Image via Pointy Hat
When it comes to official, first-party source material, Dungeons & Dragons has plenty to offer. The D&D team at Wizards of the Coast puts out several new sourcebooks for its current 5.5e edition each year, alongside plenty of supplemental content via D&D Beyond. Yet ravenous D&D fans like me are always looking for more ways to get creative at the table. That’s where the exciting content coming from third-party creators comes in. Thanks to third-party projects using the D&D creative license, the possibilities are basically endless. Now, that’s about to include turning your next D&D campaign into your very own Delicious in Dungeon-style adventure.
Wild Hearth is a new D&D 5e and 5.5e expansion from Pointy Hat. Billed with the tagline “hunt. cook. build,” it’s packed with new rules to help you cook up the monsters you kill. In other words, it’s giving serious Delicious in Dungeon vibes. However, that’s not all this Kickstarter project is prepared to offer. It also includes rules for designing and building up your own town, complete with farming and cooking that basically add a farming sim element to your next TTRPG campaign. If this sounds good to you, you’re not alone. Since it launched on Kickstarter, Wild Hearth has amassed over 12,200 backers. It’s blown well past its initial goal of $25K, with 16 days still to go at the time I’m writing this. Here’s why so many people are backing this third-party supplement for D&D.
Wild Hearth Lets You Live Out Your Farming And Town Management Sim Dreams via D&D
So, what is Wild Hearth? The plan is to create a “massive, two-tome expansion” that’s compatible with the D&D 5e and revised 5.5e rules. The first book is packed with cooking and farming mechanics, with an emphasis on turning the monsters you slay into dinner. It also features player options to leverage those cooking and farming rules to your best ability. The second book pulls in travel and town-building rules, plus everything you need to run your own in-game monster-hunting cooking competitions.
The 15+ subclasses in Wild Hearth offer up options to lean into the fun of cooking with monsters. You can be a College of Hospitality Bard, ready to show the town a good time and profit from it, or you can sneak poisons into your prepared dishes as a Poisoner Rogue. The supplement also includes new playable races to give players plenty of fun new character options to experiment with right alongside the new mechanics.
If you love cooking games or town management sims and love to play D&D, this feels like an obvious must-have addition to your third-party collection. To get a sense of the overall vibes, you can check out the anime-style opening Pointy Hat designed for the project:
As you can see, we aren’t leaning away from the Delicious in Dungeon inspiration here, and frankly, that makes the project all that much more exciting. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Kickstarter campaign without plenty of backer perks and stretch goals. Interested parties can get the PDF versions of both books for just $60 USD, or opt for bigger, more comprehensive packages that include physical books, printed handouts, dice, and other add-ons.
Several stretch goals have already brought plenty more to the project, including additional town origins, mechanics for festivals and fishing, and more. The next major goal will bring in more source material for building seasons into your gameplay. In other words, make it even more of a TTRPG translation of your favorite farming sims. If you’re interested in securing your copies of Wild Hearth‘s sourcebooks and helping hit that “pie in the sky” goal of $3 million, you can check out the Kickstarter campaign here. Keep in mind that, as with any crowdfunding project, backing something like this does come with inherent risks.
Looking for more tabletop gaming goodness? Check out my review of the latest Pokémon TCG expansion, 30th Celebration.
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