Jacob Lewis
Ye Olde GM
I think it was the Campaign Frames that finally sold me on Daggerheart—or at least convinced me to buy in and explore what it was really offering. The idea of campaign framing isn’t new. Most GMs do some form of it, whether in collaboration with their group or not. But I’d never seen it defined so clearly, or presented as a deliberate procedure instead of just a pre-game conversation.
That clarity alone isn’t what impressed me, though. Like a lot of things in Daggerheart, the value isn’t just in the form—it’s in what the form enables. The Campaign Frames don’t just organize the beginning of a story; they open up space for a wider range of stories to be told.
The examples in the book showed that range explicitly. It wasn’t just “gritty fantasy vs heroic fantasy.” It was cowboys versus kaiju. It was surreal, strange, and highly variable. That was the moment I understood: this isn’t a system designed to support one tone or subgenre. It’s built to support choice—to let players and GMs determine how complex, grounded, or chaotic they want their game to be.
That flexibility runs through the rest of the rules, too. Rather than presenting a fixed economic model or detailed pricing lists, it abstracts wealth into something usable across wildly different settings. You’re not forced to reconcile item costs with a world that doesn’t use coinage—or invent a workaround. The system assumes you’ll shape those details yourself, and it gets out of your way.
What stands out most, though, is how each Campaign Frame invites players to co-create and personalize the setting through their characters. Even if you revisit the same Frame with a different group—or the same group with different characters—it produces a different story. Because the characters are the core. The Frame is a starting shape, not a boundary.
And that’s when I realized something else. There’s no implied setting baked into this game. No default world, no official cosmology you need to adopt or adapt. If you buy Daggerheart, you’re buying the system—not the lore. You can use the suggested default assumptions, but even those are presented with a light touch—meant to serve as a springboard, not a standard. That may seem small, but to me it’s a big deal. I already have settings I want to run. I have stories I want to tell. And this system, from its foundation, is built to support that—rather than selling me a world I have to work around.
Altogether, this told me what I really needed to know before deciding to invest in another game system: that everything I need is in one book. I wasn’t looking to start a new library of compendiums. I didn’t want to wait for more volumes to fill in the rest of the rules, or rely on a simplified starter set just to onboard new players. I wanted a complete system—one that could support the kinds of games I want to run without adding pressure to keep up with what comes next. And because of how the Campaign Frames are built—open-ended, adaptable, centered on the characters themselves—I knew I could start anywhere with minimal effort.
This book is about the game itself. And it is complete. One volume, fully equipped to play and build the kinds of stories I want to tell, the way I want to tell them; not alone, but with other players who wish to help tell and write those stories together.
That clarity alone isn’t what impressed me, though. Like a lot of things in Daggerheart, the value isn’t just in the form—it’s in what the form enables. The Campaign Frames don’t just organize the beginning of a story; they open up space for a wider range of stories to be told.
The examples in the book showed that range explicitly. It wasn’t just “gritty fantasy vs heroic fantasy.” It was cowboys versus kaiju. It was surreal, strange, and highly variable. That was the moment I understood: this isn’t a system designed to support one tone or subgenre. It’s built to support choice—to let players and GMs determine how complex, grounded, or chaotic they want their game to be.
That flexibility runs through the rest of the rules, too. Rather than presenting a fixed economic model or detailed pricing lists, it abstracts wealth into something usable across wildly different settings. You’re not forced to reconcile item costs with a world that doesn’t use coinage—or invent a workaround. The system assumes you’ll shape those details yourself, and it gets out of your way.
What stands out most, though, is how each Campaign Frame invites players to co-create and personalize the setting through their characters. Even if you revisit the same Frame with a different group—or the same group with different characters—it produces a different story. Because the characters are the core. The Frame is a starting shape, not a boundary.
And that’s when I realized something else. There’s no implied setting baked into this game. No default world, no official cosmology you need to adopt or adapt. If you buy Daggerheart, you’re buying the system—not the lore. You can use the suggested default assumptions, but even those are presented with a light touch—meant to serve as a springboard, not a standard. That may seem small, but to me it’s a big deal. I already have settings I want to run. I have stories I want to tell. And this system, from its foundation, is built to support that—rather than selling me a world I have to work around.
Altogether, this told me what I really needed to know before deciding to invest in another game system: that everything I need is in one book. I wasn’t looking to start a new library of compendiums. I didn’t want to wait for more volumes to fill in the rest of the rules, or rely on a simplified starter set just to onboard new players. I wanted a complete system—one that could support the kinds of games I want to run without adding pressure to keep up with what comes next. And because of how the Campaign Frames are built—open-ended, adaptable, centered on the characters themselves—I knew I could start anywhere with minimal effort.
This book is about the game itself. And it is complete. One volume, fully equipped to play and build the kinds of stories I want to tell, the way I want to tell them; not alone, but with other players who wish to help tell and write those stories together.
