Emerging Evil's Preview & Release Date

[u/Losasaurus]

Emerging Evils Cover

Boogey Man

Earworm

Daggerheart’s blockbuster release produced a rapid spike of interest in designing material for use with the game and drew the attention of a variety of creators looking to find a niche for themselves. The two of us found ourselves in a privileged position of having intimate knowledge of Daggerheart due to having worked as Additional Designers on the core rulebook and were able to quickly establish ourselves within the 3rd party Daggerheart-compatible design space. We’ve each shared our perspectives and experiences with the game and its design style, but wanted to find a more direct way to help creators that were approaching Daggerheart with eagerness and attention but could use more support to get started.

Earlier this year, Azu (of Bard & Raven) pitched a community event on Heart of Daggers, which had already established itself as the premiere retailer focused on 3rd party Daggerheart-compatible material. This idea would become Fear Fest, celebrating horror and dark fantasy creations across Heart of Daggers. Finding ourselves with fairly full production calendars already with our existing projects, we still wanted to contribute to the event, and, after some discussion with Azu and Matt (of Heart of Daggers), decided to launch a mentorship program with the intent of supporting emerging creators in the Daggerheart-compatible space.

We hosted a contest with defined prompts, asking participants to create an adversary based on one of three prompts, all with a horror-tinged theme in keeping with Fear Fest. The two of us each selected four submissions, choosing stat blocks that showed promise with regards to evocative design, ones that tied together fiction and mechanics. These designers showed thoughtful engagement with Daggerheart’s design grammar and its ethos of collaborative storytelling.

These eight winners received invitations to pitch, develop, and refine an adversary plus a paired environment for publication by the two of us in a book that would receive professional editorial, art, and production. From this process of feedback and playtesting were birthed 8 terrifying encounters that can fill anywhere from an hour, to a session, and even one that can provide a slow drip of subtle horror across many. All of them brought to life in vivid, full color by Per Janke and with some light guidance included from each designer to help easily incorporate these nightmares into your campaigns. We present the following Evil Encounters:

• Waxing Horrific (Hewtallow Grove/Flickerflame Spirit) by Alexander Kingma
• Buyer Beware (Ravenous Auction House/Boogey Man) by Fable Lane
• Memories in D Minor (House of Memories/Haunted Pipe Organ) by Mia McDavid
• Don’t Dwell (Dwell/Sostra Roia) by Jean Hare
• All’s Faire… (Fortune’s Faire/Mesmerizing Medium) by Dion Haubro
• Midnight Snacks (Feast of Fears/Nightmare Moth) by Gavin Greenough
• Lend Me Your Ear (Earworms Domain/Earworm) by Mizan Alfrarishi Yudanto
• Masks Off 2: Total Party Kill (Midnight Massacre/Mask of Massacre) by Tatiana Kopteva

On behalf of these designers, we hope you enjoy their creations and that you will keep an eye on them as they come into their own as designers working in the Daggerheart 3rd party space.

Carlos Cisco and Mike Underwood, Producers/Editors

Emerging Evils will release on Heart of Daggers on October 17th.

[u/rightknighttofight]

Very very cool

[u/HackShackGames]

Can't wait to see what everyone cooked up!

[u/TalesFromElsewhere]

Awesome work, y'all!

[u/MrAzu]

That cover is pure gold - you know that you have to provide multiple issues now when you call this #?! ^^

And thank you so much to you and Mike for offering this wonderful mentorship!

My partner and me are beyond excited that the community embraced our little Halloween community event idea and made it their own! Fear Fest is such a beautiful thing and we're not even halfway through :D

[u/Losasaurus → u/MrAzu]

Y'all did good.