Pointy Hat's Wild Hearth Kickstarter Passes $3.6 Million

AT THE ASHFORGE — Wild Hearth, Pointy Hat's two-book cooking and town-building expansion for Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition and 5.5E, had raised $3,694,164 from 17,727 backers on Kickstarter as of October 15. The goal was $25,000. The campaign closes Monday, October 19, at 2:00 p.m. CDT, and I have stopped pretending I'm not hungry.

Pointy Hat is the online name of Antonio Demico, an illustrator, art director, and D&D YouTuber, Tabletop Sentinel reports. This is his first crowdfunding campaign. Its pitch fits on a pot lid: the monsters you kill can be dinner. Any monster, homebrew included, can go into a Monster Meal that helps in the next fight, if the cook gets the recipe right. The campaign page even carries a food-safety warning, which I respect: "Make sure ALL the meat goes in the pot!"

What's in the pot

• A Recipe for Heroes (240+ pages, per TTRPG Fans): harvesting, monster cooking, farming with crops that can fight beside you, new ancestries, feats, spells, 15-plus subclasses, and a full Necromancer class. The subclasses run from a College of Hospitality Bard to a Butcher Barbarian to a Poisoner Rogue who slips toxins into the stew.
• A Blueprint for Adventure (300+ pages): the GM's companion, with town building, a three-tier travel encounter system, new monsters, lighter cooking rules, and eight adventures built around monster-hunting cooking competitions.
• Towns you can hold: screen-printed wooden buildings on a 1-inch grid. A Heroes' Hamlet set comes in the Core tier, and other Town Origins include Steampunk Suburbs and Edo Edifices. NPCs you recruit on adventures move in and bring new buildings with them.

The order slip

• PDF: $60 for both books
• Dual Book: $99 plus shipping, both hardcovers and the PDFs
• Core: $299, with map packs, item cards, a bonus book called Cakewalk, dice, and a wooden town set
• Top tiers: Deluxe at $495 and All In at $795
• Estimated delivery: May 2028, listed on the reward tiers for the PDF and Core alike

Read that last line twice. This order slip runs nineteen months from close to delivery, so it's a long simmer. Anyone backing should plan around that date, and as Bonus Action notes, every crowdfunded project carries some risk. Stretch goals already unlocked include more Town Origins plus festival and fishing rules; the next big one adds seasons. The creators call it "proudly a 100% human created project!" and promise no generative AI, EN World reports.

Two small things made me grin at the anvil. Everyone who backs gets a free mini of Pointy Hat and his "human familiar" (an STL file for digital-only backers). And the town-building section of the campaign page includes the line "Yes! OSHA compliant." Over on the far plane, it seems even a fantasy town needs a building inspector. A free Necromancer playtest is linked from the campaign page for anyone who wants a taste first.

— M.A., from the forge