January Letter to CMON
One of our goals with Samaria Lives is to provide regular feedback and updates on the state of Dark Age to CMON. Below is the first of these updates summarizing what’s happened in the last couple months, as well as notable upcoming events.
With the new year, I just wanted to check in on what’s going on with Dark Age. The last anyone had heard was a message from the CMON Facebook page back in November that there’d be an announcement soon, but that announcement hasn’t surfaced yet. I hope we’ll get a chance to hear some news (preferably good news!) in the not-too-distant future, though I understand that we’ll just have to wait until CMON is ready to announce things. Even so, having a time frame more specific than just “soon” would probably do a lot to quell people’s impatience.
As I’m sure you saw, nearly all the Dark Age line sold out from CMON’s web store pretty quickly on Black Friday (likely owing partly to the deep discounts), but even other stores with smaller discounts, like Gadzooks Games, sold out of almost all their stock. While some of this is no doubt due to uncertainty whether Dark Age is discontinued, I think it also shows that people still have a lot of interest in the game. A common refrain I hear from other players is that the only reason they don’t buy more Dark Age stuff is that the things they’re looking to buy are out of stock.
In the meantime, the Dark Age community has come together to make sure the game gets the support it needs. Below is a brief summary of what’s been happening.
Ricky Estrada is organizing the Dark Age “Bloodlust” tournament for the Extra Life charity at AdeptiCon, and it’s already proven popular enough that he’s organizing a second tournament so that more people can play.
In late November, I founded “Samaria Lives”, a fan/volunteer group focused on organizing people who want to collaborate on various Dark Age projects. We’ve already published updated tournament rules for 2019 (with some changes to help support Ricky’s Bloodlust tournament) as well as a booklet of new and updated scenarios for the game.
In addition, we’ve begun a list of recommended proxy models to help players (both existing ones and brand new players) find suitable models to play the game with. This has been somewhat of a bittersweet project for me, since one of the things that attracted me to Dark Age was the excellent miniatures. However, for people to keep playing the game and adding to their forces, they need models, and proxies are better than nothing. Of course, I look forward to the day where this list is no longer necessary.
Still, there’s only so much we can do on our own in the community to help Dark Age. Even just restocking existing miniatures would be a huge boon for us, and would make it much easier for us to help grow the Dark Age playerbase. If a full restock is out of the question for now, something as small as letting people “preorder” miniatures that would then get recast on demand would still be wonderful. There are a lot of excellent miniatures that I (and others!) would love to buy if we could.
Finally, I’d just like to say that if there’s anything we can do as part of Samaria Lives to help out with Dark Age, such as event support, promotion, proofreading/playtesting, or anything else, don’t hesitate to let us know. We’d all be happy to team up with CMON and help keep the best tabletop game out there going strong!