Dispatch

Vol 29: Riegel & Roll

Spires, squids, and Sallowlands. Then, social anxiety and underrated opinions. There are monster squads and magical decks, a bit of schmaltz, and a whole lot of VTT. Learn how to use action to drive reaction, then test your skills against RJL. Plus: free stuff and pond play.

SPOTLIGHT

There’s nothing quite like this video to remind you of the Critical Role phenomena. Online view counts can tell you reach, but to stand behind Sam Riegel and face a sea of Atlantans during the Maelstrom Kingdom show is to understand connection.

NEWS & RELEASES

Aspire for the Spire

It’s FREE RPG Day! Head over to your FLGS and ask—nay, demand—that they supply you a copy of The Dying Spire, Darrington’s T2 adventure from Colossus of the Drylands and Pistolheart designer Carlos Cisco. No nearby store? Rumours abound a digital copy may drop next week. Bonus: Tips for running TDS.

Squid Game

Can’t wait to watch Matt GM Daggerheart in Age of Umbra: Sallowlands? It’s a vibe shift, but he’s doling out Fear in the delightful and aforementioned Maelstrom Kingdom: Echoes of Exandria. PS: Don’t swim too close to Marisha.

Beauty and the Beasts

Speaking of Sallowlands: CR dropped this sick promotional art earlier in the week. Illustrated by Daniel Jimenez, it reveals two important party character traits. One is how everyone except Laura Bailey is grotesque. The other is the corollary: Laura Bailey is sticking to her strategy of [gesticulates] “some ancestry/race/class—but hot.”

Sorcerous Sundries

A guy named Chris Perkins plays Luck of the Draw and damn if he doesn’t spit a great backstory for the character he met three seconds ago.

Roll Models

Know some women who’d be good GMs but worry they’re not good enough? Point them to Amy Vorpahl’s GM Fest, a collection of three female-fronted APs where Amy hosts a post-game discussion with the GM about how things played at the table. Amy leads the third AP and runs Daggerheart on Alchemy.

Dread Reckoning

The winners of Heart of Dagger’s Fear Fest competition are up. These talented folks now get mentored by Mike Underwood and Carlos Cisco on how to sharpen their knives to draw even deeper cuts. The final results will be published later this year.

VTTTTTT

VTT grab bag: Heart of Daggers added premade characters, ability trackers, and readied character sheets for different languages. HeartForge released encounter tokens, compendium collections, and drag-to-reorder adventure content. Owlbear added chromatic weather effects. Daggerbrain shut down (good riddance). And Alchemy shared their philosophy on making VTTs disappear while also announcing Free VTT Day, where titles like Blades in the Dark, Degenesis, City of Mist, and Call of Cthulhu can be claimed, FOR FREE, FOREVER—but only during the 24-hour window.

DISCUSSIONS

Ctrl+Alt+Del

“Can I just kill the guy?” Yeah, sometimes you can. That’s ThisIsVictor’s reply for a question about managing stealth moves. “Call for an action roll. Success you kill him, failure you don’t.” Bada bing.

Sweaty Socials

True to our generation, everyone’s anxious about social encounters—even in a game. A good thread evolved on how to manage them. Dancovich reminded the OP to start with narrative rather than mechanics, then provided an example. PrestigiousEmu noted there a tools (plural) for socials—and to use them as needed.

A History of Violence

Filamena kicked off a great discussion with “what’s your favourite cluster of baddies for a violent encounter?” Many chimed in, but I liked Monster Mike’s recipe pack:

Leader + 2 Hordes
Leader + Bruiser + Minions
Solo + Horde
Solo + Minions

I also appreciated the back and forth between the two Mikes (Underwood and Robertson) about planning encounters for dramatic and mechanical impact, which effectively boils down to: given DH’s action economy, your Adversary will only have a couple of turns to make an impact. Choose Adversaries with that narrow window in mind, and use supporting Adversaries to either buff or draw focus so the action doesn’t devolve into a quick kill or hit/miss slog.

VIBE CHECK

Meet Bang, the Tidekin Warden of the Elements Druid by Dreizehn Bunny.

How many die can you roll on Heart of Daggers before the animation slows? Sena had to know.

🎯 GM TIPS

Opinions are Underrated

I think it was Jane Austen who wrote “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a GM in possession of a good campaign, must be in want of engaged players.”

Such is the story, such is the truth. But for players to be engaged, notes Sam from Tabletop University, they need opinions. Lots of them.

Drawing on a conversation between BLeeM and Emily Axford, Sam notes that in addition to "finding something to care about," Axford goes out of her way to vocalize opinions about NPCs. “In life, I have SO MANY opinions about EVERYTHING. Why wouldn’t [my] player character have them?”

It’s that observation that led Sam to start his own “opinion tracker” for when he’s a player in a campaign—and it's changed how he engages with the game and everyone around the table.

Watch the video. And maybe share it with your players.

Bonus: Here's the Brennan/Emily convo...

🤔 KNOWLEDGE CHECK

WHEREIN WE ASK the community for pearls of wisdom. This week, PrestigiousEmu on the best advice they've been given as a GM, and the best advice they've given to a player.

GM Advice: The game is not yours (singular) the games is yours (plural). Invite the players to contribute, use the spiral campaign development model to work together to build out the world. It lowers the burden on the GM and it helps to get the players more invested in things.

Player Advice: Play the game in front of you and embrace its theme, mood, genre, and gameplay. Don't play every game like it's some sort of variation on a theme. Approach each game as if you're a new player and leave habits you picked up from other games behind.

🍺 HOMEBREW

Deck of Many Things

The Deck of Many Things is many things: absurd, delightful, stupid, and—most importantly—unpredictable. Until the folks in Burbank add an official version to Daggerheart, here's Trev's homebrew to throw a grenade on your table.

Bonus: Jack Panic Esq. has a little trouble brewing for your players.

🌎 CAMPAIGN FRAME

Tad Paul's Tour de Pond

It's summer! Time to break out the adorkable (and free) T1 one-shot Tad Paul's Tour de Pond.

Here's the pitch: "Every year, the dwellers of Lake Velocipond celebrate their shared love for racing in the form of the “Tour de Pond”—a daring and thrilling race in which participating Crews with self-made Chariots are pulled by aquatic Beasts through an obstacle course."

Designed by the hardworking and community-loving duo Niklas Meyer & Ursina Jenny (Bard & Raven), TPTdP is a light spritzer among dark lagers, ideal for that hazy day when you want to escape the heat but still keep your toes in the water.

🎨 CRAFTY

It's a Little Schmaltzy

Schmaltzy is a blackletter typeface after a couple of drinks: loose, a bit frivolous, rather charming. Or, in the words of the typographer: Schmaltzy is to a blackletter what Cooper Oldstyle is to a Roman: Cooper Blackletter.

At ~$100, it’s not cheap. But that price comes with eight weights and a variable. More importantly, it offers a playful medieval mood that’s distinct in a field flooded with indistinct pap. [Ed: Reading this after Tad Paul's outro there is clearly booze on the mind. Drink responsibly kids!]

Kickstopped Before You Started

You put in the work. Ran the playtests. Kerned the type. Paid the illustrators. Now it's time for Kickstarter. Time to… wait a minute. You have crap graphics. Or, more specifically, you have game illustrations that need to make their way into graphics that artfully telegraph the tone and promise of your game. Enter Ines Możdżyńska, an interdisciplinary Polish designer living the life in Portugal while helping creators crush their funding goals. Maybe reach out?

🛠️ TOOLS & RESOURCES

Skarlso doesn't always remember everything, so he made a few cheat sheets to help him build better encounters. There's an encounter builder, tactics guide, and—cribbed from Sly Flourish—a lazy GM prep overview.

The Roundup:

Nullfish built this animated Fear tracker for his digital GM screen. Go nudge him to release a public version.
Phil Vecchione from Gnome Stew gives tips on how to use Obsidian for campaign management, and shares a list of handy plugins.
PocketBard, the immersive audio app, is no longer just for your pocket.
RPG Trader has a Free RPG Day 2026 Bundle on sale. There's some good stuff on offer.

INSPO

I can see why CR's creative time asked Spanish artist Daniel Jimenez to illustrate Sallowlands: facility with fright. His compositions, line work, facial expressions, colour palette…they harden into tight, thrilling moments of tension and horror that manage to express both scale and intimacy.

STORYTELLING

Re: Action

Corkboards & Curiosities is back with another video, this time to point out the purpose of action isn’t to mimic movies or discuss “how are you doing that?,” but to disrupt the flow of decision making in a game.

Her observation: games are loops of “decision → outcome,” and action serves to accelerate those decisions—forcing player logic to break and chaos to surface.

She adds a few tips to ratchet things up:

Introduce complications round by round, rather than all at once. Each twist forces players to reprioritize.
Strip away safety by removing time and perfect information. Give players incomplete intel and force fast choices.
Help stuck players by narrowing their options (“help your ally or stop the engine fire?”).
Establish a culture of quick turns. Not to punish, but to sync the pace of the story with the speed at the table.

The goal isn’t to fluster your players, but to create a rhythm of “pressure and release” where adrenaline, not analysis, drives the moment. [Ed: Re-upped this from Volume 9 for new members.]