This Week in RPGs: HBO Greenlights Baldur’s Gate 3 and Hexcrawls Take Center Stage (13th February 2026)

It has been a big week for anyone who cares about where RPGs are headed. HBO officially greenlit a Baldur’s Gate 3 TV series, a hexcrawl sandbox is generating serious crowdfunding buzz, and February’s zine surge is in full swing. There is a lot to unpack.

From Critical Role’s Campaign 4 hitting its stride to new digital RPG releases worth stealing ideas from, this week gave the community plenty to talk about. Here is everything that matters, plus a practical GM tip rooted in this week’s hottest crowdfunding campaign.

At a Glance: February 7–13, 2026

Category	Highlight	Need to Know
🔥 Big News	HBO greenlights Baldur’s Gate 3 TV series	Craig Mazin attached; Larian not involved
🎲 Tabletop Crowdfunding	Empire of Bones hexcrawl (Agamemnon Press)	Closes 17 February; £30–£60 pledge tiers
📖 Tabletop Releases	Savage Worlds, 5E supplements, Stranger Things tie-in	Available now on DriveThruRPG; £15–£40
🎮 Digital RPGs	Dragon Quest VII Reimagined, Disciples: Domination, Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma	All out this week; £30–£70 depending on title
📺 Actual Play	Critical Role Campaign 4, Episode 15	Aired 12 February; CR Abridged available for catch-up
📣 Crowdfunding	Mutants & Masterminds 4e, Dark Matter, SEWER SCUM	All currently live
🌐 Community	Convergence (CVRG) open playtesting	Seeking narrative RPG playtesters via /r/rpg
💰 Industry	DriveThruRPG print-on-demand price increases	Hardcovers and color books most affected
🛠️ GM Tip	Three-layer hexcrawl prep method	System-neutral; works for any sandbox campaign
📅 Coming Up	Norse: Oath of Blood (17 February)	PC, PlayStation, Xbox

Headline News

HBO’s Baldur’s Gate 3 Series Changes Everything

The biggest story of the week — and possibly the year — is that HBO has officially greenlit a Baldur’s Gate 3 television series with Craig Mazin attached as a key creative force. If that name sounds familiar, Mazin was the mind behind HBO’s The Last of Us, which became one of the most acclaimed video game adaptations ever made.

What makes this particularly interesting for the tabletop community is that Larian Studios, the developer behind BG3, is not directly involved in the production. That means the show will draw on the world and characters of the game while interpreting them through its own lens — much like how The Last of Us expanded beyond its source material.

For GMs and players alike, this is a significant moment. BG3 already served as a gateway drug that brought thousands of new players to D&D and TTRPGs over the past few years. A prestige HBO production built around Faerun could do that again at an even larger scale. If you have been meaning to write a guide or review connecting BG3 to tabletop play, now is the time — this story is going to drive search traffic for months.

Keep an eye on how Mazin handles the Forgotten Realms setting. His track record suggests he will lean into the emotional and moral complexity of the source material rather than sanitizing it for mainstream audiences.

New This Week

Tabletop Releases

This week’s print news roundup from EN World highlights a solid spread of new physical releases across multiple systems. Savage Worlds, 5E-compatible supplements, and a Stranger Things tie-in all landed simultaneously on major storefronts like DriveThruRPG, with prices running roughly £15–£40 depending on format. It is a good reminder that the RPG shelves — physical and digital — are never really empty.

Empire of Bones Hexcrawl – Agamemnon Press | Crowdfunding until 17 February This jumbo-sized sequel to The Painted Wastelands drops players into the “Unholy City of Zeb,” a ruined sandbox built for exploration-heavy play. Print-plus-PDF pledge bundles are sitting in the £30–£60 range. If your group loves open-world play and you have been hunting for a ready-to-run campaign with genuine scope, this one is worth a look before the campaign closes this coming Monday.

On the indie side, ZineQuest and Zine Month crowdfunding is in full swing this February. Highlights include You’re a Wizard Stuck in a Can of Beans, a solo “maze zine” micro-RPG that is exactly as wonderfully weird as it sounds. These small-format games tend to land in the £5–£15 range and work brilliantly as one-shot inserts or GM inspiration fodder. Low risk, high creativity.

Digital Releases

Dragon Quest VII Reimagined dropped on 5 February across PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, and Switch 2 at standard AAA pricing around £50–£70. The tactical, party-driven combat and deep narrative arc make it a goldmine for GMs thinking about encounter pacing and long-form party dynamics.

Disciples: Domination (PC, 12 February) and Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma (PC, 13 February) both landed this week as well. The Rune Factory entry in particular is interesting for tabletop players — its relationship systems and settlement-building loops translate beautifully into downtime mechanics and NPC relationship tracking for your campaigns.

Norse: Oath of Blood hits PC, PlayStation, and Xbox on 17 February next week and is already generating anticipation for its tactical combat and mythological setting.

Actual Play Corner

Critical Role – Campaign 4, Episode 15

Campaign 4 is still in its early arc, and Episode 15 aired Thursday 12 February at 7 pm Pacific on Twitch and YouTube. If you have been following along, the table-defining moments of this campaign have been genuinely compelling viewing — this crew is finding its rhythm.

Critical Role also continues to push Critical Role Abridged, which condenses full episodes down to 60–90 minutes for catch-up viewing. For anyone who wants to follow Campaign 4 without committing to the full runtime, the abridged series is a genuinely useful format. It also models something worth thinking about as a GM: how to identify and communicate the essential beats of a session.

The Beacon platform’s post-show discussion content is worth your attention if you are a GM. The behind-the-scenes debriefs that drop right after episodes are practical examples of how to discuss narrative choices, pacing decisions, and stakes-setting with your table after a session wraps.

Crowdfunding Watch

Featured Campaign: Empire of Bones

Empire of Bones from Agamemnon Press is the crowdfunding story of the week, and it closes on 17 February — that is Monday. This is a massive hexcrawl sequel built around the Unholy City of Zeb, a ruined sandbox packed with exploration-focused content. Pledge tiers for print-plus-PDF bundles sit in the £30–£60 range.

What makes this stand out from the crowdfunding pile is scale and system flexibility. The hexcrawl structure is designed to be hackable into many fantasy systems, not just one, which means GMs running anything from OSR games to Pathfinder 2e to lighter indie systems can find use in the content. If you are even mildly curious, the deadline is coming fast.

Quick Hits:

Mutants & Masterminds 4th Edition is currently crowdfunding and pulling significant interest — superhero TTRPGs are clearly having a moment in 2026. Dark Matter and SEWER SCUM are also in the mix this week, representing the kind of diverse genre spread that shows the hobby is healthy and weird in the best ways.

Community Spotlight

The 7 February /r/rpg Free Chat thread included a call for playtesters on Convergence (CVRG), a narrative-first TTRPG currently in development that prioritizes story-driven play with lower mechanical overhead. Open playtesting of rules-light systems has been a recurring theme in community spaces this year, and CVRG is a good example of the kind of indie development happening right now. If you enjoy helping shape new games, keep an eye on that thread.

The hexcrawl conversation sparked by Empire of Bones has also been active across several community spaces this week, with GMs trading advice on how to prep sandbox content without burning out. The three-layer prep method in this week’s GM tip (below) comes directly from that discussion.

Media & Entertainment

Books: February’s LitRPG slate continues to be strong — if you are reading in that space, watch for new releases hitting Amazon’s Kindle store this week. For a deeper look at LitRPG as a genre and how it connects to tabletop play, our LitRPG beginner’s guide is worth bookmarking.

Industry: DriveThruRPG announced another round of print-on-demand price increases this week, driven by manufacturing and shipping costs. Hardcovers and premium color books are most affected. If you have been putting off picking up a physical copy of something, the time to buy may be before the next round of increases hits. The trend is also likely to push the market further toward PDFs and shorter, more focused print products going forward.

GM Toolkit: The Three-Layer Hexcrawl Method

This week’s GM tip comes straight out of the Empire of Bones crowdfunding buzz and the sandbox prep conversations happening across community spaces right now. It is system-neutral and works whether you are running a full hexcrawl campaign or just want a more sustainable way to prep a large wilderness region.

The Tip: Structure your sandbox map in three concentric layers — known, rumored, and blank — and only prep detailed content for the innermost layer.

Why It Works: Most GMs feel pressure to have every location fully fleshed out before play begins, which leads to burnout before the campaign even starts. The three-layer approach mirrors how real exploration would feel to your characters and matches how large commercial hexcrawl products structure their information density.

How to Use It: Your “known region” covers the area your players start in and can gather reliable information about — prep this fully with named locations, encounter tables, and fleshed-out NPCs. Your “rumored region” gets one-line prompts only: something like “bone forest where sound dies” or “a village that appears on no maps.” Your “blank region” is exactly that — empty space that player choices and random tables will populate during play.

In Practice: When your players decide to push into the rumored layer, grab one of your prompt lines and flesh it out during the session or the night before. The prompt already contains the evocative core of the location — you just need to build the doors and details around it. The blank region stays blank until the players make choices that should reveal something, at which point you generate on the fly or pull from a random table.

This approach keeps your workload manageable while giving players a genuine sense of expansive, living world. It also makes the campaign feel responsive to their choices rather than pre-scripted.

Coming Next Week

Norse: Oath of Blood hits PC, PlayStation, and Xbox on 17 February — expect community coverage and first impressions to flood in over the weekend. Critical Role Campaign 4 continues its Thursday night run. The Empire of Bones campaign closes Monday, so watch for funded celebration posts if it crosses its goal. We will also have our hands on some of February’s ZineQuest highlights for a closer look at the zine scene this month.

Community Question

The HBO Baldur’s Gate 3 announcement is dominating conversation this week. Where do you land on it — excited for what a Mazin-led adaptation could do with Faerun, or worried about what gets lost when Larian is not in the room? Drop your take in the comments, or come argue about it with us on social media.

Continue Your Journey

Our Monthly RPG Roundup – For deeper dives into monthly releases, industry trends, and LitRPG highlights, the monthly roundup covers everything the weekly format can’t.

Baldur’s Gate 3 and Tabletop Gaming: A GM’s Guide – How to steal the best encounter design, dialogue systems, and moral complexity from BG3 for your tabletop campaigns.

Getting Started with Hexcrawls – A beginner-friendly breakdown of exploration-based play, open-world campaign structure, and how to run your first hexcrawl session.

The Best D&D Alternatives for 2026 – If the surge in indie RPG crowdfunding has you curious about systems beyond D&D, this comparison guide covers the strongest contenders.

GM Tips: Running Large-Scale Campaigns Without Burning Out – Sustainable prep strategies, pacing tools, and session management advice for long-form campaign GMs.