre says.
The company has also had the luck of managing its timing well, with the recently-introduced tariffs being shot down between projects.
Another benefit for the team is being located in Australia, not too far from manufacturing facilities in China. While distance is a challenge in general, particularly when it comes to promoting games internationally and sharing them with a passionate community, being closer to production does reduce stress on the production pipeline and reduces risk overall.
With this experience tackling challenges, and a head-down approach to producing quality tabletop adventures, Ghostfire has been able to continue design and production on an array of new projects, full speed ahead.
Ghostfire Gaming’s next big project: Neopia Quest
The biggest project Ghostfire Gaming is currently working on is the launch of Neopia Quest, a new Neopets-inspired board game designed in collaboration with World of Neopia. Currently in a crowdfunding stage, this board game adapts the classic website into a nostalgic adventure, where players can complete quests as their favourite Neopets characters.
As one of a few major board games developed at Ghostfire, it was a unique challenge for the studio. McIntyre says it was a chance to challenge his design skills in a more collaborative setting, though the process of creating the game – as with other tabletop experiences – was layered.
Neopia Quest was first pitched to World of Neopia as a light card game, tacked onto a pitch about a dedicated TTRPG. (A separate TTRPG project eventually went to Geekify, before it was cancelled.) After meeting, the project morphed again, with Ghostfire adapting the game to be more like Companion Quest, its multiplayer quest-based fantasy board game.
‘We basically said, look, we’ve got a game that should be fairly different from anything else people might be pitching to you,’ McIntyre says. ‘If we utilise some of the core mechanics from that, but we update it with the Neopets theme and integrate the license, how does that sound?’
Per McIntyre, the pitch was well-received, with the unique adventure mechanics of Companion Quest being of particular interest. In Neopia Quest, these mechanics have been adapted to create a system where players can go on an epic quest, with movement driven by the pressure of time and needing to hit objectives.
The original 2003 Neopets board game, Adventures in Neopia, also served as a core inspiration, particularly for Neopia Quest‘s mini-game expansion, which adds in playable mini-games inspired by the original Neopets experience.
Ghostfire aimed to create a well-rounded, well-representative adaptation of Neopets in this adventure, and studied its history and lore closely to do so.
‘We wanted the core game experience to be really nostalgic for fans, [with] all their favourite characters, the items, the locations,’ McIntyre says. ‘It was really hard to do justice to some of them.’
ScreenHub: A new Neopets board game is in development at Melbourne’s Ghostfire Gaming
But as McIntyre tells ScreenHub, Ghostfire Gaming is well-equipped to create this adventure, given that another benefit of working within Australia is access to so many talented, creative people.
Ghostfire is a relatively small team, with around nine people working in its Melbourne office, a further four across Australia, Canada, the UK and the US, and some talented freelancers on board too.
This set-up, with a core team and access to talented developers around the world, means Ghostfire Gaming can focus on multiple unique projects and multiple styles of games, from traditional board games through to tabletop RPGs.
Embarking on further adventures with D&D Beyond
While Neopia Quest is a current focus for Ghostfire Gaming, the company also has multiple other projects on the go, including new Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition adventures, which provide new campaign settings, characters and mechanics, ideal for tabletop players looking for something new.
As McIntyre describes, the design process for any project, whether working with a license or not, is highly involved. The first step is asking questions about the intentionality and viability of the project, including setting out timelines, crowdfunding opportunities, marketing ideas, selling points and other elements.
The supplemental material for D&D Beyond, like the adventures Grim Hollow and Dungeons of Drakkenheim, requires the same approach to good design that informs the creation of traditional board games, which is why the studio has been excited to branch out into new avenues.
There still must be a hook to capture players’ interest, and a logical flow that allows them to immerse themselves in a new world. Lacking tools like meeples, dice or a physical board, tabletop adventures must achieve this via words and images, painting a picture of a deep, immersive world for them to lose themselves in.
Ghostfire Gaming’s Creative Content Director, Ben Byrne, explains: ‘We’ll come up with an idea for the type of project that we want to do, whether … that’s more like a setting guide for D&D 5th Edition – where it’s a broad toy box of new classes, new species, new spells, things you can put on your character – or … an adventure module, which is something more like a story that the Dungeon Master follows along with.’
Byrne tells ScreenHub there are ‘a lot of moving parts, and a lot of stuff has to happen at the same time, which is very challenging, but it’s a fun process. Usually you get to a manuscript stage, from the initial writing stage, playtesting, making sure it’s fun, and making sure it’s interesting.’
In the months ahead, Ghostfire Gaming will focus on multiple facets of its business, guiding new board games and tabletop adventures into production, all sharing a commitment to strong creative and storytelling as a tool for escapism and fantasy.
As well as Neopia Quest, the studio is also working on a second printing of Grim Hollow: Aberration, its popular tower defence board game, and the release of adventure book, Lairs of Etharis.
Byrne teases that there is also work happening on a ‘couple of different things’ which are proving ‘creatively exciting’ for the team, although formal announcements will have to wait.
It’s clear that even against a backdrop of economic downturn and challenges in production, Ghostfire Gaming is looking ahead to busy future, with plenty of new projects on the horizon – and the team looks well-positioned to take its next steps, and to overcome the current uncertainty around manufacturing and shipping to serve an audience hungry for new and more adventurous tabletop adventures.
