Vol 5: Rings & Roleplay
A GenCon player proposal, Demiplane drops player-base stats, and zines make a comeback. We dig into HP, how Fear drives tension, and the filter that keeps your story from becoming white noise. PLUS: a Witherwild one-shot, and big updates for character tools and Foundry.
SPOTLIGHT
While you were fumbling a 9-with-Fear at GenCon last week, Emma and her beau cast Life Ward and rolled Success with Hope. Congratulations to the betrothed!
UPDATES
Fireballers
OGs Jeremy Crawford and Christopher Perkins are on Beacon this Tue, Aug 12, @7pmPST for a Fireside chat. Pre-show questions on the Beacon Discord server.
Young Blood
Demiplane’s founder, Peter Romenesko, told Todd Kenreck during last week’s GenCon that more than 500,000 Daggerheart character sheets have been created on Nexus—and dropped a new tidbit: active players skew heavily 18–24 years old. A bit unsurprising, given that Gen Z grew up watching Critical Role, but also a notable contrast to the Boomer nostalgia behind Draw Steel and the OSR’s retro appeal.
Smells Like Zine Spirit
Speaking of retro, zines are entering the chat as Daggerzine drops Edition 1 and Whetstone moves into its community edit phase ahead of publication. Just add distressed photocopies, illegible type, and a little Nirvana to complete the ’90s kitsch.
DriveThruRPMs
DriveThruRPG now lists 30 Daggerheart titles—up roughly 500% from just three weeks ago. Death at Helfast Spire by YouTuber Bob World Builder is currently #3 overall, trailing only the official CRBs. In other words: it’s the top-ranked indie title.
Foundry Forged
The Foundryborne team released an impressive v1.0 of Daggerheart for Foundry VTT last night. Features include the Hope/Fear dice system, an inline SRD compendium, custom character sheets, countdowns, Fear trac… err, why are you still reading this? Get the package! Your players are waiting.
DISCUSSIONS
Brain Damage
Like much of Daggerheart, the HP system Spenser Starke and team landed on abstracts math to emphasize narrative weight: in this case, to make you feel vulnerable in combat. Where 5e gives you a big block to chip away, Daggerheart doles out a small number of HP, creating the sense that each hit pushes you closer to the edge. And while you might only mark 2 HP after a strike, you’re doing it under a bold, all-caps MAJOR DAMAGE heading, a visual cue to you and the table that the stakes just went up.
As Rob Donoghue points out, these severity thresholds do something else too: they pull number-crunchers out of min/max mode and into the fiction. Because the thresholds are fixed—not calculated—there’s no formula to reverse-engineer, no temptation to optimize mid-fight.
As he puts it: “If it were calculated, then it would be knowable. If you have the kind of brain that processes things as formulas, there would be some temptation to re-generate the numbers every time you think about them. This doesn’t affect everyone, but it definitely speaks to a brain I’m familiar with.”
