Dispatch

Vol 20: Slashers & Shadows

Panic attack, melee math, and necrotic adventures. Then, deep dives with the devs, ten house rules for your table, and the final hours of the final girls. Plus: some golden nuggets, Incan intricacies, and rules for hexcrawls and traversals. Finally: learning the medieval mindset.

SPOTLIGHT

We continue to be enchanted by the subversive, counterintuitive ideas and the gonzo, joyfully anarchic aesthetic of Jack Panic/DNGN CLUB. His collection of (often free) campaigns and mechanics are a celebration of how far you can push Daggerheart, from a down-and-out Baba Yaga to a 70s roadside slasher grind. How lucky we are to spin in his manic pixie dream whirl. À suivre.

NEWS & RELEASES

GM²

Variety, the 120-year old Hollywood tabloid that documented the most influential industry in the world, saw fit to host a conversation between two people famous for being GMs solely because they’re GMs. Wild. And overdue.

Dream Team Stream

Starke & Hall were back on the channel for their first dev stream of the year, covering topics from combat resource management and temporary effects to running investigations and collaborative world building. The stream broke after an hour, so here’s Part I and Part II. Bonus: @Starocotes summarized the important bits in German.

Dirty Laundry

Viva La Dirt League’s Rob Hartley is making the rounds to discuss Azerim, the Kiwi comedy troupe’s Daggerheart series. The GM noted the chaotic nature of the cast and their refusal to remember rules has made their actual play more instructive than most since he has to repeat everything several times to get the lads on book.

Ox Bows AP

Speaking of comedy APs, UK-based Oxventure announced they’ll launch a new, long-term Daggerheart campaign after they wrap the final season of Wyrdwood. (You may recall they ran a DH one-shot last year.) With Azerim in New Zealand, Drakkenheim in Canada, and Johnny and the crew in the Isles, Daggerheart’s dominion over the Commonwealth grows further still.

Final Girls

Olympic Medalist Laurie Hernandez joins Gina Susanna and Gnome Anne for the sensational one-shot “How’s My Driving?” (pictured up top), a Daggerheart hack of DNGN CLUB’s roadside horror game and billed as “a bonding trip to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers quickly devolves into a Thelma & Louise slasher nightmare.”

Oh, hallo!

Our friends in Germany have translated the Quickstart Adventure, character sheets, and play guide as they await the official localization of the CRB.

HoD Heads Up

"Pretty much a VTT but not quite for legal reasons” platform Heart of Daggers dropped another impressive list of feature updates. Additionally, they’ve also launched Artist Guild, a free portfolio for fantasy illustrators looking to connect with the Daggerheart community.

Look What the Cat Dragged In

Toe Beans, the adorkable magical cat cafe Kickstarter we profiled in the last edition, was funded in 40 minutes, hit their first stretch goal within an hour and two more within a day, and earned the coveted “Projects We Love” designation by the platform. Cats, people. Don’t say Tumblr didn’t teach us anything worthwhile. (PS: Oh, and pretty pink dice!)

DISCUSSIONS

Conditional Logic

An “I played Daggerheart for the first time and…” list of loves/loaths kicked off a chonky thread with suggested remedies for unbalanced Adversaries/encounters, and how to think about Conditions.

Melee Math

On a separate post, @Torneco shared their “+2/-2 Rule for Adversaries” to help tweak encounter balance and add story depth. Some examples:

“Some monsters are weak to some effects. Maybe that ogre is really dumb, or that wizard is frail. So, in some cases, the monsters have "-2 against mind attacks", or "-2 against physical attacks". Same thing when a adversary is really good against something. A villain has "+2 against deception and lying" or "+2 against fire attacks.”

Play Your Cards Right

Two similar threads debated whether a GM should release Domain cards to PCs as in-game rewards rather than during the prescribed level-ups. Many yes/no and how/whats, but the sagest advice was “offer Wild Cards instead”—specific, limited use powers.

VIBE CHECK

Soren, a Drakona Seraph as illustrated by the incomparable David "Mouse Guard" Petersen. Follow the link to see the whole party.

*"Long live Calythra,* *Wise Sorcerer of Fanewick**. Pursuer of higher truths and a relentless fighter for justice. May your legacy continue to inspire heroic tales across the continent."*

🎯 GM TIPS

Heritage and Adversary Explainers

One of the benefits of C4’s West Marchian play style is that Marisha, freed from on-camera commitments in Aramán, can instead appear on-camera for DP's Get Your Sheet Together series. She brings us two explainers this time: Heritage, and Adversaries. These are beginner to intermediate-level advice, and useful for players as much as GMs.

Bonus: For more advanced GMs, Monster Mike Underwood is here to help you design two-phase Adversaries.

Wisdom of the Crowd

Rob Jon goes on camera in a new format to unpack helpful house rules that have bubbled up through the community. Lovely to meet the crafty storyteller who, as always, offers articulate and concise advice you can use immediately.

How to GM a LotR Battle

For new readers, a top tip from an older edition: Can Peter Jackson teach you to be a better Daggerheart GM? Derik Malenda thinks so. The Knights of Last Call streamer uses Jackson’s Lord of the Rings—specifically the Amon Hen fight, where Aragorn defends Frodo at the Seat of Seeing against the Orc horde—to illustrate GM moves that, while mechanically correct, also serve the story and heighten the player characters’ drama.

I expected to watch only a couple of minutes of this stream but found myself nodding, taking notes, and genuinely enjoying his improvised tutorial. Malenda uses the scene to pinpoint the mix of rules, timing, and theatrics that can sharpen a GM’s instincts and, ultimately, enrich the table. Highly recommended for GMs at any experience level.

🍺 HOMEBREW

A Fistful of Gold Coins

I’ll admit that A Fistful of Gold Coins is just a fancy 2x2 look-up table that could have just as easily been shared in Google Docs or an Excel block. But we’re not here only for the data, right? We play these games to feel something. To engage in the magic of make-believe. To surrender ourselves to aesthetic pleasure such that a scary-ass knight with a big sword and kit-bashed typography turns some clever suggestions about what to do with gold into an EXPERIENCE.

This is the way.

(Certainly the Jack Panic way, who at this point is spitballing a new entry into the Daggerheart canon every other week. Fistful of Gold Coins joins Make Camp which joins The Wandering Tavern which…yeah. Manic output from Mr. Panic. And worth every second of your time.)

🌎 CAMPAIGN FRAME

Era of Shadows

A healer. Come to treat the survivors of a tragic blight that has brought ruin on the land. He is embraced. His tinctures, salves, and care restore the Men of the Watch who, short in numbers and losing faith, must protect the villagers of Ashwind from deepening shadows and hungry spirits.

But the healer is a dark spirit. His remedies are maladies that rot the good men from the inside out. They fall, and turn undead, and the necromancer grows in power and hunger, eager to consume the remaining survivors.

Alas, fair adventurer, you join the unfortunate as you arrive in Ashland, on a fool’s journey seeking a rumoured Oracle who can restore the land and cast out evil.

So sets the stage for Blind Faith, the first of four adventures in Chris Davidson’s Era of Shadows, an Age of Umbra-inspired mini-campaign that asks your players to make difficult decisions about life, death, and morality in a land blanketed in shadow, far from the protection of gods.

Davidson, one of the authors of Incredible Creatures, RightKnight's Guide to Making Custom Adversaries, and an Additional Writer for the Daggerheart Core Rule Book, may toil in shadows—but his schemes will bring delight to any table. (Well, dread. But delightful dread.)

🎨 CRAFTY

Incan Intrigue

Khipus, the Incan record and writing system made from long strands of intricately knotted fibres, seem like a magical TTRPG prop: a faction ledger, quest log, or arcane accounting tool made of cord and knot rather than ink and parchment.

Khipus helped Incans keep track of everything from inventories and censuses to historical narratives, using a system that assigned meaning to the type and position of knot, the spaces between knots, cord length, fibre color, and other variables. For a trained reader, interpreting a Khipu would have felt less like reading text and more like decoding a puzzle of symbols and patterns. Source

🛠️ TOOLS & RESOURCES

At Inkarnate, Mati created this handy design guide and NPC generator.

The Roundup:

Over at Patchwork Paladin, rules for running a Daggerheart hexcrawl or traversal.
On the sub, @pagnabros created random Fear moves for generic Adversaries.
MAB Music has yet another soundtrack for Five Banners Burning, this time for travel.
While this should be in the ETC or CRAFTY sections, @paradiso’s hand-drawn, super-dense mega-dungeon sketchbook feels like a resource. Certainly an aspirational one.
Drew Bassett thinks giants get short-shrift in bestiaries and gives examples of how they can be more intriguing and exciting.
Forget that Chernobyl showrunner Craig Mazin and HBO are adapting Baldur’s Gate for tv. What we really want are chill demonic beats for a long rest.
Wait. Maybe we want Losing My Religion, medieval style.

INSPO

Parisian artist Nico Delort’s epic scratchboard illustrations sit at an intersection of folklore, cosmic fantasy, and woodcut tradition—ominous and reverent rather than violent or flashy. Partly this is their composition and scale, but it’s chiaroscuro that sells the mythic grandeur and stops you in your tracks. Sometimes I see work and do the Liz Lemon “I want to go to there.” But Delort’s work feels like it’s inside you, dark thoughts and grand ambitions just waiting to stir.

STORYTELLING

Medieval Mindset

A good chunk of Daggerheart plays out in quasi-medieval settings that mimic the castles, market towns, and landscapes of the United Kingdom. So why not spend some time there and learn about the rituals and patterns of daily life?

Tudor Monastery Farm is a beautifully produced six-part BBC historical series (re-packaged for the Chronicle YouTube channel) in which historians live and work on a functioning monastic estate, reconstructing daily life using period tools, crops, and routines. It focuses less on politics or war and more on food, labor, religion, and the seasonal rhythms that governed ordinary medieval existence.

For Daggerheart tables, those details translate directly into texture and story hooks. They help GMs animate the settlements that make up the world in-between cities and dungeons, and give players a sense of what their characters (or NPCs) eat, work at, and depend on between adventures. I filled my notebook with hundreds of details that have already made my world richer and more tangible.