New Daggerheart Kickstarter Announced, Chris Perkins, Jeremy Crawford's Plans Revealed

Daggerheart has ambitious plans for the upcoming months, with several major partnerships announced and a new Kickstarter planned for later this year. Today, Darrington Press announced that it would be Kickstarting Class Packs for Daggerheart, a class-based product that contains everything you need to play a specific class. The 76-card packs contain ancestry cards, community cards, subclass cards, and all cards from each of a class's two domains. Also included for Kickstarter backers is a digital PDF of the Daggerheart Core Rulebook.

Also announced were several new collaborations and campaign expansions from the game. A campaign frame focused of romantasy will be released in 2026, focused on the Exandria in-world book Tusk Love. Also announced were collaborations with Legends of Avantris, Dungeons and Daddies, and Bonus Action, all of whom will produce Actual Plays using Daggerheart as a game system.

Darrington Press also announced that Jeremy Crawford, Chris Perkins, and Twogether Studios are all working on new campaign products for the game. Crawford is leading the design of a "devilishly scary" campaign setting (which will be fully fleshed out unlike a campaign frame), while Perkins is building a series of adventures that will span multiple campaign frames and connect into a larger arc. Details about Keith Baker and Jenn Ellis's world was not revealed, but it would feature new player options as part of the "brand-new world."

 

[darjr]

Because reasons.

Is it a general dislike for kickstarter itself? Or that they are using it when they could produce it traditionally?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Why is the kickstarter a problem for folks? I don’t understand.

There's a somewhat old-fashioned view that successful companies shouldn't use Kickstarter because either they're taking money from smaller creators who need to use it by doing so, or because it's just being cheap when you don't have to be cheap.

I think when Kickstarter was very different, like, fifteen years ago, there was some limited justification for the first viewpoint, especially as you often saw KSes doing similar concepts and one was from a big company and one or more from a smaller one. But now it seems clear big companies using KS/Backerkit/etc. will often get people to see smaller products and back those - indeed, some Backerkit (and possibly KS?) emails I get the people actively promote smaller, unrelated KSes and the like in those emails, which is decent. And the second one is sometimes obviously true, because if a big company KSes an obviously-going-to-succeed big product that's a little... off. It's not like, satanic but it's like, tacky.

But the reality is, as @TiQuinn says, these are often niche products with unknown demand (and this one definitely is - who knows how many class-specific card packs will sell? I wouldn't buy one and I like DH a lot!), and that's perfect for Kickstarter or similar. We already know Darrington wildly underestimated the demand for Daggerheart itself - why make potentially make an estimation mistake again when KS is right to here to help?

Because reasons.

I mean, I think it's better to admit there are reasons and address them rather than pretending it's mere irrationality or contrarianism. There's more to it than that. I think it's wrong in this case (and often is) but let's not just sweep all critiques of people using KS or similar under the carpet.

 

[overgeeked]

Is it a general dislike for kickstarter itself? Or that they are using it when they could produce it traditionally?

People are looking for reasons to be mad at CR. Someone else uses Kickstarter, it’s fine. CR uses Kickstarter, how dare they.

 

[TiQuinn]

Why is the kickstarter a problem for folks? I don’t understand.

Speaking only for myself, it rankles me that larger and larger companies across numerous areas are using it to fund projects rather than use their own capital or finding capital through more traditional means. The problem is that "What is a large company?" rears its head. I may have a perception of Darrington Press' success because it's tied to Critical Role and Critical Role received funding from Amazon to produce multiple animated series, and it "feels" like it's all one big company that "should" be able to fund its own projects.

But I don't really know that that is true. I don't understand the ins and outs of their business and partnerships to say that's the case. It's not like Wizards of the Coast put out a Kickstarter for the 2024 Edition, for instance.

And the more that I think about it, if I'm in their shoes, is this really a hill I would die on if the opportunity is there?

End of the day, I can simply choose not to back a Kickstarter. I won't get the special extras, which usually are not the big hook for me anyways, and simply buy the finished product once it's been released without ever having backed it.

 

[wicked cool]

Devils advocate here
If you don’t back the kickstarter it most likely means you won’t get the product for a long time after and some cases not at all
Kickstarted often have stretch goals and if you back the starter you get extra goodies and if you don’t you sometimes can’t buy those extra goodies
Me personally this sounds like a hot mess
2 wotc people are building settings- I wasn’t impressed with their wotc settings and multiple things could water this down
3 not loving the card thing. This sounds like a disaster as it keeps expanding

 

[Ruin Explorer]

2 wotc people are building settings- I wasn’t impressed with their wotc settings and multiple things could water this down

I think that's a valid concern, but the big difference here is that Crawford and Perkins are working on an original setting, not merely heading up a new version of an existing D&D or MtG setting.

Also, Crawford only worked on Ravnica and Sword Coast. No other settings.

I'm not sure Perkins worked on any. Which do you think he worked on? I do think some of the setting-adventures, specifically Dragonlance and Strixhaven were fairly dire but neither of them were leads on those.

They're not making settings separately, note. Perkins' other project is this weird "community adventure" deal which I don't quite get. Maybe it's like a Living Greyhawk kind of deal?

Keith Baker is the other guy making a whole-ass setting and he's not a WotC and if you weren't impressed with Eberron well, with respect, that's a setting that, like or not, is close to objectively well-designed and particularly remarkable because it managed to nail "D&D" whilst also being rather original in many ways.

3 not loving the card thing. This sounds like a disaster as it keeps expanding

Have you played yet?

The cards work really well. If you don't want to use them, it's totally trivial not to, just like with 4E, you just print out the cards you have to a sheet of paper or w/e. Or don't even do that if you're going digital. There's no card manipulation - no tapping, no flipping, etc. etc. so they don't actually matter. You are sometimes told to put tokens on a card - we didn't do that, we just put them on the table and remembered what they were, seemed fine.

But like I do get it! I was like "UGH CARDS NO SUCK ARGH HATE CARDS" when I heard that too. I didn't even follow DH until the very end because of that, and I only bought it on a semi-whim, and then was impressed.

Where's 1 though lol?

 

[Vael]

It's hard to get a sense of scale here in the niche world of RPGs, and I certainly don't claim any particular insight into it, but I do feel like this is Darrington going through a fairly major scaling up process. That said, they're early on. Just because they signed two ex-WotC designers doesn't make them the next WotC, at best they're approaching Paizo. So I get the need for caution and to see if these class packs will work to help get Daggerheart distributed, given they can't keep it in stock.

 

[Arilyn]

Darrington does avoid crowd funding. But these cards are tricky. Hit? Flop? Probably in between but no way to know. They are also an expanding company which can be a risky spot to be in. KS seems a good idea.

 

[SteveC]

The Kickstarter is kinda weird to me. Who is this for?

I'm sure this will be answered many times, but it's for my players. I have a core set and the PDF. My players are all grown up adults who buy gaming stuff. If we can get the game going in person, I think that all of the players in the group will buy these to have them with their characters.

I was in the process of seeing if I could have a set of cards printed professionally to have extra copies. It looks like I could do this, but it would also be really expensive. The fact that I can get sets for my players now, that will be great.

 

[zakael19]

I only have the PDF, two of my players bought the full set (one via KS), one has nothing and I gave them the PDF to help. The latter would be a target for a card set.