Penny Arcade’s Jerry Holkins and Elyssa Grant Preview New ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Acquisition Incorporated Book

Wizards of the Coast and Penny Arcade are releasing an Acquisitions Incorporated book later this year, which will provide rules about how to add franchises of the “treasure retrieval company” popularized in a series of podcasts and live-play events into home Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. The new D&D book is unique in that Penny Arcade is the first company to officially partner with Wizards of the Coast to produce an official D&D book – Penny Arcade managed the design of the new book, while Wizards of the Coast is handling distribution and production. While lots of companies have made rulebooks compatible with D&D (or have even designed D&D books for Wizards of the Coast), this is the first time that a book will use both D&D intellectual properties and branding along with branding and properties owned by another company in an “official” D&D product.

To get some insight about what the new Acquisitions Incorporated book contains, we spoke with Jerry Holkins and Elyssa Grant via telephone earlier this week. Holkins is the writer of the Penny Arcade comics strip and plays Omin Dran, the CEO of Acquisitions Inc. in both the podcast and the spinoff webseries Acquisitions Incorporated: The C-Team. Grant is a project manager and producer for Penny Arcade and was the project manager for the Acquisitions Incorporated book.

What’s In Acquisition Incorporated?

ComicBook.com: What is the official “in canon” description of the Acquisitions Incorporated company, for anyone unfamiliar with the show? What makes it so unique in terms of adventuring groups?

Jerry Holkins: Acquisitions Incorporated is a dark office comedy, essentially. It happens to take place in a medieval themed fantastic realm, but at the end of the day, all the dynamics they hold, there’s this sort of strange, distant unaccountable hierarchy that you’re beholden to in one way or another, and you have to do a lot with a little. And these are all themes that map pretty well on to role playing campaigns.

What will be in the Acquisitions Incorporated book?

Holkins: Oh my gosh, it’s so much stuff. The beginning contains all the information that you would need to understand the world that we have set up. Of course, this takes place in the Forgotten Realms, so the personages of Acquisitions Incorporated often overlap and have interacted with some of the real power players of that setting in general. And so the first portion of the book helps you anchor your campaign with information about Acquisitions Incorporated and how it fits into the already much loved and well established Forgotten Realms setting.

And beyond that, there is an official level one to level six campaign that lets you take all of those things and put them all to use. So all the special rules for corporate rules, all the special rules for how your franchise develops, all those rules come to play in a campaign that’s written to be very inviting, no matter which side of the screen you’re interacting with.

Elyssa Grant: We also have some player options, so some additional spells. We’re introducing a new playable race that was originally created in our Acquisitions Incorporated: The C Team show. And then on top of that we also have a section about how exactly to plug in this material into your already existing campaign, or the classes that already exist within the D&D world.

Acq Inc. Occupations

So this book has several occupations that are franchise positions the players can assume. What went into the development of those and how do those work?

Holkins: So our corporate roles, more or less completes the office metaphor. But the office that you’d be working in, or the work environment in Acquisitions Incorporated has a mystical flare, so that even if you’re engaged in petty bureaucracy, there is still a sort of underlying mysticism to it. And so that’s probably best reflected in the documenter role, which is essentially an entity that has mastered the ability to file paperwork and even manipulate events through the use of proper filing. But there are eight such roles that all have a different sort of spin or twist. Some of them you’d recognize more clearly like a cartographer, but it means something specific of course in our context.

And there’s even a secretarian. Secretarians excel by essentially being notorious gossips, and a secretarian speaks essentially to other parties and the head office. And so they can talk and figure out what’s the story behind the story simply by piecing it together through these third-hand accounts. So each of these roles, and like I said, there’s eight of them, each of these roles improves along with your franchise and offers special abilities. It’s like a super background essentially, because it confers some novel abilities as opposed to some some skill and background options.

You mentioned that you can level up your franchise as you progress through your campaign. What are some ways that a player or a party can do that?

Holkins: The main way that you’re going to progress your franchise in an Acquisitions Incorporated campaign is by taking and completing jobs. But generally speaking, those corporate roles I discussed, those increase in power as well. But it’s possible through exemplary performance to earn more advanced abilities even before the franchise has authorized them. So if you are really embodying that role, it’s possible for the headquarters to authorize more advanced parts of that track ahead of schedule.

Wizards of the Coast Partnership

So could you talk a little bit about how this partnership between you and Wizards of the Coast came up? Because this is the first officially partnered third party book…ever.

Holkins: Being in the midst of this, it’s pretty wild. The shelf that I’m looking at right now includes books even from when I was playing the game in high school. So it’s hard to imagine that my name is anywhere near anything that would be considered an official chapter in that story and history. But at the end of the day, we had done many streams and many live shows with Wizards of the Coast, and it seemed like the opportunity for us to boil down a full decade of that content and put it in front of players.

Players have been asking for this for years, but we were never in a position to really get something like that done end to end. In addition to making the live shows and podcasts and a YouTube series, there’s just a lot of different tasks, up to including running the past shows, and our schedule stays pretty busy. But we finally, we brought on Elyssa Grant, who had actually spent time working over at Wizards on books that you have heard of. She has an expertise that we thought was really the missing piece basically to try to wrangle everything. We actually brought her in specifically to run a Kickstarter and produce that book. But just as a courtesy, we were talking to Wizards about another topic and we were like, “Well this is actually something that we’re considering doing. We’re staffing up for it. I think that we’ll be able to really do this well.” And eventually they came back to us and saying, “Well, have you considered doing this as an official book?”

And the answer of course is, “No, I wasn’t aware that was one of the things that happened.” But learning that there was a possibility at all, that definitely gave us pause, and that seemed like an interesting route to go. In terms of the content, that’s a custom team that we built. And the funny thing is that the custom team that Elyssa constructed to create this book, there’s a lot of overlap between this book and products that Wizards of the Coast already put out. The pool of people doing work at that level is not vast, and so it was our great pleasure to pull in people like Shawn Merwin and Teos Abadia, and of course our lead editor. But I want to let Elyssa go into that.

Grant: We began with Acquisitions Incorporated being an official Wizards of the Coast podcast with James Wyatt and then it moved over to Chris Perkins. And so we were pretty tightly married with Wizards of the Coast to begin with. We originally thought this book would be in the art and the style of just Penny Arcade and the Acq Inc dark comedy kind of look. When D&D decided to partner with us, we thought, “Well, why not try to split this into both a D&D, an official D&D and Acq. Inc. kind of look.” So we have art that matched the Wizards of the Coast style, we had art that matched the Penny Arcade style, and it would kind of jump back and forth so that we hit both beats.

That’s why we chose so many of the amazing artists and writers and editors that we ended up working with, was just so that we could capture both of those tones. And a lot of that had to do with our writers that Jerry mentioned, Shawn and Teos, and then also our lead managing editor, Scott Fitzgerald Gray, who has basically touched every single D&D book that you can imagine, at least the more recent additions. So we had a pretty vast team.

Accessibility and Organized Play Potential

Is this book is accessible to D&D players that don’t follow the Acquisitions Incorporated podcast?

Holkins: Oh, I think so. And not only because that was one of the core philosophies we went into it with. I mean, think about this, dude. Let me just go over a few of the box sets that I purchased as a young man in terms of their conceptual heft, and tell me if they are not substantially more sophisticated than a dark office comedy. Let’s go into Spelljammer where magic wizards and space spiders fly mystical galleons through the Phlogiston, a flammable medium that exists between crystal spheres. That’s Spelljammer.

Let’s talk about Planescape. A series of box sets and books of course that established that any point can be connected to any other point so long as you have the key. We introduced more than 10 unique factions. Each of these factions constitutes a coherent philosophy about the operation of the multiverse. So that’s Planescape.

Let’s talk about Dark Sun, a world where you don’t even roll stats the same way. Elves, halflings are cannibals, water is scarce, there’s no potions so you cast spells on fruit. Like I mean, compared to those, what we’re trying to get across in Acquisitions Incorporated I think is very, very digestible.

Will the book feature any stack blocks on some of the existing Acquisitions Incorporated characters?

Holkins: Oh yeah. Imagine Omin Dran statted up the same way that you would have a monster statted up for easy incorporation into a campaign. Any major personage from the 10 year run of Acquisitions Incorporated, and that includes The C Team, any of those personages you will find statted up. Even characters that are NPCs in our own campaigns are statted up in the book for your use in an easy monster style implementation so that managing them at the table is a breeze.

Will there be any sort of plan for like organized play to kind of track the progress of different franchises, or give all the AI franchises a common goal to work towards?

You’re describing the fantasy scenario! I know exactly who I would talk to about those things. Right now for us, the main focus is just dropping this book that we’ve been at for over a year. But the universe you describe is one I would very much like to live in, because when it comes to organized play, which has that sort of trackable and MMO type vibe, but with the intimacy of a tabletop type setting, if I can drop into Omin’s voice for a moment, I think that Acquisitions Incorporated is uniquely situated in the market place to execute on something like that. I think that it’s such a perfect match that I’d love to manifest it, but like I say right now, I think Elyssa and I are just happy to push this thing off the dock and see if it’s something that connects with people.

What is one surprise that’s in this book?

Holkins: I think that players in general will find the culmination of the campaign at the very end has some very delightful surprises. Gosh, I’m trying to think. It’s like I know the whole book. I’m trying to think. What do you think would be a good, like something that’s novel and jumps out? 

Grant: I think some of the monsters that you will see and that you’ll allow the players to have access to is going to be very exciting. We don’t only have fun monsters and fun NPCs, but you know we definitely might have some vehicles in there.

Holkins: If you are digging around in this book and you’ve come across some of the legitimately incredible art, in addition to the other people that we mentioned, there’s also a very, very deep roster of incredible talented artists, including Aviv Or, who defined a lot of who we call our canonical NPCs. We have these sort of corporate roles that have these different abilities, but we felt like it would be really helpful for players if they had an iconic personage to go along with them and  explain the philosophy a little bit. And so we trusted Aviv Or to come up with these characters.

Acquisitions Incorporated comes out in game stores on June 18th.