This Week in RPGs: Horror Season Hits Full Stride, Foundry V14 Arrives, and LitRPG Gets a Strong May

The RPG calendar is packed right now, and this week the horror wave that’s been building for a month finally crested. WotC’s Ravenloft preorders are landing on doorsteps, Pathfinder’s Hellfire Crisis is keeping Paizo’s name in the conversation, and Dimension 20 continues one of the more interesting actual play experiments the hobby has seen in years. If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed trying to keep up — same.

Here’s everything that mattered in the hobby this week, from the tabletop to the virtual tabletop, with a practical GM tip you can take straight to your next session.

“`

Headline News: WotC’s Horror Season Is Real and It’s Here

Ravenloft: The Horrors Within is the centrepiece of WotC’s current “Season of Horror” rollout, and preorder content is already moving through D&D Beyond. At $59.99 it’s firmly in the premium tier, but the Ravenloft setting has a devoted following and horror-focused D&D campaigns have become a reliable niche — one that’s probably bigger than most GMs realise. Whether you’re running a full gothic horror arc or just want to lift some atmosphere for a standalone session, this kind of sourcebook tends to punch above its weight for GMs who raid settings for ingredients rather than running them wholesale.

If you want the broader picture of how WotC is positioning itself right now — particularly their move into official actual play with the Dungeon Masters series — last week’s roundup covers that story in depth. The horror angle feels like the other half of the same strategy: dominate the mainstream conversation in multiple directions simultaneously.

New This Week

Tabletop Releases

Ravenloft: The Horrors Within — Wizards of the Coast | $59.99 The flagship D&D product of the week, and WotC’s horror season continues to gather momentum. Available via D&D Beyond and physical preorder.

Pathfinder 2E: Hellfire Crisis — Paizo | current release Released in April and still generating significant table chatter. If you haven’t looked at Paizo’s Lost Omens line recently, this sourcebook — with its faction politics, regional detail, and ready-made scenario seeds — is a good argument for why Pathfinder 2E remains a serious D&D alternative for groups who want more mechanical texture. Campaign builders will find a lot to work with here.

Daggerheart Class Packs — Darrington Press | arrived April 21 These are at tables now, and they’re a genuinely interesting model for anyone thinking about how Daggerheart approaches character creation — modular, accessible, and designed to reduce the paralysis of too many options at session zero. More on why that matters in the GM tip below.

Digital and VTT

Foundry VTT V14 is live, but if you run production games through The Forge, the recommendation is to hold off on migrating for now. Not all modules have caught up, and V14 is still settling. Worth bookmarking if you’re curious, but this isn’t a urgent-upgrade situation for active campaigns. The essential digital tools for GMs post has some broader context on how to think about VTT updates without disrupting your table.

D&D Beyond continues incremental roadmap work, particularly around Maps and dice, alongside the Ravenloft preorder pipeline.

Actual Play Corner

Critical Role

Campaign 4 Episode 25 aired on May 7, keeping the show on its usual weekly rhythm. The current arc has been picking up steam over the past month — if you fell off somewhere in the middle stretch, this is a reasonable point to check back in. The show continues to anchor the actual play ecosystem in a way that no other series quite matches for sheer community scale.

Dimension 20: City Council of Darkness

Dimension 20’s Vampire: The Masquerade crossover continues on Dropout, and it remains one of the more thoughtful genre experiments in current actual play. Pairing Dimension 20’s production sensibility with White Wolf’s setting creates something genuinely different — not just D&D-adjacent fantasy with a different coat of paint, but content that takes the horror and social mechanics of Vampire seriously. Worth watching even if you’re not a VtM fan.

The Big Picture: WotC and the Production Arms Race

The most significant actual play development this week isn’t an episode — it’s the continued ripple effect of WotC’s Dungeon Masters launch. Official publisher actual play with companion play-along content represents a meaningful shift in how the entertainment around TTRPGs is structured. Creators who’ve built audiences on authenticity and accessibility are now competing against polished productions backed by the largest player in the hobby. It’s a story worth watching through the rest of 2026.

Crowdfunding Watch

Featured: The Division TTRPG

Ubisoft’s post-collapse tactical shooter IP landed on Kickstarter on April 28, and the momentum has been strong. The Division’s setting — a fractured society trying to hold itself together through squad-based survival — maps naturally onto tabletop play in ways that a lot of video game adaptations don’t. The faction dynamics and gear-driven progression should translate well. If you run games where survival pressure and tactical resource management matter, this is worth a look before the campaign closes.

Quick Hit: Asunda Expansion

The Asunda expansion funded in minutes after launch — which tells you everything you need to know about the strength of that community. Established indie settings with passionate backers can move faster than almost anything in the TTRPG crowdfunding space. No urgency here as it’s already funded, but worth knowing the appetite exists if you haven’t explored Asunda’s fantasy setting.

Community Spotlight

The Daggerheart class pack rollout has sparked useful community discussion about what “good onboarding” actually looks like in TTRPGs. The pack structure — limited, themed options rather than an overwhelming core rulebook — is becoming a reference point in conversations about session zero design and how to get new players invested without front-loading too much mechanical reading. If you’re thinking about how to bring people into the hobby, that conversation thread is worth finding.

Gen Con 2026 product news is also starting to surface early, with the Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG and Dungeon Crawler Carl Unstoppable both confirmed for convention debuts. The Dungeon Crawler Carl series has been one of the breakout LitRPG properties of the last few years, and seeing it make the tabletop leap at one of the hobby’s flagship conventions is a significant moment for the LitRPG-to-TTRPG pipeline.

Media and Books

LitRPG releases for May 2026 are solid. Objects in Motion dropped on May 5, and Welcome to Lightroot Manor is due May 12, with more queued through the rest of the month across progression fantasy and LitRPG. If you’re new to the genre, the essential LitRPG reading list is a good starting point before diving into the May releases.

GM Toolkit: The Modular Options Trick

This week’s design idea comes directly from the Daggerheart class packs, but it’s system-neutral and works at any table.

The tip: When introducing new players or new arcs, give players a small, themed choice set rather than the full mechanical menu.

The reasoning is straightforward. Most systems — even relatively accessible ones — present character creation as a wall of options. New players freeze, experienced players relitigate every past decision, and session zero runs three hours longer than it needed to. The class pack approach solves this by narrowing the frame: here are three or four options that fit this specific campaign’s tone. Pick one. You can go deeper once you’re at the table.

In practice, this looks like curating a short list of classes, backgrounds, or archetypes that fit your current arc before the session zero conversation starts. If you’re running a horror campaign, you probably don’t need to present the full breadth of martial builds. If you’re running political intrigue, you don’t need the wilderness survival options front and centre. The full rulebook stays available, but you’re guiding attention rather than overwhelming it.

The same principle applies to encounter design mid-campaign. When you want players to engage with a new mechanical space — chases, social conflict, horror mechanics — introduce it through a focused scenario before layering in the full system. One scene, one clear objective, one new rule in play. That’s usually enough to make the mechanic feel natural before it matters.

The Ravenloft preorder content this week follows similar logic on the publisher side: horror as a curated frame that shapes how players engage with the setting, rather than presenting everything at once. It’s a design pattern worth borrowing.

Coming Next Week

Gen Con product reveals are accelerating, so expect more announcements from the Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG and likely other Renegade Game Studios releases. Critical Role Campaign 4 continues its current arc. Foundry V14 module compatibility updates will be worth checking if you’ve been holding on migration.

We’re also keeping an eye on whether The Division TTRPG Kickstarter closes strong — final week momentum in crowdfunding can tell you a lot about whether a game will have legs at launch.

What’s Catching Your Attention This Week?

The modular options approach from Daggerheart’s class packs is genuinely changing how some GMs run their session zeros — but what techniques do you use to get new players into a system without overwhelming them? Drop your approach in the comments, and if you’ve tried the curated-options method at your table, we’d love to hear how it went.

If you want the weekly roundup delivered straight to your inbox, the Scriptorium Newsletter has you covered — sign up below and you’ll never miss a week of RPG news.

---

Continue Your Journey

• Your First Daggerheart Session: What to Expect at the Table — practical prep advice for the system everyone’s talking about
• Session Zero Strategies: Setting Your Campaign Up for Success — goes deep on the onboarding session that shapes every campaign that follows
• Pathfinder 2E vs. D&D 5E: Which Should New Players Choose? — useful if Hellfire Crisis has you curious about Paizo’s system
• Essential Digital Tools Every GM Needs — includes VTT guidance for when Foundry updates feel overwhelming
• This Week in RPGs: WotC Enters the Actual Play Arena — last week’s roundup with the full Dungeon Masters launch story