Vol 17: Rezendes & Remnants

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.