Daggerheart General Thread [+]

[overgeeked]

The [+] is to keep things positive and prevent the same already tired arguments about Daggerheart and more narrative-focused play. There are plenty of other threads to hate on games and play styles you don’t like.

There are a few people on here who play Daggerheart and want to talk about it without the constant negativity of the other threads, so I thought we should have a general [+] thread about the game.

If anyone has any useful links related to Daggerheart, please feel free to post them.

Here's a few useful links.

Main Daggerheart website: Daggerheart

The Daggerheart SRD: https://www.daggerheart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/DH-SRD-May202025.pdf

The Daggerheart playtest space: The Void - Daggerheart

Daggerheart downloads: Downloads - Daggerheart

Daggerheart card creator: Card Creator - Daggerheart

Daggerheart subreddit: Daggerheart • r/daggerheart

One of the designers, Mike Underwood, has a YouTube channel: Mike Underwood

There's the main Critical Role YouTube channel: Critical Role

And there's the Darrington Press YouTube channel: Darrington Press

ETA: Daggerheart encounter builder: FreshCutGrass.app

 

[overgeeked]

As mainly a referee I tend to look at that side of things first. So campaign frames, adversaries, countdowns, downtime, etc are all where I've been focusing my attention so far.

I absolutely love the modular design so far. Just about everything is designed in a discrete silo that makes for easy hacking and homebrew. I'll be working on some campaign frames first. Most likely for my favorite settings that would actually need some little bit of design work, but there's already so much in the official release there's a lot of ground covered.

Here's my preliminary notes on a Dark Sun campaign frame.

One thing I always do is look at how you could do something like Dark Sun in whatever fantasy game comes out. Surprisingly there's very little you'd need to homebrew to get Daggerheart to work.

Most things are lore choices and renaming or reskinning things.

The wide variety of ancestries covers everything you'd need including thri-kreen. All the major traits of the thri-kreen are present in one form or another spread across the other ancestries. The only trouble is the thri-kreen are wildly overpowered in old-school D&D so players would need to choose only 2 from their 6-8 most common traits.

The desert survival aspect could easily be handled with countdowns. Given the heroic fantasy nature of Daggerheart, making a full-on survival module seems kinda silly. Making a small, easy to use campaign frame-style set of mechanics, absolutely. Something like supplies vs distance with rolls every day to signal how the trip's going. Mark more supplies or less distance on failures or fears. Mark fewer supplies or more distance on success with hope and crits.

Which leaves defiling. Thinking about it a little bit I believe I've landed on what's my favorite solution for this. When you need to spend Hope or mark Stress to use an appropriate magical ability, you can instead defile the area around you. The size depends on the amount. Radius chart for Stress and double it for Hope. You're literally causing Stress to the landscape or draining Hope from the world around you.

 

[overgeeked]

Daggerheart has sold out on the Critical Role shops and when I was just poking around on Amazon I saw this. It's also #234 across all books on Amazon as of right now. Seems like a great first week for Daggerheart.

Oh, and Age of Umbra premieres tonight on Critical Role.

 

[zakael19]

Reddit has been recommending this encounter builder / character tracker!

Fresh Cut Grass

That card builder should be perfect for some custom community stuff I need to put together.

 

[Reynard]

I started a Let's Read thread before I saw this one. I don't think it is in conflict because that thread is meant to focus specifically on the text and what we can glean as we read.

 

[Tanek]

Has anyone attempted to play online yet? And, if so, how did you do it? Demiplane and Roll20 or some other combination?

I'm not interested in Roll20 in the least bit, but I don't see anything out yet for Foundry (I know there's people working hard on this at the moment), Fantasy Grounds, or Alchemy (though this may be soon).

Technically, it looks like I could wing it by using Discord and some sort of die rolling app (think I saw something about Daggerheart being part of Avrae now), but I'm curious as to what other people are doing.

 

[Tonguez]

As mainly a referee I tend to look at that side of things first. So campaign frames, adversaries, countdowns, downtime, etc are all where I've been focusing my attention so far.

I absolutely love the modular design so far. Just about everything is designed in a discrete silo that makes for easy hacking and homebrew. I'll be working on some campaign frames first. Most likely for my favorite settings that would actually need some little bit of design work, but there's already so much in the official release there's a lot of ground covered.

Here's my preliminary notes on a Dark Sun campaign frame.

One thing I always do is look at how you could do something like Dark Sun in whatever fantasy game comes out. Surprisingly there's very little you'd need to homebrew to get Daggerheart to work.

Most things are lore choices and renaming or reskinning things.

The wide variety of ancestries covers everything you'd need including thri-kreen. All the major traits of the thri-kreen are present in one form or another spread across the other ancestries. The only trouble is the thri-kreen are wildly overpowered in old-school D&D so players would need to choose only 2 from their 6-8 most common traits.

The desert survival aspect could easily be handled with countdowns. Given the heroic fantasy nature of Daggerheart, making a full-on survival module seems kinda silly. Making a small, easy to use campaign frame-style set of mechanics, absolutely. Something like supplies vs distance with rolls every day to signal how the trip's going. Mark more supplies or less distance on failures or fears. Mark fewer supplies or more distance on success with hope and crits.

Which leaves defiling. Thinking about it a little bit I believe I've landed on what's my favorite solution for this. When you need to spend Hope or mark Stress to use an appropriate magical ability, you can instead defile the area around you. The size depends on the amount. Radius chart for Stress and double it for Hope. You're literally causing Stress to the landscape or draining Hope from the world around you.

Yeah, second* thing I thought of when reading about stress was using it as a defiling mechanic. Clearing stress but exchanging for Fear (thus letting the GM brining in elemental complications) makes sense to me

* the first thing was stress = fatigue/exhaustion and how that might playout

 

[overgeeked]

Has anyone attempted to play online yet? And, if so, how did you do it? Demiplane and Roll20 or some other combination?

I'm not interested in Roll20 in the least bit, but I don't see anything out yet for Foundry (I know there's people working hard on this at the moment), Fantasy Grounds, or Alchemy (though this may be soon).

Technically, it looks like I could wing it by using Discord and some sort of die rolling app (think I saw something about Daggerheart being part of Avrae now), but I'm curious as to what other people are doing.

I'm not sure I understand the problem. Wherever you'd play any RPG would work just as well for Daggerheart.

 

[zakael19]

Has anyone attempted to play online yet? And, if so, how did you do it? Demiplane and Roll20 or some other combination?

I'm not interested in Roll20 in the least bit, but I don't see anything out yet for Foundry (I know there's people working hard on this at the moment), Fantasy Grounds, or Alchemy (though this may be soon).

Technically, it looks like I could wing it by using Discord and some sort of die rolling app (think I saw something about Daggerheart being part of Avrae now), but I'm curious as to what other people are doing.

We played the beta oneshot in Miro, which is where I run all my other more narrative games and have run OSE/Dolmenwood as well. I like the ability to quickly draw rough maps (works great with games where you just need relative positioning for same-paging), see everybody’s sheets constantly without doing anything more then scroll around, and drop images or sketch scenes quickly on the fly.

Not to everybody’s taste and doesn’t have built in dice stuff that works well, but my players all want to roll physical dice anyway!

 

[Tanek]

We played the beta oneshot in Miro, which is where I run all my other more narrative games and have run OSE/Dolmenwood as well. I like the ability to quickly draw rough maps (works great with games where you just need relative positioning for same-paging), see everybody’s sheets constantly without doing anything more then scroll around, and drop images or sketch scenes quickly on the fly.

Not to everybody’s taste and doesn’t have built in dice stuff that works well, but my players all want to roll physical dice anyway!

Thanks for the answer! Miro looks like a great tool.

You mention your players enjoying the act of rolling dice, does that mean that you played offline or did you use video conferencing as well?