Whoops, we’re a little late

Hello and welcome to the official CritFail.Press Newsletter!

So…we’ve been slacking a bit. For a year. For more than a year. That’s on us. The short answer is that life got in the way and made it difficult to keep releasing new issues of the CritFail.Post. Like so many creative endeavors, keeping up with this newsletter was one of passion and momentum. When that momentum breaks, well, the whole thing can come crashing down.

But we haven’t stopped thinking about this newsletter. Or the blog over on the website. In order to ensure the continuation of this newsletter, and the blog, we are going to engage in a little reformatting.

Gone will be the myriad different categories in each newsletter. They proved too much to maintain. Going forward, the newsletter will become a mechanism to deliver articles from the main website directly to you, the reader, as they are released publicly. At the end of each week you’ll receive the text from the week’s blog post on the main site as well as the “Map Monday” article. A new map in your inbox each week! We’re going to try for some kind of consistency, but our original goals remain the same:

1. Provide you with top tier TTRPG rules, reviews, advice, discussions, and adventure content that you can use in your own games.

2. Not abuse your inbox.

Simple really. We want to create and engage in meaningful conversations surrounding this hobby we love. And that's it.

So as part of this revamped newsletter, please check out the article below. If you have any suggestions or comments feel free to send them to mike@critfail.press.

Late to 2026 planning...but still optimistic

I know this is a few weeks behind a lot of other TTRPG creators and bloggers who have already discussed their plans for 2026. Honestly, it took me a little while to figure out how I wanted to engage the year that is 2026, and what I wanted to do.

Last year, shortly after the release of Daggerheart, we released the DAGGERzine Issue 1, and it's honestly done pretty well.

But I quickly encountered a major life event and didn't have the time to release anything else: my second child was born.

He was actually born about a month before the release of Daggerheart, but when they're in that newborn stage, you can sometimes get a little work done, and so the DAGGERzine was also born.

After that however, once they grow a bit, it becomes really hard to have enough time for anything else.

The good news is that they (my child and Daggerheart) have continued to grow, and sleep better (just my child) soI find I'm having more time to work on projects again. I promise that DAGGERzine Issue 2 is on its way with more to follow after it!

If you read the forward in Issue 01, you'll see my optimistic naivete on full display. The monthly release schedule for the DAGGERzine was obviously way too ambitious. So, in 2026, we're trying to embrace a more realistic release schedule or pace. Probably quarterly. The problem is there's still a lot of things we want to make!

More Daggerheart content, more Shadowdark content, more D&D content.

And more system agnostic stuff.

As there are more and more systems out there, (Daggerheart, Draw Steel, Dragonbane, etc.) I think there is a place for settings, adventures, and general game content that is not tied down to any one system.

My hope is to be able to release more of that in 2026 and beyond.

In order to do some of that, we're going to try to tap into some more structured content and releases and to limit the scope of some projects in order to try and maintain a consistent output.

So, while we will still have kind of "larger" product releases at certain intervals, you're going to see a new format for the blog and the newsletter and our releases in general.

The first is you're going to notice that over time there's going to start being some changes on the website. We need to do some long required cleanup to certain parts of the website. That will occur piecemeal throughout 2026.

We're also going to have two weekly releases.

First, on Mondays, something we're going to creatively call "Map Mondays", where maps that we have created will be put up on the blog and released for personal use. This will begin next Monday, as I dragged my feet a bit getting this post (and the map) prepared.

You can download these maps and use them in your games, similar to how a lot of other map creators provide their work online.

I believe there is always value in having more options for Game Masters and Dungeon Masters when trying to find what's right for their game.

Our second release will be on Wednesdays, where you will find new blog articles from CritFail.Press, this one being the first.

They might be short, they might be long. That's okay. We're going to follow in the format of some of the bloggers that we follow regularly, and we'll range in scope from the topics and brevity of a blogger like the great PhD20 to the larger scope and longer length articles of someone like Justin Alexander of the Alexandrian.

Although ultimately we'll probably try to find a happy medium, somewhere perhaps more like Mike Shea's Sly Flourish.

But we'll see.

Then on Friday, we'll have the CritFail.Post, our newsletter. Rather than being a fully bespoke piece of content, the Post will contain links to the Map Monday article and the Wednesday blog article.

But, who are we kidding? Sometimes there may be a little something extra.

And of course anytime we have a major product release or sale you'll be able to hear about that in the newsletter first. So sign up!

That's it for the goals for 2026. I'm trying to keep the scope small so it's manageable to stay consistent. I want us to continue to provide the best and most useful resources that we can to this community that's given us so much and I want to see more gamers, playing more games, and having more fun doing so. See you next week.

-Mike