For over 10 months, I’ve been working as a (freelance) game designer on Daggerheart, Critical Role’s forthcoming fantasy ttrpg.
Today, the game’s pre-orders went live, including an amazing limited edition.
You can find all the information at Darrington Press’s website. There will also be information about pre-orders and the state of the game in an update stream today at 5pm EDT (2pm PDT) on Twitch/YouTube.
I’m extremely excited to be getting closer to the game’s release, and I expect to spend a lot of time running introductory games for friends and colleagues once the final version is out. 🙂
If you’re excited about the game, please consider pre-ordering in these first few days/weeks so that Darrington Press knows how much demand there is.
NOTE: If you have questions about pre-orders or anything, those should go to the Darrington Press accounts/site, not to me. The sales & fulfillment part is very much separate from where I’m working in the design team – once we hand the game off to become a book, it’s a whole other ballgame. 😉
After a couple of years of conflicts and bad luck (I got sick last year right when I was going to travel), I’m attending ArmadilloCon in Austin, TX for the first time this weekend as a panelist!
As of the time I post this, there is *one* spot left in the Daggerheart one-shot I’m running at the con – playing “Marauders of Windfall”, an adventure I was the lead designer for.
Here’s my schedule (all times central):
Friday, Sep 6 8pm – Help, I’m Mid-Career and My Industry Has Changed – Ballroom E
Saturday, Sep 7 11am – Worldbuilding for Masochists Presents: Traveling Light – Southpark A 1pm – What is the Social Responsibility of SFF Authors? – Ballroom E 7pm – Daggerheart: RPG Session with Designer Michael R. Underwood – Rm 103
Sunday, Sep 8 10am – Autographing – Dealers Room 1pm – Reading – Michael R. Underwood – Conference Room
Summer con season is here and I’m traveling more than I have since the start of COVID. With the combined powers of multiple vaccines, masks, air filters, and nasal sprays, I hope to come through the summer healthy and good to keep trucking into autumn.
First up is GenCon next week, where I’ll be participating in programming with the GenCon Writers’ Symposium.
Here’s my schedule. All of these will be in the Indianapolis Downtown Marriott (not the adjacent JW Marriott) at 350 W. Maryland St. For more detailed directions, find the Writers Symposium registration/info desk.
Thursday Aug 1st 10:00 am – Book Signing and Meet & Greet – Michael R. Underwood and Anthony W. Eichenlaub
3:00 pm – Dennis the Peasant: Class and Social Stratitifaction in Speculative Fiction and Gaming
6:00 pm – Meet the Writers (this is a big event where you can chat with all the attending authors)
Friday Aug 2nd 11:00 am – The System as Villain: Explore Goodness Through Media
12:00 pm – Liminal Identities in Speculative Fiction and Gaming
Saturday Aug 3rd 1:00 pm – Working with an Agent
Sunday Aug 4th 11:00 am – Writing with Kindness
The week after GenCon, I’ll be appearing in virtual programming for the Dublin WorldCon. This fall I am appearing at ArmadilloCon in Austin, TX as well as attending New Jersey WebFest in Montclair, NJ, and BigBadCon in San Francisco. I’ll be rounding out the year with PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia, PA at the start of winter.
Tomorrow night (May 31st) at 9pm Eastern Daylight Time, I will be a guest player for a Daggerheart one-shot at Folk And Myth (an actual-play channel run by Bleakseason and Miko).
I first saw Bleakseason’s work while watching all the 2023 New Jersey Web Fest’s official selections in actual play and have then seen him as a player on Crit Hit Chronicles. Bleak put out a call for players for this one-shot and I thought it’d be fun to get to both branch out as an actual play performer and bring the special dimension of having one of the game’s designers in the cast.
We’ve done our session zero and game prep already and I am excited to see what the group gets up to tomorrow night. 🙂
(Image description – promo graphic for …And Further On, a Daggerheart one-shot by Bleakseason. The image is a leather-texture gradient from brown-orange to yellow, with gears in yellow, blue, and orange. Text in white with black borders reads “Calamity, YaBoiBig, Northwolf911, Miko” and “With Special Guest Michael Underwood – Daggerheart Design Team!” and gives the time of the stream as May 31st, 9pm EST and the location – twitch.tv/FolkandMyth)
We’ll be playing the latest playtest version of the game (1.4.1) and you’ll get to see how I play a game I helped design. <3
This week Darrington Press released an update to the Daggerheart playtest, along with a livestream + Q&A with Daggerheart Lead Designer Spenser Starke and Critical Role’s Matt Mercer.
There’s cool stuff in this update and I am excited to see what people think about these updates! If you have been testing Daggerheart, please take the time to leave some feedback at www.Daggerheart.com or through the form at Demiplane. The game will be better the more we hear back from a broad range of players putting time in with it at each step! <3
Today is the beginning of Darrington Press’ Daggerheart open beta playtest! <link href=”https://www.daggerheart.com/>” replace=”” to=””/>https://www.daggerheart.com/>
And, with the release of these materials, I can now say that I have been consulting for Darrington Press as a designer on the game! It’s been so hard keeping this under wraps, especially since it represents a big development in my game design career.
2022 – self-published The Only Logical Solution is Hijinx (one-page RPG), working on the Genrenauts RPG 2023 – working on the Genrenauts RPG, short consulting job on Candela Obscura 2024 – multi-month contract as a game designer on Daggerheart
It’s been an amazing experience working with the Daggerheart team, and I’ve had the chance to apply and refine my game design skills and delighted in how much my existing writing skills apply over to the world of ttrpgs.
If you’ve been curious about Daggerheart, or if you like the story-forward kinds of ttrpgs I talk about and tend to GM, I’d strongly encourage you to take a look at these playtest documents and give the game a try. You can get started with this video made by the Critical Role/Darrington Press team and tonight (Tuesday) there will be a live one-shot of Daggerheart at twitch.tv/criticalrole.
I haven’t posted here in a while, so I wanted to provide a short update for folks that don’t visit my Patreon, which is updated much more frequently.
Since May of last year, I’ve been much more active in ttrpg game design. I was a design consultant and provided additional writing for the Darrington Press game Candela Obscura, a supernatural investigation game using their Illuminated Worlds system. I did more consulting from October through February, but the NDA means I can’t talk about it until it’s out in the world. But rest assured that once I am allowed to talk about it, you won’t be able to get me to stop. 😛
In other news, I stepped down from being a co-host of Speculate in January, after helping make the show for many years. In my last year co-hosting, our show Valloward, which I produced and GMed, was an official selection at five web festivals, including the New Jersey Web Festival, currently the premiere festival for actual play. You can read more on my departure from Speculate here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/some-news-from-96627620
The Pitman Sculpture, an Apocalypse Keys miniseries, is the last show we completed while I was still a co-host. You can listen to the complete miniseries at speculatesf.com now or on your podcast app of choice.
I’m heading out tomorrow for my first in-person SFF book convention since ConFusion in 2020 – a cross-country trip to Anaheim, CA for the 2023 Nebula Awards Conference. I’m very excited to reconnect with colleagues, talk shop on panels, learn from colleagues, and to meet people new to the field and/or SFWA.
I’m participating in three panels, two on Sat and one on Sunday. All times PDT. Virtual-only memberships are available, and the Control Your Book Promotion panel will be streamed. More info at https://events.sfwa.org/
Saturday, May 13th
1:30 pm – Power and Politics in Worldbuilding 2:30 pm – I’ll be signing at autographing table A for almost a half-our before… 3:00 pm – Unionize Publishing
Sunday, May 14th
1:30 pm Control Your Book Promotion
Promotional card for Power and Politics in Worldbuilding panel. Purple background with a divine figure and a stylized image of space.Promotional card for Unionize Publishing panel. Purple background with a divine figure and a stylized image of space.Promotional card for Control Your Book Promotion Panel. Purple background with a divine figure and a stylized image of space.
Hi folks! I haven’t been very active on this feed, mostly because I’ve just now started returning to in-person cons and I’ve been hard at work on writing without as much news to announce.
But now I have news!
If you’re a long-time viewer or fan, you know that I co-host an actual play show called Speculate with my friends Gregory A. Wilson and Brandon O’Brien. We’ve played games from D&D to Blades in the Dark, Girl by Moonlight, and more. We’ve been making actual play shows for several years, we love making these shows, and want to make more!
Which brings me to the news. We’re going to be streaming an all-day event on Saturday, November 12th, starting at 3pm EST at Twitch.tv/Arvaneleron
We’ll be bringing you several segments of gaming fun, with the hope that you’ll get excited about what we do and help us to be able to do even more. We’re very proud of the work we do, but it’s resource-intensive, not just in time, but in costs – games, tech, paying for audio editing (worth every penny), and more. Right now, our primary pain point is resources.
Our goal is to be able to release episodes more regularly, going weekly for at least a couple of months, with some other options if we reach higher levels, things like a website refresh, some new tech for regular cast members, and new shows/programming.
Here’s a rundown of our schedule! All times EST
3pm – Greg is running a D&D one-shot from Critical Crafting with Skiffy & Fanty show cast members Shaun Duke, Paul Weimer, and Trish Matson!
6:30 pm – Brandon, Greg, and Iwill dive into the world of Destiny 2, a game renowned for good shooting and interesting but largely underused lore. We’re excited to talk about the world and storytelling techniques Destiny is now utilizing to put the story more directly into the gameplay.
9pm – The Strange Friends Crew (as seen in The Case of the Cindered Seal and Fractal Spire) will be playing a one-shot of Blades in the Dark as we’ve done for Worldbuilders and other special events, but this time, with a major twist! We’ll be playing in Faerun’s famed city of Waterdeep in an adventure GMed by Iori Kusano!
Throughout the fundraiser, we’ll have special incentives for large donations, highlights/greatest hits reels from our shows to run during the breaks, and more!
So please mark your calendars and get excited about an entire day of storytelling awesomeness as we work to take Speculate to the next level!
Hexomancy, the third and final book in the series, is back out today in a new edition (lightly revised) with a new cover.
Cover for Hexomancy by Michael R. Underwood. Text reads “Hugo Award Finalist Michael R. Underwood – Hexomancy – Ree Reyes Book Three” A slim Latina holding magic-powered dice and a sword stands in front of a middle-aged white man with a salt-and-pepper beard wearing a brown trench coat and holding a science fiction-looking ray gun.
Ree Reyes has been fighting to protect her town for a couple years now, using her Geekomancy to draw on her love of superheroes, movies, comics, and more.
When Ree’s long-time nemesis Lucretia is finally brought to trial and found guilty for the deadly attack on Grognard’s, the Geekomancer community breathes a collective sigh of relief. But Ree and her crew soon discover that Lucretia has three very angry, very dangerous sisters who won’t rest until Eastwood—a fellow Geekomancer—is killed.
Ree agrees to serve as Eastwood’s bodyguard, despite their rocky relationship. Along the way, she’ll have to face a gauntlet of foes, hexes, curses. Plus the growing ache in her heart for a certain dimensionally-displaced gadgeteer.
This means that the entire Ree Reyes series (Geekomancy, Celebromancy, Attack the Geek, and Hexomancy) are all now available again. These books launched my career and they’ll always have a special place in my heart. It’s been great to give them a fresh coat of paint and send them back into the world, and I hope you’ll enjoy them – either for the first time, revisit them some years later, maybe in a new format. I’m excited to return to conventions when it’s safe and see people with paperback copies walking around. I’m especially excited to sign your copies and hear about your own geeky stories.
ALSO
Valloward, the Court of Blades series I’m GMing for Speculate, kicks off this Friday with our first actual play session in Court of Blades proper. This is a great time to jump in with the series if you’re interested to see how I GM or watch a group of professional fantasy authors create a setting together through play in this game of power politics, gunpowder diplomacy, and romantic skullduggery.
