It’s the first day of GenCon and Darrington Press has charged in with major announcements that has the Daggerheart community absolutely reeling. Though it was expected for the Critical Role publishing arm to make a few major announcements, the quantity and quality of the announcements were astounding.

Kicking things off at the panel were Senior RPG Producer Elise Rezended, Daggerheart Lead Designer and Senior Game Designer Spenser Starke, and Critical Role co-founder Matt Mercer. The panel eventually ended with many major guests with announcements such as new directors Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford, Collaborators Keith Baker and Jenn Ellis, and a live play of Daggerheart with popular content creators.

Here are some of the announcements that caught my ear.

An Official Setting And Adventure Is In The Works

D&D legends Chris Perkins & Jeremy Crawford, who joined the Darrington Press team over the summer, joined the stage to share that they are working on an official setting for the game of Daggerheart that’ll be “devilishly scary”. Additionally, they are also working on a campaign frame that people can build an adventure around as a community. Perkins likened this to how he heard so many stories on how people kill Strahd in The Curse Of Strahd D&D module (one story involving nipple clamps).

This got me excited. One of my hesitations about running. Daggerheart game as a GM was the lack of a written module to follow. I thrive more on having a story to start with then breaking it, rather than the current design of letting the story unfolded organically during game play. I recognize this is more about my own preference and isn’t a limitation of the game itself, but hearing this has made me feel like Darrington Press is listening to their community in providing what they need to play games rather than having a firm line of how it should be played.

Official Theme Song (& Royalty Free) For Daggerheart

The music composing team Duology will release an official theme song for Daggerheart. Having worked with Spenser Starke on his previous TTRPG, Alice Is Missing, they created a song that the Darrington Press team loved so much that they decided to make it the official song for Daggerheart and have made it royalty free for the community to use.

This is a good faith gesture for Darrington Press to give to the community. Companies can (and are within their rights) to provide this for a fee but having it be royalty free shows that they are wanting to support their community as much as possible. Little gestures like these will go a long way as they’re navigating their way through developing and updating their Community Gaming License (CGL).

Homebrew Kit Now Available

Daggerheart players and GM will now have an official support resource from Darrington Press on creating their own homebrew Daggerheart elements, such as classes, heritage, adversaries, and so on.

At first glance, this is a PDF resource that can be very valuable for people to use. I personally thought the homebrew advice in the Adversary chapter was a bit limited so hopefully this will improve on this immensely.

Honorable Mentions

Here are some other announcements that Darrington Press made that are worth mentioning as well that is insightful and exciting.

• Over 500,000 Daggerheart characters have been created on Demiplane

• Keith Baker and Jenn Ellis will be creating a sourcebook for Daggerheart.
• Darrington Press is expanding business Patrtnerships with VTTs Alchemy & Fantasy Grounds, minis creator Hero Forge in creating new Simiah, Ribbet, and Fungril minis, dice companies Misty Mountain Games, Disple Dice, and Botch to make new dice sets for Daggerheart, Insight Editions for art, and limited series Actual Plays from Dungeons & Daddies and Legends of Avantris.
• Critical Role will be doing a second Daggerheart mini-series, Age of Umbra 2. (This is not Campaign 4)
• New canpaign frame inspired by Tusk Love, a romantasy theme called With Love & Magic.
• New Class Packs will be available to order, which provides all the cards you need to play a specific class. (Not sure how this will work with Heritage, however).