This Week in RPGs: Daggerheart’s Hope & Fear Arrives

The tabletop world’s biggest story this week is a book, not a Kickstarter or a convention reveal. Darrington Press put Daggerheart’s first full expansion into players’ hands on 25 August, and it’s already reshaping what character options look like at the table. Alongside it, Critical Role kept Campaign 4 moving, one Kickstarter closes today, and Wizards of the Coast is testing a genuinely strange new subclass path in the Underdark, picking up right where last week’s roundup left off.

At a Glance

Story	Category	Key Detail	Why It Matters
Daggerheart: Hope & Fear releases	New Release	25 August, $39.99, 200-page hardcover	Major expansion adds four new classes and eight subclasses
Critical Role Campaign 4, Episode 32	Actual Play	Aired 27 August	Convergence arc pushes forward with the Tale Gate retrospective alongside it
D&D Unearthed Arcana: Underdark Options	Playtest	Published 20 August, free	New subclasses and a mind flayer transformation feat chain
Deadlands: Mysterious Maze Kickstarter	Crowdfunding	Savage Worlds 30th anniversary boxed set, ends 4 September	A flagship anniversary release worth backing before it closes
Star Wars Zero Company launches	Digital	27 August, PC/PS5/Xbox	Turn-based tactics with genuine squad-RPG appeal
Dimension 20: Toylight announced	Media	New season premieres 16 September	Toy Story-meets-fantasy actual play from Dropout

Headline News

Daggerheart: Hope & Fear Unveiled

Darrington Press released Daggerheart: Hope & Fear on 25 August through Critical Role’s own shop and select retailers, ahead of a wider retail release on 22 September. The 200-page hardcover costs $39.99 and adds four new classes with eight subclasses between them, along with new ancestry and community cards.

The headline addition is a set of “ceremorphosis-style” transformation options that let characters gradually become something else entirely, echoing similar design work happening over at Wizards of the Coast this week. A deluxe edition with a GM screen, fear tokens and dice is exclusive to the Critical Role shop and Darrington Press Guild, while digital editions are live now on Demiplane and DriveThruRPG. If you want a head start on running it, our own Hope and Fear as GM Tools piece breaks down how to keep the new tension mechanics fair rather than arbitrary at the table.

Key Details:

• Released: 25 August 2026 (wide retail 22 September)
• Price: $39.99 standard hardcover
• Available: Critical Role shop, Darrington Press Guild, Demiplane, DriveThruRPG

New This Week

Tabletop Releases

Daggerheart: Hope & Fear – Darrington Press | $39.99. Four new classes, eight subclasses and transformation-style character options. Available now through the Critical Role shop, wide retail 22 September.

D&D Unearthed Arcana: Underdark Options – Wizards of the Coast | Free playtest. Three new subclasses (Path of Unlight Barbarian, Imaskarcanist Wizard, House Agent Rogue) plus a “Path of Ceremorphosis” feat chain letting a character slowly transform into a mind flayer. Available free on D&D Beyond, and fan reaction so far has been mixed on whether the transformation goes far enough to feel earned. For more on where D&D’s been heading this year, see our Gen Con 2026 D&D announcements breakdown.

Digital Releases

Star Wars Zero Company – PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S | Standard pricing. A turn-based tactics game set during the Clone Wars, built by the XCOM-adjacent team at Bit Reactor. Squad building and character progression give it real RPG appeal even outside the tactical combat, and reviews out this week have been strongly positive.

Actual Play Corner

Critical Role

Campaign 4 kept moving this week, with a “Previously On” recap covering episodes 26 through 31 on Monday, followed by Episode 32 airing live on Thursday 27 August. The same week included a live Tale Gate panel with Whitney Moore, Marisha Ray, Sam Riegel and Travis Willingham discussing the campaign so far, plus a Get Your Sheet Together breakdown of Daggerheart’s rest and recovery mechanics that doubles as this week’s GM tip below.

Other Highlights

Dropout’s Dimension 20 confirmed its next season, Toylight, a Toy Story-meets-fantasy story using the D&D 2024 rules with physical battle sets, premiering 16 September. It’s a little ahead of this week’s news cycle, but with the cast including Emily Axford, Ally Beardsley and Siobhan Thompson, it’s worth getting excited about now.

Crowdfunding Watch

Featured Campaign: Deadlands: Mysterious Maze

Pinnacle Entertainment is marking 30 years of Deadlands with a Savage Worlds boxed set built around the Mysterious Maze storyline, and the campaign closes 4 September. It’s a strong pledge-tier lineup for anyone who’s played Deadlands before or wants a genuinely complete horror-western boxed experience straight out of the box.

Quick Hits

• Stat Block Studios – A DND Studio, funding an actual-play production studio, closes today, 28 August, with a popular £25 tier.
• Midnight Press: Ultimate Detective Noir, a newspaper-format noir TTRPG, also closes today at $59 and up for the PDF and print bundle.
• HackMaster 25th Anniversary Edition from Kenzer & Co runs through 10 September, marking a quarter-century for the system.

Community Spotlight

A discussion making the rounds on EN World this week questions whether big-budget TTRPG Kickstarters have quietly become merchandise storefronts rather than book-funding campaigns, pointing to dice sets marked up several times over their standard retail price as stretch-goal bait. It’s a fair question worth sitting with next time a shiny add-on tier catches your eye.

Separately, a wave of Greek mythology-themed campaigns has hit crowdfunding platforms at once, from Herculean Quests to Odyssey: The Returns from Troy, suggesting the “Odyssey” well is far from dry for indie designers right now.

Media & Entertainment

Dimension 20’s Toylight season (see above) leads the entertainment beat this week. On the lighter side, AMC released a Dungeons & Dragons: Mists of Ravenloft popcorn bucket shaped like a d20, proof that tabletop crossover merchandise has officially gone mainstream.

GM Toolkit: This Week’s Tip

The Tip: Give downtime a menu, not a reset button.

Why It Works: In this week’s Get Your Sheet Together episode, Liam O’Brien walked through how Daggerheart splits rest into short and long options, each built from named activities rather than a flat “heal to full.” That structure makes downtime feel like an actual scene at the table instead of a pause button.

How to Use It: Whatever system you run, write out three or four specific rest activities, tending wounds, sharing a story around the fire, sharpening gear, and tie each to a small, distinct mechanical benefit rather than lumping everything into one generic long rest. Our Daggerheart GM guide covers the core principles this kind of tip builds on, if you want the fuller picture.

Example: A player choosing to “share a story” might recover a point of stress or inspiration instead of hit points, while another tending a companion’s wounds recovers a resource specific to that bond. Suddenly your players are making a real choice about how their characters spend downtime, not just clicking through a menu.

Bonus: Let players invent their own rest activity occasionally, as long as they can explain the fictional action behind the mechanical benefit they want.

Coming Next Week

PAX West opens in Seattle on 4 September with a live Daggerheart show from Acquisitions Incorporated among its tabletop programming, and the Deadlands: Mysterious Maze campaign closes that same week. Daggerheart: Hope & Fear also hits wide retail on 22 September, so expect a fuller wave of reviews and actual-play reactions to build over the coming weeks.

This Week’s Question

With Daggerheart’s new transformation options and D&D’s mind flayer feat chain both landing in the same week, would you actually let your character trade humanity for power at the table? Share your answer in the comments.