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Every good story needs a villain. In tabletop games like D&D and Daggerheart, that villain is usually someone with plans for world domination or at least someone who is trying to cause a little bit of chaos. Classically, it has been up to the GM to come up with the villain for the campaign, but the upcoming Daggerheart expansion, Hope & Fear, is turning things around and giving players a chance to help create their perfect villains.

“I am imagining right now that a Daggerheart villain is just somebody who’s doing something so awful that any right-minded party of adventurers feels the absolute need to stop them,” Chris Perkins, Creative Director at Critical Role’s Darrington Press, told us when we sat down with him at PAX East 2026. As someone who has been writing published campaigns and adventures for many years, Perkins is also thinking about how to make villains the kind of baddies that players just want to stop, so that means letting them flesh them out a bit more. 

“One of the key things about a Daggerheart villain is that it will be built in such a way that the GM and the players can customize it. You’re gonna see a little of that in Hope & Fear. One of the campaign frames that I worked on with Jeremy [Crawford] and Spencer [Starke] and Rowan [Hall] is a campaign frame that is based around a villain. The villain is sort of the motivator for pretty much everything that happens in the campaign frame, and so one of the things that was done in this campaign frame was we have a section up front that says, ‘Okay, here’s the basics of the villain. Here’s what they’re up to. What their plan is. Now here is the system by which you and your players customize the villain in the session zero before the campaign even starts.’”

It is all centered on giving players a personal stake in the campaign frame through their relationship with the villain. “It’s asking questions like, ‘What was your character’s first contact with the villain?’ ‘What did the villain do that impacted your character’s community?’ ‘Define some of the actual events of the villain’s life that led them on this path.’” Perkins admits that this is kind of an experiment on the part of Darrington Press with Daggerheart, but suggests that if it works well, “that could be something that we carry forward for all Daggerheart villains or a great many of them going forward.”

The Daggerheart core rules are out now. The first expansion for the system, Hope & Fear, is due out in September 2026.

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