r/daggerbrew

Thanks to everyone who joined us for our AMA! We loved your questions and hope you had as much fun as we did.

As we enter the final few days of funding, we wanted to highlight some announcements about Hope Dies Last, namely that the second adventure zine has unlocked and we have announced our final stretch goal!

We'll be making two adventure zines, one for each of the campaign frames which are most voted-on by our backers. And we're also only a few thousand dollars away from unlock the third. That would mean we create pre-written adventures for each campaign frame!

But if we push even further and hit $60k, we'll work with Carlos Cisco, Daggerheart alum and creator of Pistolheart, to create a Hope Dies Last Subclass Zine. Every class, including those in Hope & Fear (that's 13, for those counting), will get a new subclass that draws from the themes and settings in Hope Dies Last.

We'll pull from all three campaign frames to identify those features and abilities that speak to defiance in the face of overwhelming odds, while also leaning into magitech, cyberpunk, and sci-fi flavor for the subclasses. Carlos will be the lead designer, but the entire development team will have a hand in creating a zine full of cool player options and incredible iconic character art.

You can check out our recent update to learn more about this and our other stretch goals, along with how you can help support the project.

Thank you again for all your enthusiasm! We're proud of what we've accomplished and can't wait to start building these frames, adventures, and rules.

This is a heist and espionage-focused frame. Complexity 1 with two thematic mechanics.

I started to build a 3-shot campaign for friends and this grew out of it. I wanted to come up with an environment that would keep generating intrigues without needing a single mastermind secretly controlling everything.

The Circle Unwritten is built around the Umbral Circle, a distributed conspiracy that moves through four invisible and overlapping hands: the Dagger, Ledger, Flask, and Quill. The campaign starts in Saltgloom, a port city fragmented between merchant houses, criminal brokers, and old families. All competing for powers.

The frame includes:

• A 8-page campaign frame with player and GM principles, Saltgloom, power brokers, useful contacts
• Two campaign mechanics:
  • The Walls Do Talk, a downtime mechanic where surveillance can expose the party, or let them intercept useful information
  • Oh, I Planned For That, allowing characters to flashback, letting players reveal preparations they made before the trouble started
• Dead on Arrival: an inciting incident, a simple three-stage operation structure, and Session Zero prompts

It’s free/PWYW on itch.io and Heart of Daggers.

Illustrated with historical book artwork and original graphic elements, with full art credits and source information included. Shoutout to Old Book Illustrations for being an amazing art resource.

Hope y'all like it!

P.S. If y'all actually play this, be nice to Flick! 🐸 (if he's nice at your table anyway...) One of our players got so mama-bear over him, she'll probably hunt you down if you're mean to Flick.

Daggerheart’s blockbuster release produced a rapid spike of interest in designing material for use with the game and drew the attention of a variety of creators looking to find a niche for themselves. The two of us found ourselves in a privileged position of having intimate knowledge of Daggerheart due to having worked as Additional Designers on the core rulebook and were able to quickly establish ourselves within the 3rd party Daggerheart-compatible design space. We’ve each shared our perspectives and experiences with the game and its design style, but wanted to find a more direct way to help creators that were approaching Daggerheart with eagerness and attention but could use more support to get started.

Earlier this year, Azu (of Bard & Raven) pitched a community event on Heart of Daggers, which had already established itself as the premiere retailer focused on 3rd party Daggerheart-compatible material. This idea would become Fear Fest, celebrating horror and dark fantasy creations across Heart of Daggers. Finding ourselves with fairly full production calendars already with our existing projects, we still wanted to contribute to the event, and, after some discussion with Azu and Matt (of Heart of Daggers), decided to launch a mentorship program with the intent of supporting emerging creators in the Daggerheart-compatible space.

We hosted a contest with defined prompts, asking participants to create an adversary based on one of three prompts, all with a horror-tinged theme in keeping with Fear Fest. The two of us each selected four submissions, choosing stat blocks that showed promise with regards to evocative design, ones that tied together fiction and mechanics. These designers showed thoughtful engagement with Daggerheart’s design grammar and its ethos of collaborative storytelling.

These eight winners received invitations to pitch, develop, and refine an adversary plus a paired environment for publication by the two of us in a book that would receive professional editorial, art, and production. From this process of feedback and playtesting were birthed 8 terrifying encounters that can fill anywhere from an hour, to a session, and even one that can provide a slow drip of subtle horror across many. All of them brought to life in vivid, full color by Per Janke and with some light guidance included from each designer to help easily incorporate these nightmares into your campaigns. We present the following Evil Encounters:

• Waxing Horrific (Hewtallow Grove/Flickerflame Spirit) by Alexander Kingma
• Buyer Beware (Ravenous Auction House/Boogey Man) by Fable Lane
• Memories in D Minor (House of Memories/Haunted Pipe Organ) by Mia McDavid
• Don’t Dwell (Dwell/Sostra Roia) by Jean Hare
• All’s Faire… (Fortune’s Faire/Mesmerizing Medium) by Dion Haubro
• Midnight Snacks (Feast of Fears/Nightmare Moth) by Gavin Greenough
• Lend Me Your Ear (Earworms Domain/Earworm) by Mizan Alfrarishi Yudanto
• Masks Off 2: Total Party Kill (Midnight Massacre/Mask of Massacre) by Tatiana Kopteva

On behalf of these designers, we hope you enjoy their creations and that you will keep an eye on them as they come into their own as designers working in the Daggerheart 3rd party space.

Carlos Cisco and Mike Underwood, Producers/Editors

Emerging Evils will release on Heart of Daggers on October 17th.

From the books by Stephen King.