GenCon: Daggerheart's Hope and Fear Sets Foundation for Company's Future Vision

Hope and Fear, the core rules expansion for Darrington Press’ Daggerheart TTRPG that premiered at GenCon 2026, was nearly replaced by another book, according to the team that brought the immensely popular fantasy TTRPG to life. Now it’s central to how the company hopes to move into its next three years.

Hope and Fear received an early preview at GenCon 2026 as the big focus of Darrington’s presence at the convention. The product, which provides new classes, adversaries, and campaign frames for players to use at their table, is presented as an extension of the core game. And according to senior RPG producer Elise Rezendes, it could have been a different book altogether. However, the company quickly swapped product plans after seeing the enormous response from fans and buyers in 2025.

“We actually had a different book ready following the release of Daggerheart,” Rezendes told TTRPG Insider. However, the players’ response to Daggerheart made it immediately clear that “the book we had planned was not the next best book after Daggerheart’s launch.”

Rezendes emphasized that there was significant demand from fans for new character options, campaign frames, and adversaries, and the company needed to catch up. There was also a lot that the company could not fit into the original gamebook due to printing limits.

Hope and Fear came to exist by listening to the community, game director Jeremy Crawford told TTRPG Insider. The combination of Daggerheart’s core ruleset and Hope and Fear will allow for the “journey” the company seeks to pursue over the next three years, with multiple adventures and at least six official Daggerheart books published by Darrington Press. Rezendes and the DP team announced on Thursday at the GenCon 2026 Daggerheart Next panel that it intended to release two books every year. It was a surprising promise, considering Daggerheart’s book has only been around since May 2025.

When asked what inspired the decision to double the release schedule for the next three years, Rezendes immediately pointed to Crawford and creative director Chris Perkins, two “titans of the industry” whose experience and knowledge have helped the quickly expanding team at Darrington Press step up. The pair stepped down from their roles forming D&D 5.5e in April 2025, then joined Darrington Press in June 2025.

The DP team has been tight-lipped about its plans for its next books. However, they did reinforce that their top priority remains creating adventure content that GMs can run with ease. “Players are demanding adventure content,” Perkins said. “And adventures are really the mechanism for delivering and showing people what a story in Daggerheart could be as well as showing how all the elements can come together into a cohesive narrative.”

That’s why they promised to release multiple adventures in the coming months, including a new one in August.

There are also plans to release With Love and Magic, a romantasy-themed campaign frame, digitally for players to use sometime this fall. A physical release for the frame could occur in the future, Rezendes said, but it will depend on community demand.

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How Darrington Press Hopes to Support its Creator Community

One of Thursday's announcements included the addition of Hope and Fear’s mechanics to the Daggerheart SRD. The SRD, for those unfamiliar, acts as a guide to Daggerheart’s mechanics that creators can reference with ease. It also establishes the limits of what third-party creators (such as the sci-fi conversion The New Unknown from earlier this year) can use mechanically to build a Daggerheart resource. While these documents are often not terribly important to average fans, they are the lifeblood for creators who want to make Daggerheart content.

“We wanted to empower people to be able to take the awesome playing pieces in Hope and Fear and include those in their own creations,” Crawford said. “It’s a sign of our confidence in the material from Hope and Fear as well as in the community to make spectacular stuff with the pieces.”

Those pieces also included mechanics introduced in the campaign frames. While a third-party creator cannot create supplements for previous frames, they can use the distinct gameplay elements (such as the colossi) in their own creations.

This only applies to certain mechanics in the two Daggerheart books’ frames, although more distinct mechanics could be added down the line, Rezendes said.

Another way Darrington Press hopes to support its community is through partnerships with other creators like Eberron creator Keith Baker. The designer and his partner Jenn Ellis at Twogether Studios are working with Darrington to publish a Daggerheart setting in the future, Rezendes said, but no timeline is set for when it might come out. The project appears to be a separate project from the six books announced during the Next presentation.

Baker, in the meantime, is publishing a separate Daggerheart setting called Eidolon: The Ghost Market that is expected to crowdfund in October 2026.

Rezendes also praised the Daggerheart Discord and Reddit communities, which she describes as significantly less caustic compared to other online TTRPG communities and who continue to create new homebrew tools for the space.

Daggerheart: Hope and Fear is available for pre-order now and is expected to release on August 25.

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1  Fun fact. A tornado warning went off in the middle of TTRPG Insider’s interview with Rezendes, Crawford and Perkins. Indianapolis doesn’t get those often.