What do YOU plan on doing with Daggerheart?

[Ruin Explorer]

For it to be a true Dresden-like one would need vampire and werewolf ancestries, of course. I wonder if any of the existing ones could be easily reskinned as such.

I think the question to be asked here is what role vampires and werewolves fill in your setting, what do you want from them? Do you want them to be primarily scary antagonists, with PCs as less-powerful members? Do you want them to be just people dealing with difficult issues? Do you want the werewolves to shift voluntarily/at will? Do you want vampires to be hurt by the sun, or is the default that the thin-blooded PC vampires are daywalkers? Or perhaps PC vampires default to having a ring that protects them?

I think you need a pretty firm conception of what you want from them and what you're intending to do with them before you can start designing them.

Also are they ancestries? Presumably one is not born a vampire, though born a werewolf is pretty common, but again not always the case.

If I was just going with "I want them to be about the same power level as existing ancestries", I'd be looking at "dilute" versions of both - i.e. some kind of toned-down werewolf where you didn't have a Crinos-form equivalent, you were just a person who could turn into a wolf (giving you the T1 predator template from Druids maybe, it's rather wolf-esque) and healed fast, so on a short or long rest you added +2 to your rolls to heal HP. With vampires I'd probably make them thin-blooded-type neonates, and I'd consider what aspect of vampirism I wanted to emphasize - In a modern-day setting I'd probably go with blood-drinking as one of them and to avoid disturbing issues make it only possible to be used on consenting targets by the PC ancestry-type vampires (NPC vampires, all bets are off), and say they don't need to eat/drink, but they do need to drink blood at least once a week or something, and that doing so does 1 HP of damage to the consenting target but also heals 3 HP on the vampire, and they can gain this benefit 1/long rest or something. For their other ability I'd probably be looking at something combat-related - would you want to emphasize their speed, strength, toughness?

I do think generally Daggerheart would make a very strong base for an Urban Fantasy setting, and modern guns would be pretty trivial to add (just ignore the bad design on the revolver and make them work more like the magic revolver or something).

 

[Reynard]

I think the question to be asked here is what role vampires and werewolves fill in your setting, what do you want from them? Do you want them to be primarily scary antagonists, with PCs as less-powerful members? Do you want them to be just people dealing with difficult issues? Do you want the werewolves to shift voluntarily/at will? Do you want vampires to be hurt by the sun, or is the default that the thin-blooded PC vampires are daywalkers? Or perhaps PC vampires default to having a ring that protects them?

I think you need a pretty firm conception of what you want from them and what you're intending to do with them before you can start designing them.

Also are they ancestries? Presumably one is not born a vampire, though born a werewolf is pretty common, but again not always the case.

If I was just going with "I want them to be about the same power level as existing ancestries", I'd be looking at "dilute" versions of both - i.e. some kind of toned-down werewolf where you didn't have a Crinos-form equivalent, you were just a person who could turn into a wolf (giving you the T1 predator template from Druids maybe, it's rather wolf-esque) and healed fast, so on a short or long rest you added +2 to your rolls to heal HP. With vampires I'd probably make them thin-blooded-type neonates, and I'd consider what aspect of vampirism I wanted to emphasize - In a modern-day setting I'd probably go with blood-drinking as one of them and to avoid disturbing issues make it only possible to be used on consenting targets by the PC ancestry-type vampires (NPC vampires, all bets are off), and say they don't need to eat/drink, but they do need to drink blood at least once a week or something, and that doing so does 1 HP of damage to the consenting target but also heals 3 HP on the vampire, and they can gain this benefit 1/long rest or something. For their other ability I'd probably be looking at something combat-related - would you want to emphasize their speed, strength, toughness?

I do think generally Daggerheart would make a very strong base for an Urban Fantasy setting, and modern guns would be pretty trivial to add (just ignore the bad design on the revolver and make them work more like the magic revolver or something).

I have a setting I have used with both Monster of the Week and Savage Worlds wherein many creatures and people from Fantasyland poured in to modern Earth as regugees when The Big Bad took over. I would have to tweak it since the lack of a "manasphere" on Earth made drawing magical energy from items and monsters necessary for casting, but I might fiddle with it. In this case, all the DH ancestries would work fine, because the place they came from was basically generic fantasy world #7651.

 

[Arilyn]

That is a good idea.

For it to be a true Dresden-like one would need vampire and werewolf ancestries, of course. I wonder if any of the existing ones could be easily reskinned as such.

It would be easy to reskin or just mix up ancestry abilities to make your own.

 

[overgeeked]

It would be easy to reskin or just mix up ancestry abilities to make your own.

Exactly. There are 18 ancestries with 2 traits each. If you follow the top/bottom restriction that’s 324 possible combinations with those traits alone. Actually tweaking what’s there with slight trait changes also further breaks things wide open. To say nothing of actually homebrewing new traits or whole ancestries.

 

[TwoSix]

That is a good idea.

For it to be a true Dresden-like one would need vampire and werewolf ancestries, of course. I wonder if any of the existing ones could be easily reskinned as such.

Infernis could definitely be used for White Court vampires or Red Court infected; full Red Court and Black Court should probably be restricted to antagonists.

Werewolves (like Billy and gang) might make sense as a reskinned class/subclass, more than an ancestry. A Loup-Garou should definitely be an antagonist, and you can probably gloss over the lycanthropes from book 2; they never show up again (I think) and were kinda half-baked anyway.

 

[John R Davis]

Had a session zero rolling up pcs. Took about 2 hours all in with world creation and such, so about standard for a PBTA style game
Equally mentally exhausting, but much fun and creative, like all these styles of games
Created a Galapago wordsmith bard from a Sly background. Favoured Codex over Grace for my 2 powers cards.
Played an intro of a simple first adventure about escorting an item to a resistance. Gameplay very familiar to us and we have played a lot of "token" based games lately.
We picked the Wildwood setting. Really like the initiative and I do love a D12
Looked forward to next session

 

[John R Davis]

I may have also just ordered a copy.

 

[Reynard]

I'm still trying to find just the right campaign frame for Daggerheart, especially since I plan to run it at at least one regional con this fall (Carnage on the Mountain in Killington, VT). I am starting to gravitate toward something with a Starfinder or at least masters of the Universe vibe. What would you do to incorporate strong sci-fi elements into DH's inherent high fantasy milieu?

 

[zakael19]

I'm still trying to find just the right campaign frame for Daggerheart, especially since I plan to run it at at least one regional con this fall (Carnage on the Mountain in Killington, VT). I am starting to gravitate toward something with a Starfinder or at least masters of the Universe vibe. What would you do to incorporate strong sci-fi elements into DH's inherent high fantasy milieu?

Motherboard’s Frame has you covered .

I think you need to do a little more player up front agenda stuff (it has player facing “here’s how to make your stuff tech), but it’ll work.

 

[Reynard]

So I am just going to do some light brainstorming here. Feel free to chime in.

I want to create a Campaign Frame that mixes fantasy and technology. it has always been a go-to for me (probably from being an 80s kid and growing up with He-Man and Thundercats, among other things). I have run multiple successful Starfinder games, as well as other genre mashups, and I feel like Daggerheart can totally do it.

I like the idea of the single world that is a marriage of tech and magic, and I don't necessarily want an explicit conflict between the two. Daggerheart has a lot of playable ancestries which is good for this sort of thing: most of the inspirational media I would reach toward also has "Mos Eisly Cantina" level variety.

I think I want it to take plac eon one world rather than in an interstellar or interplanetary settings -- but maybe it WAS an interplanetary setting prior to play. Maybe it was a colony world of some sort for a very diverse science-fantasy star empire and then the warp gates went down or something? I like the idea of a slightly post apocalyptic feel, but without it being completely grungy like Fallout. Rather, stuff is just falling apart because the colony never had the resource extraction or manufacturing capacity of the galactic civilization at large.

So maybe this ws a big giant planet at some sort of interstellar ley line nexus. lots of members of the "Federation" set down colonies here for various reasons, and surely it had at least one if not a few native species. For a while everything is fine but then poof the method of interstellar travel is gone. or maybe the world and its star are suddenly cut off from the galaxy. Or maybe the whole place was wallowed by a black hole. Whatever happened, the world is cut off and decaying tehcnology is the most important thing to fight over.

Where does this leave the PCs? Probably the kind of folks that go looking for old tech to sell to those people willing to pay.

Thoughts?