Welcome to the Quarterly Questing Report! In these posts I will breaking down all the games I played this quarter, updates on ongoing games, thoughts on new systems, and any learnings I have along the way as both a GM and a player.

Let's get into it!

In Q2 of 2026 I participated in 35 total sessions (no it definitely doesn’t kill me that my game on the last day of June got canceled last minute so I didn’t have time to spin up another one, leaving me one session shy of last quarter. definitely not.), which is up double! from 17 sessions in Q2 in 2025. That’s wild.

This quarter I played:

• 25 sessions of Daggerheart
  • 16 sessions as a GM
  • 9 sessions as a PC
• 8 sessions of D&D 5E/5.5E
  • 7 sessions as a GM
  • 1 session as a PC
• 1 session of Dungeon Inc as a PC
• 1 session of His Majesty the Worm as a PC

Interestingly, my Daggerheart GM vs PC count basically inverted from last quarter mainly in part to missing some games I normally play in to GM Daggerheart at Origins this year.

Let’s break everything down!

Dungeon Inc

I played one session of Dungeon Inc as Bloop, the myconid from Maintenance. This was actually part 2 of the quickstart adventure, The Giant's Entrails, being run by Patchwork Paladin, so I jumped right into the fray when I arrived for this session. You can see Patchwork Paladin's first review of it here and you can also see an in character corporate style report of our session by Wormlike Chain here.

The adventure was intense! When I arrived on the scene green slimes had already incapacitated one of the PCs and I rushed to their aid. As a janitor I was here to clean up the enormous mess that had been made in this level on the dungeon. I gathered my allies, scattered equipment, and ritual objects throughout the dungeon as we made our exit. PCs were fragile and the rogue creatures and magical instability caused by the necromancer's rites made the situation very dangerous. Despite having very little training with my repeating crossbow I took cover in some rubble and got very lucky with some shots at the necromancer.

I really enjoyed the Favor system and how you could use it to call upon other NPCs within the corporate structure of Dungeon Inc for information, items, or advantages while in the dungeon. I was able to get a gas mask from Roger in Surveying to protect me from toxic gas. I also liked the traits you had for your character and how that impacted the game and the skills you could call upon.

Overall, the flavor of playing as corporate monsters resetting dungeons after adventurers have gone through is very fun. I'm still on the fence on roll under games. It definitely makes things quicker, but as a player it feels like I'm playing my own game over on my own with my sheet and my dice, and as a GM I feel like I don't have as much to do.

His Majesty the Worm

I had the opportunity to play one session of His Majesty the Worm. I've wanted to try a proper megadungeon crawl for a while now and this system has intrigued me with its use of tarot cards. We played part of the Tomb of the Golden Ghosts and it was a lot of fun!

We each played each of the different suites, and I was a Wands character who was also a gnome. I like how in HMtW the ancestries are a bit more strange. For example, gnomes were human children who were taken in and raised by faeries (sort of like a changeling), but continued to age like humans do while also still being a fey touched child. I find that players will naturally humanize and soften the weird edges of fantasy ancestries, so I like when the book pushes it a little further past "humans but with pointy ears". It helps add more variety to the spectrum PCs can end up on.

The tarot system took a little bit of getting used to, especially since we were playing virtually. But we were all learning together, and by the end of the session we were starting to get the hang of it.

A star of the session for me was immediately finding a secret room and working a bit backwards through the dungeon after casting Speak with Animals to talk to a giant snail munching some healing moss.

D&D 5E/5.5E

Candlekeep Mysteries

I run a two player game of Candlekeep Mysteries in 5E as loosely interconnected adventures where the PCs get to level up after they complete each mystery. You can check out last quarter's quarterly questing report to see what we have played so far.

This quarter for sessions # 20-26 the PCs ran through Sarah of Yellowcrest Manor. Then, we did a couple session side quest in Waterdeep using material from Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. The PCs were following a quest from the Harpers to keep an eye on Meloon Wardragon during the Day of Wonders parade. This teed up the party to accept The Curious Tale of Wisteria Vale from the Harpers as well and play the first session of that.

This meant that we skipped Lore of Lurue, Kandlekeep Dekonstruktion, and Zikran's Zephyrean Tome. I don't know if we will go back to those since Lore of Lurue feels very similar to others we have already done, Kandlekeep Dekonstruktion doesn't really tonally match the kind of game my players like, and Zikran's Zephyrean Tome wasn't really speaking to me for the work I would want to do to get it into shape. If any we will probably do the last one though, to give the Warlock the opportunity to use her newly acquired water breathing spell.

Sarah of Yellowcrest was very enjoyable. Using Waterdeep worked better than the earlier adventure that used Baldur's Gate because there is a lot more readily accessible information about Waterdeep to flesh out the setting. This adventure did start a trend of adventure's assuming very specific actions the players would take, and specific people they would talk to, but thankfully this adventure was less fragile than some of the others if you did not do those things. For this adventure I also tried out Patchwork Paladin's Preparing a Published Adventure for Play highlighting system, which worked really well to organize the secrets and clues so I could float them around when players didn't go to the exact right places. My yellow highlighter for clues, secrets, and lore gets a workout in Candlekeep Mysteries.

While the cult was interesting, the dungeon design was rather strange. The quest item you need and the "final boss fight" are effectively in the first rooms of the dungeon. And when the PCs waited out the ritual after being injured fighting cultists in the entrance, the boss moved to safety deeper into the dungeon and surrounded himself with guards creating a slug fest of a bottleneck fight. But overall, getting to bring in more about Great Old Ones and tying it to the Warlock was very fun.

Then, the PCs wanted to spend a couple sessions doing some shopping and enjoying Waterdeep. I took this opportunity to do something I've been meaning to for a long time, and incorporated adventure material from other books I have. I used the information from Waterdeep: Dragon Heist to have the bard Three Strings request the players keep an eye on Meloon Wardragon who had been acting strangely after a recent encounter in the Undermountain. I also used the material on the Day of Wonders parade and the escaped polar bear and had the PCs wonder why the crew of the Sea Maiden's Faire was seeking out our drow Rogue specifically for help. We also discovered that our Rogue is a terrible spy, and is way too honest for his own good, resulting in the death of Meloon Wardragon and the subsequent rush throughout the city to pawn off his high profile body to his allies to resurrect him.

After that the Harpers commissioned the PCs to return to Candlekeep with a ritual cleansing dagger to clear the corruption from a powerful Harper bard called Arrant Quill in The Curious Wisteria Vale. The PCs just entered the demiplane and began exploring the quaint village there.

Thoughtless Wastes

I had a session zero for a new open table 5.5E game! This is my first time playing 5.5E and I went back to my roots and made a Wayfinder Spellfire Sorcerer. My very first 5E character back in 2016 was a wild magic sorcerer, but I only played one session before becoming the forever GM for a long time.

This game is going to take place in the GM's homebrew setting the Thoughtless Wastes, where the ruins of a long lost civilization is consumed by the sands of a massive desert. I am excited to try this drop in and out style game where we can take quests from different factions.

Daggerheart

Protectors of the Wyrmhearth

I ran sessions # 3-8 of my homebrew campaign I'm testing for a four player table. The party traveled through the moors up to the mountains to deliver a message to the fungril leader Rotbanth's mysterious brother. The party did a point crawl through the mountains and went through various trials such as sliding on the ice to avoid doing yak pinball, getting confronted with memories of their past in a verdant oasis high in the mountains, and forging a dagger of frozen mercury and rushing it to the peak before it melted.

After meeting the ancient silver dragon on the summit, the party leveled up to level 2! I had planned for level one to be 3-5 sessions, but it ended up taking 7 sessions. Thankfully the players said they were enjoying the beginning of the campaign and felt like they had plenty to do at level 1 in Daggerheart. They spent the 8th session traveling down from the mountains into the badlands to investigate the red dragon's death.

Learn to Play: Sablewood Messengers + Dying Spire

I got the opportunity to GM Daggerheart for Darrington Press at Origins Game Fair. Before the convention I ran a test game of The Dying Spire to practice before the con. Then at the convention I ran three demo sessions of the The Sablewood Messengers and two sessions of the follow up adventure The Dying Spire.

The Sablewood Messengers ran really fast, on the shorter end of 2.5-3.5 hours with a 10min bio break in the middle. The more experienced the table, the faster it ran. The Dying Spire was a solid 3-3.5 hours long, but even with a decent amount of teaching and deliberating still kept things moving. I know some other tables took the entire 4 hours.

I had a total of 28 players across my five tables, and since I had a captive audience, I asked everyone that sat down:

• If they had played TTRPGs before
• If they had played DH before
• If they have played TTRPGs before what was their game of choice

These were the answers. Tables 1-3 were the Sablewood Messenger games, and tables 4-5 were the Dying Spire games.

• Table #1: Six players. Five had played TTRPGs before, primarily 5E, but no DH. One player had not played any TTRPGs at all.
• Table #2: Six players. Five played TTRPGs pretty regularly, primarily 5E and Pathfinder but one of them had also been GMing quite a bit of Dungeon World and Blades in the Dark recently
• Table #3: Six players. All had a lot of experience playing TTRPGs. Five of them were all together and had been each playing for 30+ years. But no DH. When I asked them their game of choice they were like WELL NOT OUR CHOICE EXACTLY (lol) but we play a lot of 5E and Starfinder these days. We want to be playing more PbtA though, and looked to one guy in their group who was apparently running a lot of PbtA games these days. The 6th person had GMed two sessions of DH but had never played, and normally ran a VtM game but was unsuccessful in convincing that table to play DH.
• Table #4: Four players. All friends. Three had played Sablewood Messengers at Origins the year prior, 1 had never played DH before. Didn't get much more out of them because of some logistical/timing issues but they enjoyed and the new player picked it up fast.
• Table #5: Six players. Five of them were together, a mom, dad, their two high school age kids, and one of the kids' partner. And then another guy. Everyone but the kid's partner (who hadn't played really any TTRPGs at all) had played Sablewood Messengers at Origins the year prior. In the family, the parents play a little 5E when they can, they have a copy of DH in the house though that the kids use when they play DH at their local queer youth club. The family uses Origins as an opportunity to try lots of different games. They played Shadowdark, Pirate Borg, 5E, and DH during the con. The solo guy had mostly played 5E, but his main group recently started a rotating games of Blades in the Dark, Masks, and DH and they'd played about 4 sessions of DH so far.

Here are some general comments I received throughout the weekend:

• The brand new to TTRPGs players actually all took to it super fast. By the end of the session they were pushing all of their paper buttons, and were making a point to combo their various abilities
  • One new player had said she had watched her partner play 5E before but it seemed really overwhelming, so she had been nervous to try TTRPGs at all but she didn't feel like DH was like that at all and they actually went right to go buy the book after the session
• Lots of love for the connection questions
  • Overall people wished we had time to do more of them
  • Those who were more experienced with PbtA immediately started whispering to each other about it and were like "oh HELL yes", and had me flip through the book at the end of the session and show them more of them
• Big interest in the collaborative worldbuilding questions. I warned each table at the top that I would ask them questions and incorporate the answers
  • One person said it scratched that GM itch for them as a player to get to contribute something
  • One of the teens said even though they were nervous about being put on the spot they liked that I waited to let them answer and that I incorporated it "even though it wasn't very good" (it was fine of course) and that same kid actually incorporated back what I had added on to their description into a description of one of their spells in the final fight
• Overall lots of love for tag teams, crit damage rules, and being able to move around without taking opportunity attacks
• People were really intrigued by the death moves. I provoked two during Dying Spire. One Blaze of Glory and one Risk It All
  • The brand new player teen leaned to the other one to ask about death moves and the kid actually pointed at me and said, "I'm gonna let her tell it was because she can probably explain it better and they're AWESOME"
• SO MUCH love for the sidecar for the character sheets lol best piece of technology we've got is sliding a piece of paper to the side
• Campaign frames were a big selling point for a lot of people when flipping through the book
• There were a couple people throughout the weekend that told me they were initially real nervous when I explained there was no initiative in this game, but both noted that in practice it actually flowed really well, and that the push and pull of the Hope and Fear felt very exciting.
  • Some folks said that they could see how if they were more familiar with their sheets, and more familiar with what their party members could do, it would be even easier to tee up stuff together.
  • But by the end of all the tables, even people who didn't know each other where calling on each other to make sure the people hadn't gone in a bit had a turn or passed the spotlight around. I did a little bit of that as well as the GM just because with six players I didn't want anyone to fall through the cracks, but each table actually self managed that pretty well. I had actually gone into this thinking I was going to have to do a lot more management for that as a demo game for groups strangers.

A few more specific pieces of feedback I received were:

• One of the brand new players said that they loved that all the DH characters felt cool and powerful at level one. She said she's had bad experiences at cons where the more experienced players take all the "good" characters and as a newbie you only realize partway through that you character isn't as cool or as powerful as the other ones. But that wasn't the case here.
• One player said the game was "fun crunchy" and felt like the player side had a good amount of crunch, but not so much that it was overwhelming or felt like you were doing things wrong if you weren't taking the most optimized turns like the way they sometimes feel when they play PF
• One player said the Guardian was the best representation of a tank in any game they had ever played and they loved how it made them feel when playing it
• One of the teens said at the end of the session that they felt like DH could be hard to GM compared to 5E and asked if I felt that way. I asked them what they felt would be hard about it. And they said there seemed to be lots of different monsters with different abilities. But when I showed them the stat blocks they said that those actually look simpler than 5E stat blocks to them.
• Notably, despite the frequent worries I see about it online, nobody asked about adjudicating Hope and Fear rolls. Several people actually pointed at me throughout the session and said some version of ohhh I see how as your Fear runs down you take less turns but that's means lots of consequences for us when you have lots of Fear.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed getting to teach so many people Daggerheart, and hear new players experiences with the game after 80+ sessions of playing and running Daggerheart.

Motherboard

Last quarter I started a new campaign playing a Giant Guardian, Fray. This quarter I played sessions # 2-6. The party helped defend the city of Calcarus from waves of remnant attacks that seemed to be spurred on not only by Remnant's Fury, but targeted attacks from a mysterious dwarf that has continued to escape our grasp.

We hunted down a massive laser beam firing bull like remnant that almost took out several of our party members accompanied the loveable fat cat, but utterly useless guide, Morix who we would all die for. Things took a turn when we returned to Calcarus to find the most combat capable council member murdered in his own home, and Morix was framed for it!

The party continued to investigate what had happened, and the mysterious remnant experiments occurring below the city. Unfortunately, while I was at Origins the party got into a terrible situation without their Guardian, and our Sorcerer made two death moves in one session! The death spiral is real.

Now, the party continues to investigate the murder of the council member and try to figure out which council member might be next.

Age of Umbra

I played another three sessions with my Human Blood Hunter, Simon. We confronted the corrupted angel from my PC's backstory trauma who's presence filled the air with a fine mist of blood that hurt to breathe. It was a super fun fight that included the GM experimenting with a new boss ability he's called Battlefield Actions. A massive powerful move on a Countdown that can be impacted by player choices and actions throughout the battle.

Right near the end of the fight the angel was above to dive at our Ranger and I took one last swipe at him before the Countdown ended, redirecting his ire towards me. The Battlefield Action for this creature was called Obliterate Foe and he dealt 7HP right to me. Thankfully, I had been saving my card Mutual Suffering for a moment when I took Severe damage, and this was definitely more than that. In an epic moment when the angel hit me I drew its own blood from it in a massive siphon and dealt 7HP right back to it, killing it outright and leaving me with a single HP. And the red ghostly silhouette of an ancient knight appeared behind me, empowered by the blood I had drawn from the creature. Super cool moment to get the killing blow on!

Then, we made our way into the temple to rest and made our way through a dimensional rift on to something called The Path. We faced trials where we learned that our amnesiac Guardian and his father who ran the tavern back in Okros were the right hands to the God King before the Age of Umbra, fighting under his banner during the war that threw the land into darkness. We also saved an echo of the Ranger's Eyeless God from utter destruction in a memory of a time long forgotten.

Level 10 Wyrmhearth Playtest

As I work on my Protectors of the Wyrmhearth campaign I wanted to take the opportunity to test my final boss fight of the campaign with level 10 characters. I ran two one shots with different groups of players testing it out. WOW are level 10 Daggerheart characters powerful. I went through three rounds of buffing up the boss before the first test and the boss still needed a little more juice. In Daggerheart, for a boss to truly be solo you basically have to be planning on killing PCs (even though they'll be fine lol).

I had only GMed a one shot at level 10 once before, close to Daggerheart's initial release, and I definitely have a much better handle on GMing and encounter building after a year of playing. Environments also play a big role in making a fight dynamic and interesting.

Legendary Cryptid Battle Royale: The Pocket Dimension Live

I GMed a special cryptid battle royale one shot over on The Pocket Dimension Youtube channel. You can find the recording to that session here. Our cryptid competitors included Mothman, the Fresno Nightcrawler, the Chupacabra, and the Kraken.

Now, Daggerheart is NOT meant for PVP so I pulled on some of DH's predecessors/inspirations to help us bend the rules to make it work. We used a version of an Intent + Resolution system, where each player would briefly declare their intent, everyone would make their rolls, and we would resolve everything from best to worst rolls in order. I still took the spotlight on failures, rolls with Fear, or spending Fear as normal. To juice everything up for the one shot all the PCs started with four Hope and I started with eight Fear.

The PCs had to chase after a ball of energy to have the opportunity to return to their reality and I also had a veil of energy moving up behind them constantly that would deal d20s of direct damage if they got caught in it. This helped keep things moving and from it being a standstill slug fest.

To see who was crowned the winner of the cryptid battle royale you'll have to tune in and find out!

One Hour Daggerheart

Inspired by Patchwork Paladin's One Hour Game, I started GMing a one hour Daggerheart game on Friday mornings. We had our first session this quarter, and are playing through the introductory campaign in One Shot Wonders as rejects of the HERO Guild. I have two players, a Clank seraph dedicated to rooting out agents of chaos, and a Clank bard ready to find adventure like all the great stories.

The first session went surprisingly well. We were able to get through a few scenes, the players were able to contribute to collaborative worldbuilding questions, and the book worked nicely as a lighthearted setting to kick off a campaign with. We were only able to do a few environmental effects so I am very interested to see how this works with the time constraint when we introduce combat.

The Wish Thief

For Daggerheart's first birthday I got to play in a one shot of the new free adventure The Wish Thief. I played a handsome faerie Syndicate Rogue with an eyepatch and a long black coat covered in silver accessories, and my contact was the young goblin prince.

I really enjoyed the social investigation aspect of the adventure. Each player got to describe an NPC, and a gift that was given to the goblin princess. The final chase and battle was also very fun, as the thief was extremely slippery and hard to pin down. A nice, lighthearted birthday adventure!

Colossus of the Drylands Tier 4 Mini Campaign

I had a session zero for a new mini campaign where we are starting at level 8 and playing through level 10 to face down Kudamat, the First Doom. I love Daggerheart session zeroes because I came to the session with a vague concept for an Executioner Assassin and left with such deep connections to all the rest of the PCs.

We have five players at the table and used our Connection Questions to not only cover meeting each other, but also flesh out the "rest of the campaign" that had happened off screen before we began the game. The GM also introduced a PC that we had lost over the course of the campaign and we used some of our connections on that dead character. Somehow I managed to intertwine my story with hers in a way where I had gained and lost a partner in a single session.

Instead of contributing locations to the map more generally, we each worked together to determine each of the previous colossi we had fought, where, and who got the killing blow. We also decided that our fallen comrade was lost to a colossus that we had not yet defeated. It was a really cool way to do a session zero, and I am really excited to play Adaline Hale, the faerie assassin with a score to settle against these remaining colossus.

Key Takeaways

• I really do love teaching games and sharing my favorite systems with new players
• I have been loving how much variety I've been able to get in my games even just playing a few systems
• Daggerheart definitely dominated this quarter, and while I love it immensely, I'm also excited to get some other systems back on the calendar next quarter. I have so many games to play!