Vol 17: Rezendes & Remnants
Spotlight of the Year, a clash for the crown, and magical dragon eggs. Then, a Tier 3 combat, a terrifying Tennessean transformation, and a caravan adventure along a fractured coast. Plus: tips for editing your RPGs, a half-dozen character sheet options, and epic free artwork.
SPOTLIGHT OF THE YEAR
This isn’t a year-end review, but I’m nonetheless shining Spotlight of the Year on Darrington Senior Producer Elise Rezendes (back), a deft and capable producer who guided a tiny team to launch the biggest TTRPG of the year. It’s clear she’s smart and tough, but her interview with Todd Kenreck also reveals her sincerity, humanity, and empathy for the community she serves. May we all Ishmail our white whales.
NEWS & RELEASES
Co-Conspirators
Kenreck also released a couple of videos from his sit down with Spencer Stark and Rowan Hall which go deep on how the duo approach game design (no bloat!), Frames (the CRB Frames were about breadth; the upcoming Hope & Fear are about doing deep into specific genres), and navigating what the system wants from them and the community.
Adventuring Enneagrams, Troisième Fois
Haven’t had enough of Hall’s “What your Class Says About You” heart-to-hearts? Here’s Part III.
Fresh CMS
FreshCutGrass, beloved by the community but rather quiet in its operations, announced a new CMS/editor that lets you create and share encounters, adventures, guides, and other similar homebrew. I’m not sure if the encroachment of Heart of Daggers set this in motion, but the community support for the FCG news shows just how beloved the app has become.
Catchy Capybara
Foundryborne added a Battle Points display and an Effects HUD to their latest release, but by nicknaming v1.3 “Tactical Capybara,” all I can hear is Jennifer English and Aliona Baranova crooning the adulterated BG3 theme song “Down by The Capybara.”
Rapid Release
On a roll, Duality Codex is back again with more updates to its characters sheet platform, first with CRB Ancestries and Communities, followed by custom ones a week later. Addendum: and a loot generator.
Tools Duels
Also staging an uprising is DH Tools, who was back on the sub to announce a Campaign Manager that lets GMs and players chat, roll dice, share assets, and the like. The “integrated platform” category is heating up and it's likely one will pull ahead in 2026, much like FreshCutGrass did in its category this year.
KICKSTARTERS
Dragon Dowsers
Bristol-based publisher Hatchlings Games announced an upcoming Kickstarter for Dragon Dowsers, an adaptation of their solo-journaling card game into a full-fledged adventure. The 200+ page campaign guide explores a solarpunk world where rebels fight overlords to protect magic dragon eggs.
In their words: "The fiction of Dragon Dowsers is heavily inspired by Hayao Miyazaki's epic manga, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (and the Studio Ghibli animation from 1984 of the same name). Nausicaä explores environmental catastrophes, dangerous machines, warring factions, and the communities risking everything to ensure nature and humankind might coexist in peace."
The New Unknown
December brought news of The New Unknown, a third-party sci-fi expansion book aiming to Kickstart in Q1. Led by game designer (and sub mod) Tenawa and a crew of writers, designers, and consultants (Chris Davidson among them), TNU aims to build a system within a system, expanding Daggerheart far into the reaches of the galaxy with a slew of classes, subclasses, domains, ancestries, and communities; several dozen adversaries; 20 environments; four campaign frames; and rules for spaceship building and space combat. We can finally see attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion and C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
DISCUSSIONS
Rest & Reset
Answering the question “how do you handle Hope/Fear over multiple rests?”, Mbalara offers some practical advice:
If I’m montaging/hand-waving travel, I consider it a soft reset. Stuff happened, good and bad, and nobody wants to keep track of it, so we’re also not tracking rests, rest actions, HP, Stress, etc. So after the travel, the PCs have all of their stuff reset, and I have the Fear I did at the start of the game.
When Indiana Jones is punching nazis, he gets hurt and exhausted. When the map appears and the red line goes across it, he arrives fresh and rested.
Dice Data
This examination of Daggerheart’s dice math and follow-on recommendations is worth your time. Chief among the suggestions: set a low difficulty for high-roll encounters but the opposite for low-roll; don’t be afraid of high difficulties in general; use Fear to increase difficulty as the encounter unfolds; and ensure you and your players declare before rolling.
Armor Class
Shields are secondary weapons, not armor. Remembering that is key to deciding what happens when one breaks during combat and a player reaches for another.
Beating the Unbeatable
Players with “unbeatable” Evasion or Damage Thresholds are a challenge for an unprepared GM. But the sub delivered on how to prepare.
Tuning Fork
I liked this advice on using Fear mid-combat:
“Use Fear as your mid-encounter tuning tool. Too difficult? Use less Fear. Too easy? Use more Fear. Players are constantly rolling with Fear? Use some Spotlights to highlight threats/create stakes.”
It’s from a longer thread about “first game thoughts” that inclues solid back-and-forth about learning the ropes.
MORE:
- What’s Some of Your Homebrew?
- Do Advantages Stack?
- How To Not Tip Off Your Players
- Mike Underwood on Wages
VIBE CHECK
🎯 GM TIPS
Soft vs Hard Worldbuilding
Are you a hard or soft world builder? Do your campaigns aim for details and verisimilitude, or inferences and dreams? That’s the question at the heart of Hello Future Me’s video and one worth exploring as you settle into your style as a GM.
The tl;dr is soft worldbuilding makes a world for the story, hard worldbuilding makes a story for the world. But the video (and several others in the collection) are worth firing up as you do dishes or wrap presents.
Tier 3 Combat
Rob Jon is back in the arena, this time with a full Tier 3 combat encounter featuring three level-five heroes facing every major demon from the CRB.
Heroes Need Heroic Problems
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single problem. That’s the core advice in this short from Brennan Lee Mulligan. Good characters have a heroic problem to overcome. Not only does that make them interesting, it generates endless plot hooks and story arcs for the table.
🍺 HOMEBREW
Jolene, Eldritch Horror
Blackening the summer skies with burning wings and countless eyes comes Jolene, Eldritch Horror.
Dolly Parton may not have imagined her antagonist as a bog witch, but thanks to Tumblr and Erik Smith, we have a transformational Adversary, appearing first as a buxom woman aiming to steal your man, then mutating into a Tier 3 Solo who rips and rends before drowning you in a swamp and eating your bloated corpse.
Thumbing through Parton’s discography, all those sing-song yarns now seem sinister and to hide atrocities. “I Am Always Waiting," “Bubbling Over," “I’ll Never Forget.”? Even the perky “9 to 5” makes me wonder if she was just singing about chopping trolls in half.
MORE
🌎 CAMPAIGN FRAME
Remnants of the Coast
Many Worlds Tavern has released a free playtest of Remnants of the Coast, their first Daggerheaert campaign Frame.
While the premise of Remnants is simple—a disaster fractured an archipelago and adventurers seek to connect two communities on either ends—it includes a novel character: the Caravan. Caravans help PCs travel overland and come in various sizes with different leaders. They have personalities, experiences, morale and fatigue…all the necessary attributes to turn them into hulky-yet-quirky NPCs that protect and connect the party along the journey.
The playtest module is beautifully illustrated by Rebecca Hu and includes an equally lovely map and VTT tokens drawn by S.E. Davidson.
After you’ve downloaded the free module from their Patreon, consider a visit to the Tavern itself. In a delightful twist, MWT is also a purveyor of coffee and tea, their packaging sporting the same warm watercolour artwork as their adventure supplements.
🎨 CRAFTY
Inspo from Cisco
Carlos Cisco, scribe of Colossus of the Drylands and the upcoming Dark Heart of Andaluria, is a mensch. Here he takes to the sub to offer advice about the highs and lows of self-publishing, then follows it up a few days later with survey results that allow everyone to peek into his process.
DIY Deck
The Design Lab is a new series from Mike Underwood that explores eccentric ideas that could make it to your table. In this edition, he conjures forth a Daggerheart Deckbuilder.
Naming Names
Timothy Hickson goes deep on place names: how countries, cities, and locations get their namesakes and how to apply it in your worldbuilding.
MORE
- Ten Tangible Tips For Editing Your RPG Manuscript
- Ten More Tangible Tips for Editing your RPG Manuscript
- How to Design Signals in Your Campaign Book
- I Was Running Reddit Ads All Wrong
🛠️ TOOLS & RESOURCES
EKurzweil is back with two more panoramic illustrations, free for non-commercial use. This time, an arid landscape ideal for Colossus of the Drylands, and a moodier one suited for Age of Umbra . (Click through for hi-res versions.)
Sheets, anyone?
- Prefer cards for character sheets? Imaginary Movie has you covered.
- Want character sheets in Google sheets? Here are a couple.
- Gus and a friend created print-to-play sheets for A5 paper.
- Matara designed Encounter sheets for Bosses, Crowds, and Rivals.
- Heart of Daggers is close to launching a Character Creator.
INSPO
Belgian illustrator Arne Billen's colourful and eccentric characters look like The Muppets wandered into The Little Shop of Horrors. Trained as a physiotherapist, Billen left behind his Masters degree to pursue art—and pursue it he did. Over the course of 24 months, Billen sketched night and day to produce some 2,000 illustrations in what must have been a confirmation of calling. He now teaches at a Flemish college—where hopefully some of his absurdist humour is influencing a generation of artists.
THEATRE KIDS
Improv-adjacent
“From the players’ side of the screen, the super-prepped session and the totally improvised session often feel equally good.”
That’s Syd Razavi reflecting on his full-prep vs improv sessions and coming to terms with how much more enjoyable improv can be—and how painful it is for those without theatre-kid genes.
In his post, How to Actually Improvise at the Table (Without Having a Panic Attack), Syd offers practical, detailed advice on how to ease into improv and make it work for your personality.
He ends his lengthy post with a generous reminder to GMs:
“If you’re improv-shy, here’s my gentle take-away message:
Next session, pick one thing to loosen your grip on. Maybe you prep a situation instead of a plot. Maybe you decide not to script any dialogue. Maybe you try using one simple clock. See what happens. Take notes. Bring something back next time.
We can learn this together. I’m still very much in the “scribbling frantically between scenes and pretending I meant it” stage, but the games are better for it.”
STORYTELLING
Longtime readers of The Dispatch know of my love for Scriptnotes, the decade-long podcast by John August and Craig Mazin. Its tagline “a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters” is accurate, but only half the time.
Strip away screenwriting specifics and what remains are tools that serve any table: building NPCs with interior lives, understanding what to do during an impromptu scene, recognizing characters are defined not by themselves, but how they relate to others...
It’s all there in the podcast, but it’s also now available as a book. Tightly organized, it’s a distillation of ten years of insights and a resource you can dip into between sessions and dog-ear over the course of a campaign.
If Daggerheart’s core rulebook teaches you how to play the game, Scriptnotes teaches you how to think about stories that matter to the people playing it.
ETC
Why I Keep Returning to Middle-Earth
