Daggerheart, the latest fantasy RPG from Critical Role’s Darrington Press, releases at last on May 20. Books are now reaching hands, and the community can start rolling dice of Hope and Fear in the new, narrative-focused system. Many will still have questions, though. How familiar will this game feel for those who have only watched Critical Role or played DnD? Where is the game going next?
To answer these questions, we spoke to senior designer Spenser Starke and designer Rowan Hall. Our chat features deep dives into Daggerheart‘s design philosophy, plenty of love for the tabletop RPG community, and Starke’s desire to always play a little frog guy in his games.
WG: What are the key parts of Daggerheart’s identity as a fantasy RPG?
SS: Daggerheart is a heroic fantasy roleplaying game, so we’re really focused on the characters being our protagonists. The really exciting thing about Daggerheart for me is that, at its base, it encourages the GM and the players to collaborate, both in session zero to form the campaign and then at the table as play is occurring.
We have some very basic rules of the world that you need to know inherently by having ancestries and communities in the game. Beyond that, there is a lot of freedom for GMs and players to create their own world and campaign. In this game, we have an entire system for doing that.
One of the things that stands out most is that we have a bunch of maps that don’t have anything on them. They have a locations section at the bottom, so the players can take stuff from their backstory and connection questions and put those directly on the map during the session zero.
Everyone, GM included, can add things to the map and talk about what it is and why it’s exciting to them. The GM takes all of that to prep for their campaign by going through and finding the connective tissue.
RH: One of the experiences we were specifically driving towards was eliminating the fear that some new players might have about feeling like they have to memorize an encyclopedia of information. We learned this in Candela Obscura, and we carried it with us into Daggerheart.
Looking at the mythology that appears in Daggerheart and the structure of the gods, it was really important to me that it fit on one page. GMs could copy it, put it down on the table for their players, and then use that as a jumping-off point for the campaign or one-shot that everybody was excited about.
SS: For people that might be intimidated by creating a campaign whole cloth, one of the tools in the book really gives you a step-by-step on how to do that. The GM section goes over what to do next – how to form a campaign now you’ve done your session zero. Using that, we spend a lot of time talking about narrative, story structure, and campaign structure as much as we talk about mechanics for the game.
Another thing that’s really exciting for us is that we’ve included six campaign frames in the book, too, for if you want to jump into something that has a little more structure to it. If you want a subgenre emulator or you’re just excited about a certain kind of play, we’ve given you a jumping-off point, whether that’s more classic fantasy, with slight rules additions so you’re embracing that kind of campaign, or as big as Colossus of the Drylands, which is like Red Dead Redemption meets Shadow of the Colossus. That’s a Western-inspired campaign frame with mechanics for weapons like lassos and taking down big colossi.
What kind of player were you designing for when creating Daggerheart?
RH: There are a lot of tools in the book specifically aimed at new people who might have never picked up a TTRPG before. I hope that, equally, there are a lot of tools in the book to excite those of us who have been playing TTRPGs for decades. When we were building the tools for people to enjoy Daggerheart, we were operating on a spectrum of what would appeal to new players and what would excite seasoned players.
SS: We really wanted to make a game that we love and want to play. That’s something that has long campaign play opportunities, that can play up to 100 sessions or so. It also had to be easy enough to onboard, because we love to play with new players.
On top of that, I really love a narrative-forward style of play, sort of like Forged in the Dark or Powered By The Apocalypse games. I love the collaborative storytelling nature of them, and I love bringing people together in a unique writer’s room experience where we’re both storytellers and playing our characters.
I also wanted to make some cool terrains and minis to put on the table, so we wanted to make something that felt like it could do all of those things together. That’s where Daggerheart was born out of, and it’s aiming for people who love that mix. It sits in the middle space between Powered By The Apocalypse and Pathfinder.
RH: You can even see that in the designers we were lucky enough to collaborate with on the project. It was such an honor to work with John Harper [Forged in the Dark] and Meguey Baker [Powered By The Apocalypse].
There are fingerprints of people whose work we’ve admired forever all over the book, and some upcoming people too, like Felix Isaacs, who did Wildsea, and Tom Bloom, who did Lancer. All sorts of people who have been involved at every level bring together a game that sits in the beautiful space between more crunchy and more story-driven.
A lot of the Critical Role community is coming to Daggerheart having only played Dungeons and Dragons. What will be familiar for them, and what will stand out as different?
SS: It’s a game that’s about combat as much as it’s about heart and story. That’s where the name comes from. We try to balance those factors in a way that feels familiar to people who are used to watching Critical Role.
There’s also going to be classes that are very similar, though there are some that are a little bit different and original.
There’s also no initiative in Daggerheart. It functions very much like a Forged in the Dark or Powered By The Apocalypse game, where the GM is making moves on certain dice rolls and we’re passing play back and forth as a conversation. It all flows together in a way that supports the storytelling-first direction that Critical Role has really embraced over the last decade.
How has the Daggerheart you first dreamt up changed now that it’s ready for publication?
SS: Daggerheart was a lot of things before it ever came to the public eye. There was a time when the core dice were a little more Cortex-y in style, and then they moved into modifiers. From the beginning, I knew I wanted to have something that felt heroic. So, by doing a 2d12 system, where your dice curve is more of a mountain than it is flat, to me, feels heroic.
Over the course of the open beta, the mechanics changed as we got more feedback. We were also doing internal playtesting and honing in on what we were most excited for.
RH: By the time I started working on Daggerheart, it was a bit of a Michelangelo experience. The vision was very clear; you saw it in the stone, and it was just a process of whittling away to make sure that the game was what everyone imagined it would be. On a core level, the game has been so consistent about what it wants to be. It was just a question of speaking to the marble.
We are very lucky that, during the open beta, people really understood what we were driving at and gave us some wonderful notes to help get us there.
What are the challenges of designing an RPG that’s so reliant on cards?
RH: One of my favorite parts about working with a game that has cards is the challenge of simplifying. When we make features for domains, the card space is all we get. If it doesn’t fit on a card, then it’s not for Daggerheart. That’s a really fun challenge. Limitation, for me, is the mother of design.
SS: I come from a school of design that uses cards a lot because of how accessible they make the game. Daggerheart, from the beginning, had cards involved, because I wanted people to make their characters without ever having to open the book. You can open the book and learn how to play, but when we’re all sitting down to make characters, I want you to hand out this stuff and start building.
There’s something really evocative for me about looking through cards and picking an ancestry that feels cool. There are some people who are drawn to the mechanics of a certain ancestry, and some people just want to play a Ribbit so they can be a little frog boy. That’s me, that’s my jam. There’s so much value in leaning into what people are excited about.
How do you plan to expand and support the system beyond the release of the core rulebooks?
SS: We’re so honored that people are already wanting to play years-long campaigns. We could not feel more grateful to have a community that is so excited.
We’re currently working on stuff that comes next; that’s our whole focus right now. We’ll be taking a cue from the open beta, as we really want to know what fans want to see next as well.
There are very basic things that I’m sure people can imagine we’ll do in future that we are probably already working on. But the part that excites me is the thing that I don’t see. Once Daggerheart hits the community and people say ‘we really love this and want more of this’, we can listen to them and make new stuff. We always want to be listening. This is just the beginning – the launch is the start line, not the finish line.
RH: One of our pillars when designing the Daggerheart core rulebook was, to the absolute best of our ability, to make sure we were creating a strong foundation for the game so we could continue to build on it for many years to come. Having now put the finishing touches on the foundation, we can let it run.
SS: There were also a number of things that never made it to the open beta that we stroked out because we needed the core game to have the space to be strong at a foundational level. When I first made the game, there were 27 ancestries. It was too many to go through in the core system. There was a ton of stuff I threw at the wall in the first iteration of this, and we’re kind of saving these 50 other ideas for what Daggerheart could be down the road.
Got your copy of Daggerheart already? Let us know how campaign prep is going in the Wargamer Discord. Or, if you’re looking to play some more 5e, here’s all you need to know about DnD classes and DnD races.
Source: Wargamer
