Popverse's top stories

• Made in '87: Rewinding to the movies, comics, games, and TV shows that define pop culture to this day
• Watch now: Watch the Bob's Burgers team - H. Jon Benjamin, John Roberts, Kristen Schaal, Eugene Mirman, Dan Mintz, Larry Murphy and creator Loren Bouchard - grill up memories at NYCC 2025
• Marvel Comics killed the X-Men in 1987 to reset the franchise - but it didn’t stick

All week long: Revisit the highlights and lowlights of 1987 with Popverse's Made in 87 week.

I don't know that there was a "winner" of PAX Unplugged '25, but if I had to pick one game that I bet had the most excited fans - I think I'd put my money on Daggerheart. The relatively new TTRPG, published by Critical Role's Darrington Press, not only got to show off a host of new stuff coming to the game, but also got to spend the weekend celebrating its many collaborations with some of the biggest names in the TTRPG world. Names like The Dungeon Dudes.

In case you don't know, the Dudes are a popular pair of YouTubers in the TTRPG space, who just ran a (very successful) Kickstarter campaign to bring their epic horror saga Dungeons of Drakkenheim out of the Dungeons & Dragons 5e system and into Daggerhearts. And when I got the chance to speak with the guys, I had to ask why they wanted to do so.

"Daggerheart is a beautifully narrative driven game," began Kelly McLaughlin, one half of the Dungeon Dudes pair, "When we first designed Drakkenheim, it was dark fantasy and cosmic horror, but it was very much a sandbox campaign where the players' choices drive the narrative. Daggerheart lends itself really well to that sort of storytelling."

McLaughlin continued by saying Daggerheart's core mechanic of roling Hope and Fear (that is, the system by which the players succeed in tasks or the GM gets the ability to make those tasks harder) makes for horror storytelling particular to shine, even though "Daggerheart has a lot of non-horror themes you can play."

(It's true - there's a whole campaign frame about building magic recipes. But let's get back on topic - TTRPG horror.)

"One of the core systems that we designed in the initial Drakkenheim book," McLaughlin continued, "Was a new system for how contamination and mutation works. Because the city of Drakkenheim was struck by an Eldritch meteor of magical crystals that mutated and transformed everybody in this city into horrible monsters. If you spend too long in the city, monsters can cause contamination [...] We implemented a contamination system using D&D, but looking at Daggerhart, we were able to say, well, now we can take this contamination of mutation system, and really push the use of fear, hope, and stress."

From here, the Dungeon Dude walked me through the contamination system as it will appear in Dungeons of Drakkenheim: Daggerheart.

"The idea is that the more contaminated you become, the lower your maximum amount of hope gets," he explained, "But you gain new abilities through your mutations. Unlike normal abilities in Daggerheart, you would you would spend hope to use those. Now, you can use your mutation abilities by giving the GM fear, or accumulating stress, which to me makes so much sense because, if you have a tentacle arm and your friends are watching you choke a person with your tentacle arm, that's not a hopeful situation. Everybody there is fearful of like, 'What is my friend becoming?' And so it's going to help push those narratives of the transformations within Drakkenheim; they're now adding to the fear."

"Very mechanically," expands Monty Martin, the other half of the TTRPG duo, "It is an intentional death spiral. [...] As you are using your contaminated powers, you're giving the GM more fear, which is going to be causing even more bad things to be happening. You're gonna be marking off stress, which will put your characters eventually in a much more vulnerable position. And so, the situation becomes more and more desperate."

"Which is fitting for horror, right?" Martin concluded. "Those sort of desperate moments of strokes of luck that the horror genre is so good at delivering.You know, like, the character gets out of the last moment, and then is often left in that situation of, 'Oh, I got through that on the skin of my teeth. Now there's teeth growing on my skin.'"

Fitting for horror indeed.

What's next for Dungeons and Dragons actual play? The Dungeon Dudes told us their thoughts.