I have just bought Grim dawn for a friend and I to pay. We are trying to play together from across the USA (3000 mi distance apart). Needless to say a LAN is not available. Are we able to play together. If so, how. Are we missing something?

You could use something like Hamachi (https://www.vpn.net/) to create a Virtual VPN connection so that you and your friend are in the same LAN and can open and play a LAN game.

Yep, you'll have to cheat the DRM with a virtual LAN if the normal multiplayer via Galaxy is not an option.

My personal favorite VPN is IronSocket. Can this kind of thing work with any VPN?

I'm not convinced all VPNs work. You'd have to try it.

They need to forward whatever protocol it is that GD uses to discover other hosts on LAN. That is not TCP/IP. And as far as I know, some simpler VPNs are really only concerned with your TCP/IP connections and maybe DNS, maybe UDP if you're lucky.

I think, I posted the wrong link to Hamachi ... http://help.logmein.com/articles/en_US/Downloads/LogMeIn-Hamachi-Windows-sfdwn0105

regular multiplayer via galaxy should just work fine or?

This is what I was thinking. Unless you have some horrible hard on against Galaxy, using Galaxy will let you guys play Grim Dawn MP together.

I'd rather use an optional client that's through the same company I buy my games from, than open ports and use programs that have security flaws people can abuse. That's just me though.

unless he only got one version for the two of them...

Only looking at the gog.com website, I‘d rather use an other software than any software made by gog, because quality control ist not a word GOG knows what it means.

Galaxy is actually a pretty smooth experience, from what I've seen and used, but you're certainly entitled to your opinion.

ya using galaxy here since the earliest betas - didn't have any isses at all and multiplayer worked well in all games i tried it