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Deathbringer Hits BackerKit as 5e Goes Fully Folk

issues ttrpg  2026-07-17

Issue #003 · Week of July 17, 2026

This Week’s Verdict

A quiet week where the two headline stories are a crowdfunding launch and a legal footnote finally sprouting code. Deathbringer wants your money for brutal sword and sorcery, a community fork wants to build a free 5e without Wizards of the Coast, and someone wants you to stat Pokemon as poison armor for the fourth straight day. Read your stat blocks twice, as they say.

Releases & Announcements

STARBEARDS, a sci-fi space-dwarf setting for Savage Worlds Adventure Edition, landed on DriveThruRPG this week, with starhawk crediting writing, design, and editing work and flagging it as no-AI. Rock and stone.

DriveThruRPG’s “Christmas in July” sale is doing its annual rounds. Among the discounted titles: the Forgotten Realms Wiki’s own Juniper’s Companion to Venturesome Cookery at 30 percent off, and two titles from Rock Clan Productions. On the licensed-property front, ICv2 reports Call of Cthulhu: Horror on the Orient Express - The Board Game is heading to retail, and Greg Pak is taking over Thundercats with a new story arc.

Kobold Press continued its Memoirs of a Lich series. Nothing here reorders the shelf, but the shelf is at least being restocked.

Rules & Errata

No official errata from any of the majors this week. The closest thing to a rules story is structural: following the SRD’s move into Creative Commons, a free 5e implementation is being developed and promoted under the Free5e banner via Wyrmworks Publishing. GoldenGrognard framed it in Ben Milton’s “Corporate D&D versus Folk D&D” terms, hoping a widely-adopted free version cuts Wizards of the Coast out of the loop entirely. Worth watching, though “being developed” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Otherwise the practical rules content came from the usual quarter. Sly Flourish offered the eternal reminder to read your monster stat blocks twice and understand them before the table does, which pairs nicely with Nat1Advice’s observation that the best counter to a player who has memorized the Monster Manual is a GM who has opened the Player’s Handbook. Shadowdark, DCC, and the rest saw no official changes.

The Community

The week’s actual discourse was Deathbringer, and specifically Professor Dungeon Master’s involvement, which EN World picked up and Magnolia Keep critiqued in a post titled “The Thoughtlessness of Deathbringer’s Sales Pitch.” So there is at least one real argument happening around the game rather than just the marketing copy.

Elsewhere, prep and reading dominated. martin posted a thorough read-through of The Waking of Willowby Hall for Knave, praising its interactivity, the hard-to-improvise details like library books and gallery paintings, and the Yoon-Suin vase cameo, while working out how abandoned the hall actually is. takeonrules wrote up returning to PbtA by way of Stonetop, and enfors put together thoughts on designing secrets in any system: give them an active keeper, make revelation change the world, and make disclosure an interesting choice. The Alexandrian continued its ex-RPGNet review series with A2 - Secret of the Slavers Stockade.

Two review blogs from rlyehreviews covered Atomic Shadows from Wallhalla Games, a post-apocalyptic game built on Shadowdark, and Necrotic Gnome’s Old-School Essentials Adventure Anthology 2. And ForesterDesigns continued the daily Pokemon-armor magic item march across 5e and PF2e, which is either dedication or a hostage situation.

On the Horizon

Deathbringer is live on BackerKit, pitched as brutal sword-and-sorcery action. Sly Flourish’s Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster Kickstarter is running and reportedly had the strongest opening days of any of his campaigns.

Two dates worth marking: DCC Day is July 18th, with Goodman Games open tables and swag at venues including DMen Tap in Chicago. Tabletop Scotland 2026 has its D&D Adventurers League schedule up, including con-written adventures from the Polyhedral Adventures team. For the free-and-outdoors crowd, The Anvil of Winter by Seba, Rackhir, and simiofdoom is out on itch as an OSR pointcrawl submitted to the Appendix N Jam, complete with yaks, a dead god, and a spaceship.

Resources

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