Wild Hearth on Kickstarter: Pointy Hat's necromancer class, monster cooking and town building, September 2026

What is in the two books

The campaign describes Wild Hearth as a supplement for 5E and 5.5E, meaning the 2014 and 2024 rules, built around the question of what a party does with the monster it just killed. A Recipe for Heroes answers it: any monster, homebrew included, can be cooked into a Monster Meal with a mechanical benefit if the recipe is right, crops grown on the party's farm add to those meals or fight alongside the party, and the book's player options are built for that loop. A Blueprint for Adventure carries a three-tier travel encounter system, town building, and the adventures, which the page frames as monster-hunting cooking competitions against rival adventuring teams.

Town building is physical as well as written. Each building is a screen-printed wooden piece designed to a 1-inch grid, so a settlement the party founds can stand on the battle map at the same scale as the minis, and one of the adventures has the party defending it. Three town looks are offered, Heroes' Hamlets, Steampunk Suburbs and Edo Edifices. The cooking and crafting rules are compatible with Heliana's Guide to Monster Hunting, and Loot Tavern, that book's publisher, is the project's partner; the risks section cites its campaigns for Heliana's, L'Arsene's and Ryoko's books.

The Necromancer class

The class is the part players will argue about first. Ginny Di's video of 16 September 2026, sponsored by the campaign and made with early access to the playtest, walks through building one. The Necromancer is an Intelligence caster with a d6 Hit Die, proficiency in Constitution and Intelligence saving throws, simple weapons and no armour. Every necromancer carries a vestige, a piece of humanoid remains used as a spellcasting focus, which they can raise as an undead thrall; the three subclasses shape it. The Overlord's thrall is a swarm of undead, the Medium's a ghost, the Hemomancer's what the video calls a walking biohazard. The page promises more subclasses through stretch goals.

The engine is what the class calls necromantic formulae. Damage from your spells is the fuel: when a damaging spell lands, a formula such as Blood Poisoning or Bone Armor triggers, and its strength depends on potency thresholds, so a hit that reaches the minimum gives the weaker version and a hit that reaches the perfect threshold gives the stronger one. Blood Poisoning at its weaker potency poisons for a turn on a failed Constitution save; at full potency the condition can last a minute. A level 2 feature, Death Mage, prepares extra necromancy spells, and the class can spend its own Hit Dice to recover spell slots.

• Intelligence caster, d6 Hit Die, Con and Int saves, simple weapons, no armour.
• Vestige focus raised as a thrall; Overlord (swarm), Medium (ghost), Hemomancer (biohazard).
• Formulae fuelled by spell damage, with two potency thresholds.
• 14 new necromancy spells, including a cantrip, Putrify, at 1d8 Necrotic on a failed Constitution save.

Species, subclasses and backgrounds

The page lists 13 species and subspecies. The Mandragora are awakened plants; in the video a Flowerling gains a free cantrip from the school of the spell that awakened it, all Mandragora have Tremorsense to 15 feet and can take a 6-hour Long Rest rooted in soil, and they need no food or drink given 6 hours a day in sunlight. The Arthroma are insectoid, and the Gastromaton is a construct that is literally a kitchen, with Cauldron, Teapot and Oven forms.

Fifteen or more subclasses cover the core classes: College of Hospitality Bard, Fortune Domain Cleric, Poisoner Rogue, Animist Ranger, White Mage Wizard, Butcher Barbarian, Fey Origin Sorcerer, Battle Dancer Fighter, Folk Patron Warlock and Oath of the Garden Paladin are the ones named. The backgrounds follow the 2024 shape, each with an origin feat; the Herbalist's is Apothecary, which grants Heroic Inspiration when an ally drinks a potion and lets you upgrade a healing potion with an hour's work. That is a 2024-rules design, and tables on the 2014 books will need to treat origin feats as ordinary feats.

Tiers, timeline and the anti-AI pledge

Seven pledge tiers run from $60 for both PDFs to $795 for everything. The $99 Dual Book tier is both hardbacks plus PDFs; $159 Game-Ready adds handouts, cheat sheets and a map pack; $199 Digital Deluxe is every digital item including a two-book VTT bundle; $299 Core Bundle adds one wooden town, card decks and dice; $495 Deluxe adds deluxe covers and a second town. Tax and shipping are charged later through Backerkit. A separate add-on, Cakewalk, is five food-themed adventures.

The timeline is long and stated plainly: player-option betas in January 2027, adventure betas through March 2027, version 1 of the books in June 2027, mass production from October 2027, freight from February 2028 and fulfilment beginning May 2028. The page also carries an anti-AI policy, stating that all art, writing, design, voice acting and animation is human made and guaranteeing no generative AI in any content.

Why it funded so fast

Three reasons, none of them the rules. Pointy Hat's channel had 521,000 views on a 9 September 2026 video about the Satanic Panic and 177,000 on a 15 September video within two days, and the launch week was cross-promoted by Ginny Di and XP to Level 3, whose videos of 15 and 16 September opened with Wild Hearth sponsorships. Loot Tavern's track record of delivering large campaigns takes the risk question off the table for backers who own Heliana's. And the pitch is concrete: the page cites The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Delicious in Dungeon, and anyone who has played or watched either knows what a cooking loop feels like.

The open question is whether the systems survive contact with a 5-hour session. Farming, town building and travel are the downtime layer, and downtime is where most groups skip. The campaign's answer is to make the adventures themselves cooking contests, so the systems are the plot rather than a sidebar. Whether that works is a 2028 question.