This Week in RPGs: Dark Sun’s Creators Return With Dragon Kings (4 September 2026)

The tabletop world got a genuine surprise this week: the original Dark Sun creative team is bringing Dragon Kings back for 5th Edition, the latest in a summer of big announcements following Gen Con’s wave of D&D reveals in August. It’s a big week beyond that too, with Daggerheart’s first expansion heading to wide retail, several notable Kickstarters closing fast, and a first look at Wizards of the Coast’s new Ravenloft video game.

Grab a coffee. There’s a lot to get through, plus a GM tip pulled straight from this week’s biggest release.

Story	Category	Key Detail	Why It Matters
Dragon Kings 5E Revival	Tabletop / Creator News	Original Dark Sun team reunites; BackerKit crowdfund opens 22 Sept	Major creator reunion for a beloved 90s setting
Daggerheart: Hope & Fear	Tabletop	Wide retail release 22 Sept; $196 book adds 4 classes and a Dread Domain	First major expansion for Daggerheart
Crows: Fortune or Death (MCDM)	Crowdfunding	BackerKit, ends 15 Sept, $199.99 popular pledge	High-profile campaign from Matt Colville’s studio
Deadlands & Cypher: Advanced!	Crowdfunding	Both close today, 4 Sept	Final-hours urgency for two established lines
D&D: Warlock Reveal	Digital RPG	Invoke Studios, Ravenloft setting, targeting 2027	First gameplay look at WotC’s new action-RPG
MCG AI-Video Backlash	Community	Promo pulled after fan backlash over AI-generated footage	Tests a studio’s own anti-AI branding

Dark Sun’s Original Team Reunites for Dragon Kings

Timothy Brown, co-creator of the classic Dark Sun setting, is relaunching his post-apocalyptic world Dragon Kings for 5th Edition, with conversion notes for 2nd Edition players too. He’s bringing back Troy Denning, artist Brom, and fellow TSR veterans Bill Slavicsek and Rich Baker for the project, confirmed this week.

Crowdfunding launches on BackerKit on 22 September. For anyone who grew up on Athas’s psionic, sun-scorched brutality, this is as close to an official reunion as Dark Sun fans have had in years.

Key details: 5E core with 2E conversion notes, full original creative team attached, BackerKit campaign opens 22 September.

New This Week

Tabletop

Daggerheart: Hope & Fear reaches wide retail on 22 September, following a limited release on 25 August that we covered last week. The $196 hardback adds four new classes (Witch, Warlock, Assassin, Brawler), a new Dread Domain, six ancestries and communities, and over 130 adversaries with mechanical “evolutions” that let monsters transform mid-encounter.

If you’re already running Daggerheart, this is the expansion that finally gives GMs monsters with real surprises built in, and it’s the source material for this week’s GM tip below.

Digital

D&D: Warlock, from WotC-owned Invoke Studios, got its first gameplay reveal this week: an open-world action-adventure set in Ravenloft’s Domain of Dread, Darkon, starring a protagonist whose patron is Tasha herself. It’s aiming for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S in 2027, so there’s a long wait ahead, but the setting and cast, with Maggie Robertson voicing the patron, suggest WotC is taking the license seriously this time.

Actual Play Corner

Critical Role’s Campaign 4 hit Episode 33 on Thursday, alongside a same-night Beacon Cooldown show for anyone who wants the immediate debrief. If you’re behind on Campaign 4, our recap of its return announcement is a good place to catch up on where things left off.

The standout extra this week is Get Your Sheet Together’s Daggerheart Transformations explainer, which walks through exactly how the new adversary-evolution mechanic works at the table, timed neatly with Hope & Fear’s release. Beacon also had a Weird Kids x Third Person crossover and a UNEND Season 3 roundtable, and Viva La Dirt League continued their Daggerheart: Azerim series.

Crowdfunding Watch

Crows: Fortune or Death, from Matt Colville’s MCDM Productions, is the campaign to watch this week. It’s on BackerKit, runs through 15 September, and its popular pledge tier sits at $199.99, a reflection of how much trust MCDM has built with backers since Flee, Mortals!.

Two campaigns close today, 4 September: Deadlands: Mysterious Maze from Pinnacle Entertainment, a 180-page setting expansion with a boxed riverboat-poker adventure, and Monte Cook Games’ Cypher: Advanced!, currently pledging at $139 for its top tier. If either has been sitting in your watchlist, this is the last call.

Also worth a look: HackMaster 25th Anniversary Edition from Kenzer & Co, closing 10 September.

Community Spotlight

Monte Cook Games pulled a promotional video this week after fans spotted AI-generated footage inside it, including a visibly garbled character sheet. MCG says an outside production vendor used the footage without approval and that it fails to meet the studio’s own stated anti-AI stance, and a replacement video has since gone up.

It’s a pointed reminder that a studio’s values are only as strong as its vendor oversight, especially one running an active crowdfunding campaign the same week.

In smaller news, MadCon in Fort Wayne, Indiana announced it’s moving to the larger Grand Wayne Convention Center for its second year, running 23 to 25 October, after a strong debut with around 800 turnstile visits.

GM Toolkit: This Week’s Tip

Build monsters that can change mid-fight, not just take damage.

Daggerheart’s Hope & Fear expansion introduces adversary evolutions: creatures that shift behaviour or gain new abilities partway through a fight, triggered by specific conditions rather than a simple health threshold. It works because it defeats the players who’ve already looked up the stat block and planned around it, in the same spirit as the tension-management ideas we’ve covered in Hope and Fear as GM tools and Daggerheart’s own GM agenda and principles.

To use this in any system, pick one recurring enemy type in your campaign and give it a single trigger condition, such as losing half its allies, taking a specific damage type, or a spellcaster running out of a resource. When that trigger fires, the creature gains one new move or loses one weakness, nothing more.

For example, a bandit captain who’s lost half their crew might switch from sword-and-shield to a desperate, reckless two-handed stance, trading defence for bigger damage. The change should be small enough to run without new prep, but noticeable enough that players talk about it afterwards.

Coming Next Week

HackMaster’s crowdfund closes 10 September, Crows: Fortune or Death closes 15 September, and both Dragon Kings’ BackerKit and Daggerheart: Hope & Fear’s wide retail release land on 22 September. Expect our full breakdown of Hope & Fear once copies are actually in hands.

One For the Comments

Which of this week’s Kickstarters has you reaching for your wallet: Crows, Deadlands, or something else entirely? Tell us below.