This Week in RPGs: Daggerheart Goes to Drakkenheim, D&D Unveils Its 2026 Roadmap

It’s been a big week to be an RPG fan. Wizards of the Coast finally broke their long silence with a full 2026 release roadmap — complete with Ravenloft, magic, and a mystery season — and the Fantasy Grounds Spring Sale is live right now if you’re looking to bulk up your digital library. And here at Forst Stories, we have some exciting personal news to share too.

We’ve been quietly backing the Dungeons of Drakkenheim: Daggerheart Kickstarter since it launched, and this week our playtest package arrived. The resin minis are currently printing as I write this. We’re aiming to run our first one-shot in the next couple of weeks — and you can expect full coverage here when we do.

Story	Why It Matters
D&D 2026 Roadmap revealed at GAMA	Three themed “Seasons” — Horror, Magic, and Champions
Ravenloft: The Horrors Within	June 16th release, horror subclasses and Darklords return
Arcana Unleashed announced	Two-book magic drop in September, Red Wizards of Thay
Fantasy Grounds Spring Sale	Up to 50% off across major publishers until March 26th
Drakkenheim Daggerheart playtest lands	We’re printing minis and planning our first one-shot

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The Big Story: D&D Has a Plan for 2026

After a noticeably quiet 2025, Wizards of the Coast used GAMA Expo in Louisville, Kentucky to lay out their full release strategy for the year — and they’ve done something genuinely new with it.

D&D Seasons: A Live-Service Approach to Tabletop

Rather than defining its roadmap through individual sourcebook releases, Wizards of the Coast is switching D&D to a seasonal content format, linking together major releases with themed events and products over the course of a few months. It’s a structure familiar to video gamers, applied to tabletop for the first time at this scale.

The specific seasons for 2026 are: Season of Horror (April–June), anchored by Ravenloft: The Horrors Within; Season of Magic (July–September), built around Arcana Unleashed and its companion adventure Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall; and Season of Champions (October–December), whose anchor products haven’t been revealed yet. The community is already speculating — Dark Sun keeps coming up, though WotC hasn’t confirmed anything.

Ravenloft: The Horrors Within (June 16th, $59.99)

The first major book of the year returns to one of D&D’s most beloved settings. Ravenloft: The Horrors Within will include new horror-oriented subclasses, species, and backgrounds, as well as a selection of “Dark Gift” feats, details on the Darklords and their domains, and new enemies and allies.

The book will also include info on horror subgenres like cosmic horror instead of solely focusing on gothic horror. That’s a meaningful expansion from Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft (2021), which is still well worth picking up if you haven’t. Alongside the main book, expect a Tarokka Deck, a DM Screen, and a Map Pack — all priced at $24.99 each and releasing in June.

Arcana Unleashed (September, $49.99)

The Season of Magic brings two books. Arcana Unleashed is described as “the ultimate guide for D&D magic enthusiasts,” including high-magic character creation options and a new system for magic items that allows equipment to grow in power alongside a player — something GMs have house-ruled for years, so it’ll be interesting to see WotC’s official take.

The companion adventure, Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall, focuses on the Red Wizards of Thay and a Wizard War in the Forgotten Realms. If you’ve been waiting for Thay to finally get its spotlight as a main antagonist rather than a side note, this one’s for you.

New This Week

Fantasy Grounds Spring Sale | Multiple publishers | Up to 50% off From March 19–26, the Fantasy Grounds VTT Spring Sale features up to 50% off select titles from many of the top publishers in tabletop gaming. Worth checking if you’ve been eyeing any system rulebooks or adventure modules for your digital table.

Crimson Desert | Pearl Abyss | PC/PS5/Xbox Series X|S | $69.99 Crimson Desert is an open-world action adventure RPG set on the war-torn continent of Pywel, following Kliff, leader of the Greymanes mercenaries, who must fight to save the continent from an impending catastrophe. It’s a big production — worth watching if you enjoy action RPGs with cinematic flair.

Valor of Man | PC | Tactical roguelite cRPG Valor of Man features a high fantasy setting with players building a party of four champions from twelve hero classes, with tabletop-inspired turn-based tactical combat that gives players a limited number of action points each turn. For GMs, the action point economy here is a nice model for thinking about resource management at the table.

Elemental: Reforged | PC/Steam | $18.99 Fantasy 4X strategy RPG hybrid Elemental: Reforged looks to combine the previous three Elemental games with a 3D engine as well as remastered visuals, features, and content. A niche pick, but one for fans of world-building strategy with RPG elements.

Drakkenheim in Daggerheart: A Personal Update

This is the story we’re most excited to tell properly over the coming weeks.

Dungeons of Drakkenheim: Daggerheart represents an ambitious collaboration between Darrington Press, The Dungeon Dudes, and Ghostfire Gaming — a complete redesign of the ENNIE Award-winning adventure, rebuilt from the ground up for Daggerheart’s unique Hope and Fear mechanics, delivering levels 1-10 of eldritch urban horror where corruption becomes both weapon and curse.

The Kickstarter funded in just 13 minutes, which tells you everything about how the community received it. The campaign includes official mechanics for contamination, mutations, and anomalies — and the new Contaminated Domain cards mean that as your characters’ contamination rises, they lose equal levels of Hope. The trade-off — power at the cost of your character’s humanity — is a perfect fit for Daggerheart’s emotional stakes.

We backed the Core Book tier (physical book, poster set, and resin minis), and the playtest package landed in our inbox this week. The minis are currently coming off the printer. We’re targeting our first one-shot session in the next couple of weeks, so watch this space for a proper first-play report. If you want to understand the core system before we do, our Daggerheart review and step-by-step character creation guide are good starting points.

Actual Play Corner

Critical Role continues Campaign 4, and the community is in full speculation mode following last week’s emotional episode. No major announcements this week, but the Critical Role team confirmed that The Legend of Vox Machina Season 4 hits screens in June — a nice pairing with the D&D Season of Horror launch window.

The Dungeon Dudes themselves have been streaming about the Drakkenheim Daggerheart project over on Twitch, which is worth catching if you want behind-the-scenes design chat from the team before the full book drops.

Crowdfunding Watch

Cörk Børd | Just Crunch Games & All Rolled Up | Late Pledge The gritty, Nordic-noir investigative RPG Cörk Børd has been nominated for EN World’s Most Anticipated TTRPG of 2026, and is currently in its Late Pledge window on Kickstarter. If atmospheric investigation games with a dark Scandinavian edge appeal to you, this one is worth a look before the late pledge closes.

The Dee Sanction: Monad Edition | Just Crunch Games | Late Pledge Also nominated for EN World’s Most Anticipated TTRPG of 2026, this Elizabethan supernatural tabletop experience is also in late pledge. Historical horror with period-appropriate mechanics — and a great example of the indie market producing genuinely distinctive work.

GM Toolkit: Using Contamination as a Resource Mechanic

The Drakkenheim Daggerheart news got us thinking about one of the most underused GM tools: giving players meaningful choices between power and cost.

Most systems handle danger as something that happens to characters. Drakkenheim flips this. As contamination rises, characters lose Hope — but the trade-off is access to new card abilities, which you must give the GM Fear to use. The player chooses to take on corruption. The GM gets a resource to make the game harder. Everyone’s stakes go up.

You can adapt this idea to any system. Pick a currency that matters in your game — hit points, spell slots, sanity points — and create an optional in-fiction source of power that costs some of that currency to access. A cursed blade that deals extra damage but reduces max HP. An eldritch tome that grants knowledge but costs Willpower. A forbidden ritual that works, but gives the GM an extra point to spend on complications.

The key is that the choice has to be genuinely tempting. If the power isn’t worth the cost, players will never take it. If it’s too cheap, it won’t feel meaningful. Playtest until the hesitation is real. That’s when it starts generating great stories.

For more on Daggerheart’s Hope and Fear economy — and how it shapes everything from combat to character arcs — check out our first Daggerheart session guide and the Experience Prompts breakdown.

Coming Next Week

• Our first hands-on impressions from the Daggerheart Drakkenheim playtest package
• More coverage of the D&D 2026 roadmap as pre-orders open for Ravenloft: The Horrors Within (April 13th)
• The latest from the weekly RPG news cycle

Over to You

We’re about to run Dungeons of Drakkenheim in Daggerheart for the first time — and we want to know: have you played either version of Drakkenheim, or are you planning to try the Daggerheart edition? Drop your thoughts in the comments below.

Continue Your Journey:

• Daggerheart Review: Hope, Fear, and the Future of Fantasy TTRPGs — our full review of the core system
• Step-by-Step Character Creation in Daggerheart — get your character ready before your first session
• Your First Daggerheart Session: What to Expect at the Table — prep guide for new players and GMs
• How Experience Prompts Shape Your Story in Daggerheart — understanding one of the system’s most distinctive mechanics
• This Week in RPGs: 13 March 2026 — last week’s roundup

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