Hope & Fear Is Live!

Hope & Fear is officially here. It’s finally it’s available to everyone!

The new Daggerheart expansion is now live across the platform, bringing new classes, subclasses, adversaries, environments, equipment, campaign frames, the Dread domain, Evolution mechanics, and a huge amount more into the tools you already use.

But somehow… that isn’t even everything we developed for you this month.

Hex Crawls are officially live, the Encounter Manager has received one of its biggest updates yet, Marketplace creators have more control over their listings, we have an awesome new Heart of Daggers logo, and we’ve been working behind the scenes on some pretty exciting things for Halloween, Christmas, and the future of the platform.

Hope & Fear Is HERE!!!

Hope & Fear content is now live across Heart of Daggers.

We’ve integrated the SRD content from the new expansion throughout the platform, including:

All four new classes
All new subclasses
The new Dread domain
New Domain abilities
New adversaries
New environments
New weapons
New armor
New items
New consumables
New campaign frames
New mechanics introduced through Hope & Fear

This has been one of the largest content updates we’ve ever made to Heart of Daggers, and we’re incredibly excited to finally have it in your hands.

Meet the Assassin, Brawler, Warlock & Witch

Hope & Fear introduces four new classes:

Brawler
Witch
Warlock
Assassin

And we wanted their arrival on Heart of Daggers to feel special.

We commissioned Tiago “Talexior” Alexandre to create original character artwork for all four classes.

You’ll see these characters throughout the Character Creator and across Heart of Daggers.

Artwork. For. Everything.

You read that right! 😀

Every new Hope & Fear:

Weapon
Armor
Item
Consumable
Class
Subclass
Adversary
Domain ability

…has dedicated artwork associated with it inside Heart of Daggers.

That means when you’re browsing a new weapon, selecting armor for your character, looking through the Dread domain, or preparing an encounter against one of the new adversaries, you’ll see artwork relating specifically to what you’re looking at.

A huge amount of time went into sourcing, curating, organising, and matching artwork so that everything felt cohesive and thematic.

Was it necessary? Probably not.

Was it worth it? Absolutely.

The extra visual context adds so much personality and immersion when building characters and exploring the game.

Four New Premade Characters

four brand-new Premade Characters are joining the Character Creator, each built around one of the expansion’s new classes.

We’ve commissioned Nick from Stealth Wyrm Games to create custom artwork for all four.

Sandy Crakk — Witch

Sandy Crakk is a towering, crooked Hedge Witch with a mysterious third eye, strange old magic, and the energy of an overly affectionate aunt who may know far more than she lets on.

Sneaky Nohkurse — Warlock

Sneaky Nohkurse is a dapper Underborne Gnome businessman who treats eldritch pacts, trapped souls, and potential apocalypses like perfectly reasonable commercial decisions.

Valiente — Brawler

Valiente is a 6’8″, 400-pound Simiah Juggernaut who turns every fight into a full-blown spectacle of wrestling, showmanship, and crowd-pleasing chaos.

Boreal — Assassin

Boreal is a Frostborne Earthkin/Tidekin Assassin whose glacier-like body naturally produces deadly poisons, pairing lethal precision with a surprisingly strong moral code.

Every Hope & Fear Adversary Is Ready for Battle

All Hope & Fear adversaries have now been added to the Encounter Manager.

And yes, as mentioned above… Every single one has artwork.

We’ve also implemented support for the new Evolution mechanics introduced with Hope & Fear.

If an adversary supports Evolution, you’ll now see an Evolution button directly inside their stat block.

Trigger it our engine will automatically apply the relevant Evolution changes to the adversary, including updated features and statistics where required.

Evolution Comes to Homebrew

Official adversaries aren’t the only ones getting Evolution.

The Homebrew Vault now supports Evolution Features when creating custom adversaries.

You can add Evolution abilities directly to your Homebrew adversary and build creatures designed to transform as the encounter progresses.

We’re also working on the next part of this system: allowing Evolution to automatically alter a Homebrew adversary’s statistics when triggered.

That’s coming very soon.

Hex Crawls Are LIVE!

This has been THE BIGGEST tool we’ve built for Campaigns to date.

You can now create fully interactive Hex Crawls directly inside Heart of Daggers and share them with your players. And there is a lot packed into this thing.

You can create maps containing up to 2,000 hex tiles, complete with terrain, landmarks, travel mechanics, player tokens, Fog of War, routes, rivers, and so much more.

Choose between 3D and Traditional map styles depending on the look of your campaign.

15+ terrain categories
150+ unique tile assets
Multiple landmark types
Rivers
Paths
Fog of War
Player tokens
Travel mechanics
Campaign-specific mechanics

And more on the way!

Procedurally Generate Entire Hex Maps

Don’t want to build every hex manually?

Neither would we.

Our Map Generator can procedurally create huge sections of your map automatically.

The generation system considers surrounding terrain so that tiles are created in ways that make sense together rather than placing completely random environments beside one another.

You can also simply click an empty section of the map to generate a random hex and landmark.

Every generated tile and landmark can then be moved or edited manually.

So you can generate the foundation of a map in seconds and then customise it into exactly what your campaign needs.

Breathe Life Into Hexes

Clicking any hex opens its information and settings.

You can give each hex:

A name
A description
Player visibility
Terrain information
Travel Terrain ratings
Mechanical properties

And for campaigns using mechanics similar to Journey to Horizon, we’ve added some cool fun options.

Inside the Mechanics tab, a Game Master can mark a location as:

Shadowblighted
A Sanctuary
A Shrine containing a Soul Echo

The Travel Terrain rating can also influence journey calculations across the map.

“How Long Will It Take Us to Get There?”

Hex Crawls also include a Travel Route tool.

Choose a destination and the engine will calculate the shortest route across the map.

The system considers the Terrain Difficulty of every tile along the route and can estimate how many travel days the journey will take.

It will automatically find the shortest available route to the destination based on the map.

This can be used by both Game Masters and players to help plan journeys across larger campaign maps.

Fog of War & Player Movement

Game Masters can hide unexplored areas of their Hex Crawl using Fog of War.

Players can then explore the map as the campaign progresses.

You can place player tokens directly onto the map, move them between hexes, and optionally allow players to control their own movement.

Game Masters can also configure things such as:

Whether players can move their own tokens
Whether Hex ID numbers are visible
Flat Top hex orientation
Player visibility
Map presentation

It turns the Hex Crawl into something you can actively use during a campaign rather than simply exporting a static map.

Export Your Hex Crawl

Prefer something physical?

You can export your Hex Crawl as:

And you can choose whether Fog of War should be included in the export.

So you can create Game Master versions, player versions, printable maps, campaign handouts, or whatever else your table needs.

Duplicate Campaigns

Campaigns can now be duplicated.

This is particularly useful if you’re:

Running the same adventure for multiple groups
Running West Marches-style campaigns
Creating campaign templates
Testing alternate campaign setups
Reusing campaign structures

Encounters Have Evolved (get it?!)

The first change you’ll probably notice is Stage Management.

Stages now appear more like tabs above your encounter, making it much easier to understand where you are within a multi-stage battle.

Three Ways to View Adversaries

You can now choose how adversary stat blocks appear inside your Encounters.

There are three styles:

Modern

The Heart of Daggers default.

This currently provides the most flexibility and customisation and remains our recommended view for Game Masters who want deeper control over adversaries.

Classic

A more traditional Daggerheart-style stat block presentation.

If you prefer the familiar official stat block layout, this one’s for you.

Visual

This is inspired by the new visual adversary card direction recently shown for Daggerheart and provides a much more graphical way to interact with adversaries.

We’ll continue developing this view as we get a more sneak peaks into the visual cards they teased.

Change Your Spellcast Trait

Want to play a Strength-based Wizard? Go for it.

The new Spellcast Trait selector gives characters significantly more flexibility, particularly when dealing with Homebrew options, custom abilities, unusual multiclass combinations, campaign rewards, or character concepts that don’t follow the default Spellcast Trait.

Creator Marketplace

Marketplace Galleries Can Be Rearranged

Marketplace creators can now manually rearrange images inside their product gallery.

Browse Products by Bestseller Gem

You can now click Marketplace Bestseller Gems.

Selecting a Bestseller tier will show you all Marketplace products that currently belong to that tier.

It’s a simple new way to discover products that have performed particularly well within the Heart of Daggers community.

Say Hello to Heart of Daggers (again)

You may have noticed something different.

Heart of Daggers has a brand-new logo and custom typeface!

We worked with the incredibly talented Sina, of Bard & Raven, to create new branding specifically for Heart of Daggers. (they won the Premade Character competition and have multiple bestsellers on the Marketplace!)

Heart of Daggers has grown enormously since we first launched, and we wanted branding that felt uniquely ours and reflected where the platform is heading.

We absolutely love what Sina created. Thank you, Sina 🙂

The State of the Platform

Every month we write these updates and somehow the numbers keep getting more ridiculous.

Heart of Daggers now has:

33,000+ active users
55,000+ characters created since January 2026
17,500+ Homebrew creations
15,000+ Encounters
5,000+ Campaigns
$90,000+ generated in Creator Marketplace sales in less than a year

Watching this community grow in real time has been seriously so encouraging – both for our platform and where the game is going. And we have absolutely no intention of slowing down.

Final Thoughts

Thank you to everyone reporting bugs, testing new features, sharing feedback, buying from creators, publishing Homebrew, running campaigns, inviting friends, creating characters, and helping us build an awesome platform.

A ridiculous amount of what we build comes directly from conversations with this community.

If you want to share your Hope & Fear characters, show off your Hex Crawls, talk Homebrew, meet creators, report bugs, or just hang out with other Daggerheart players and Game Masters, come join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/heartofdaggers