Dispatch

Vol 25: Hope & Heroes

Hope & Fear draw near while an alchemical VTT appears. Duets take the stage—but perilous play takes a spotlight. Then, plunging the dagger into your player’s heart, mapping the perfect encounter, and cultivating the commons. Plus: a new 80-page ocean adventure.

SPOTLIGHT

The abstract, liturgical art of Dominik Mayer and the exquisite compositions of Mat Wilmer grace the deluxe and standard editions of the much anticipated Hope & Fear, revealed this past Tuesday.

NEWS & RELEASES

Hope & Fear Draw Near

Darrington set an August 25 release date for the eagerly awaited expansion book and its many trinkets and baubles. The Triumphant Trio™ give us an unboxing, while the blog fills in the rest. A Daggerheart Nexus discount was also mentioned.

Corporate Raiders

Episode Two—3 Way Synergy—of Acquisitions Incorporated's newly minted Daggerheart series is up on YouTube. Chris Perkins GMs to a rowdy table, including a very horny, 80's-inspired Matt Mercer.

Extracurricular Chaos

Dodoborne is prying a panel from the Dimension 20 dome with the announcement of Polaris University, a Fantasy High-ish mystery series premiering April 21. More to be announced by the comedy troupe on their April 20 livestream, but you can get some giggles today by just saying the show’s initials out loud.

Va Va VTT

Something wicked-sexy this way comes: Daggerheart for Alchemy VTT. While we've known for a while the team is working on the module, this is the first public image of their test build, shared recently in the Discord. Mother, may I?!

Tooltips

Torutu, maker of the popular Daggerheart Obsidian plug-in, has put the finishing touches on DHTools, an attractive resource compendium that sits somewhere between Old Gus’ SRD and the newly minted wiki from Heart of Daggers.

Launch Sequence

The sci-fi expansion book The New Unknown has moved from its taste-testing phase to Kickstarter pre-launch. Group leader Tenawa announced the book officially kicks off April 28th. [Ed: look for an upcoming interview between Pistolheart/Star Trek writer Carlos Cisco and the the trio behind the The New Unknown.]

Stack the Deck

Daggercard, which focuses on easy-to-print homebrew Adversary cards, dropped by the sub to mention the addition of new Environment cards, easier import/export, and advanced search.

Fantasy Freebie

Darrington revealed the cover art to The Dying Spire, a Tier 2 one-shot sequel to The Sablewood Messengers that will be distributed to participating retailers as part of this June’s Free RPG Day. FLGS’ receive limited copies—check the map to see if yours is participating—though it's likely the module will appear on the DP site as a download.

DISCUSSIONS

Story, Not Stats

Playing D&D modules in Daggerheart is (now) a perennial conversation. Is it doable? If so, which ones? Thus began a recent thread where, among the whispers of Waterdeep and Strahd, PrestigiousEmu had a bankable reply:

"The simple thing … is never convert the system. I take the story beats, NPCs, locations (i.e. the important bits) but never convert the system. That way lies madness.”

Scene Partners

Can’t rustle up a whole table but don’t want to play Solo? How about a Duet? Aside from whether your partner will talk to you again after you murder their Rogue, Daggerheart brings some flexibility to the format where D&D struggles. Here’s RavxnGoth:

“The Spotlight system works so much better for Duets. With 5e the DM gets 90% of the turns. With Daggerheart it's a lot more back and forth. It benefits from having more options, combat can turn into chases, you can be more liberal with rewarding creativity and finding cinematic ways to overcome overwhelming odds.”

Perilous Play

Over at the RPG Gazette, Serban has a thoughtful piece on how lethality improves the players’ game experience. Like an Honour Run in BG3, knowing the guardrails are down heightens the stakes and forces everyone to think more deeply about their choices, in and out of combat.

Tabletop Typologies

Keith ‘The Monsters Know What They’re Doing’ Ammann has a thoughtful reply to Matt Colville’s recent walk-and-talk about What kind of dungeon master are you? Watch Matt’s video, read Keith’s post, and go get yourself a donut as you ponder the same question.

VIBE CHECK

*Clever Clover’s eclectic, electric* *GM screen*

*Liz Liu's Infernis**. Once again: Mother, may I?!*

🎯 PLAYER TIPS

Knives Out

Players—give your GMs knives with which they can stab you. That's Daði's advice, riffing on the now canonical Reddit thread, on how players should provide backstory ideas (aka knives) to their GM so they can be packed into the story and pulled out (and then plunged in) when the opportunity arises. The Reddit post gives you a ready list of backstory beats/knives to fashion, but hey—let Daði's baritone do the walking and talking if you're busy doing dishes.

🎯 GM TIPS

Mapping Your Encounters

BLeeM's younger brother is back with another soothing map-making stream that quite literally illustrates the three ingredients of great encounters: social Adversaries, puzzles/quick wittedness, and combat. Ryan's format of map-making-as-explainer is unique in this space, as are his insights and quips.

Combat Planning

Excellent advice on combat encounter planning over on Arrowed is Gaming (the maker of the handy one-screen Adversary search tool). Read the full post, but here are the highlights:

Prefer fewer, harder-hitting Adversaries
At Tier boundaries, use higher Tier Adversaries
Select statblocks carefully, choosing ones that drain resources AND generate Fear
Never spend Fear to add Adversary Experience; spend it to change the battlefield or impose/remove conditions

Make Your Setting Smaller—and then Narrow Your Scope
Adapting Strahd to Daggerheart

🍺 HOMEBREW

The Quantum Ogre

*Puss 'n' Boots and the Ogre /* *Source*

The Quantum Ogre is, as the post from Dreams of the Lich House explains, the Ogre you encounter whether you choose the path to the left or the right. Like Schrödinger's cat, it exists in a quantum state, waiting to thump you no matter your choice.

Thanks to WormLikeChain, we now have a Daggeranian Quantum Ogre, complete with backstory and both Environment and Adversary statblocks. This Tier 2 Solo is a solid piece of work, but I particularly like the Schrodinger’s Splat and Coherent Substitution features.

The GMs who lol over metaphysical constructs know who they are, so I am neither recommending for or against this baddie. It just is.

More free maps and story seeds from Domille, this time Ancient Steps and The Undermarket
A regular reminder that the sub now has The Friday Frame Pitch.

🌎 CAMPAIGN FRAME

Titanic—Day One

Titanic—Day One is the free, ~80 page adventure module just released by Italian game studio Lost in the Woods as part of their Heart of Cthulhu 1912 pre-launch Kickstarter campaign.

The Kickstarter underlines their goal of fully bringing Lovecraftian horror to Daggerheart, with plans for a couple dozen new Classes and sub-classes, ~150 domain powers, and a slew of new mechanics, Adversaries, and Environments.

The free adventure is set aboard the RMS Titanic just prior to her last port of call. A cultist has smuggled aboard a dangerous relic. Your job is to find it before tragedy—and lurking horrors of the sea—strike. Along the way you'll be exposed to some of the system's new mechanics and ideas.

Heart of Cthulhu 1912 is similar in scope to the sci-fi project The New Unknown, and yet—with barely a peep on socials—the team has nearly ~2k KS followers waiting to face the surreal and turn psychotic. (Thankfully, the team have a new Sanity system to help with that.)

Bonus: Want something even deeper and darker than Cthulhu? The folks behind the upcoming Demonheart KS have their own free module kicking about.

🎨 CRAFTY

Caring for the Commons

Maatlock's handy map prepper was featured in our last edition, which led us to dig deeper into the trove of tools they've designed and share freely. Above is Hexcrawl Studio, accompanied by the token tool, dice roller (includes Hope & Fear), and a growing library of finished maps.

We chatted with Maatlock about their work and, when asked about making everything free given the craft and quality of the tools, they spoke about open-source and community building.

"I care a LOT about open standards and Creative Commons. When WoTC tried to do what they did a few years back with the OGL, it activated me! I vowed to use my skills do something cool for the community, and that's taking shape with my website.

I think TTRPGs are about fun with friends, making memories, and have been with us since we were little more than fancy monkeys... and they'll be with us as long as we're here. It's cool to believe that years from now a little bit of what survives might have been created from me—[and there's a] much higher chance of that if I've released some stuff into Creative Commons and other open licenses."

🛠️ TOOLS & RESOURCES

Stoneware's pirate map of the fictional Ameraldi Coast is a stunner, meticulously crafted over a week and featuring some of the best colour work the craft has to offer. It's free on their Patreon, along with 20 variants and a backstory.

The Roundup:

Fillable PDF character sheets for every class via scotch-man.
Those Adversary notepads from the Hope & Fear unboxing video? MasterStyle DIY'd some, as did dawnsonb.
Here's a 3D Wyllin's Gulch model from Colossus of the Drylands for Talespire enthusiasts.
A very fast, very handy procedural name generator from Sam Twidale.
Misha guides you through how to (properly) key a map.
A lovingly designed BG3 costume dye simulator. God I love the Internet.

INSPO

You might, just for a moment, mistake Michigan artist Scott Gustafson's illustrations from those of the Brothers Hildebrandt. The lines, colours, and compositions ring from the same glen, yet where the Hildebrandts became famous for the epic adventures in their Lord of the Rings and Star Wars paintings, Gustafson's focus is often quieter and more reserved—like a hushed bedtime story instead of a thundering campfire yarn.

STORYTELLING

Character Before Cosmos

Worldbuilding is not only an overused term, it's unnecessarily intimidating and far too oblique. Build a world? Fuck that. Can't we just think about why a loser, looking for his sister in a strip joint, shoots a cop in the face?

That's the starting point for screenwriter Tony Gilroy, he of Bourne, Clayton, and Andor fame. Start with character. Not the whole character—just something that registers. An accent. A tic. A moment. Work out from that.

Starting from character rather than plot—rather than the universe that frames the plot—gives you a superpower: as your protagonist comes into view, you can constantly ask "what would they do next?" The answer to that question often gives you the "why," then the how, when, where, etc. Before you know it, your new buddy will be the tour guide of a foreign city (or planet), pointing out the highlights you and your players can't miss.

THEATRE KIDS

Pitch Perfect

Want to get better at voices? You'll do no better than Tawny Platis and her dozens of fun, instructional videos. Here she uses Batman characters to help you identify where specific sounds emanate from your body, and how you can use them to shape distinct characters.