Daggerheart Hope and Fear is a pretty much perfect follow-up sourcebook

Sequels are tough to nail, but Daggerheart has managed it. Darrington Press’ blew our socks off last year when it launched the narrative-first heroic fantasy game. And its first follow-up sourcebook, Hope and Fear, is everything an eager roleplayer could ask for.

In case you’ve not indulged in Daggerheart yet, here’s a very quick recap. Spenser Starke’s core system takes all the best bits from existing RPGs like D&D, Pathfinder, and Powered By The Apocalypse. The result of this experiment is a smooth, cinematic fantasy RPG where players combine cards from two Domains to play their preferred class.

At best, it’s a gorgeous, exciting new game with genuinely awesome ideas. At worst, its attempts at combat and character building occasionally clash with its narrative-focused design philosophy.

Hope and Fear doesn’t overhaul that base system too significantly, so the same play vibes persist, for better and worse. What it does offer is expansion via a horde of new character options, monsters, environments, and campaign frames.

Players will find the new classes most exciting. We saw plenty of them during playtesting, but these final versions are slightly more polished. What was good before has only gotten better – in most cases, at least.

Take the Warlock, for example, a fantastically thematic reimagining of a staple TTRPG class. The base class has consistent rerolls and a Patron’s Pact that grants a flavorful, genuinely useful resource in the form of Favor. You’ll spend this mostly on subclass abilities.

For the Pact of the Endless, that might mean tanking, healing, or debuffing enemies. This is a versatile, strong, and interesting character option. Or, you could go all in on dealing horrific damage as a Pact of the Wrathful Warlock – more specialized, but no less threatening. The Warlock is a strong contender for my new favorite Daggerheart class.

I still have plenty of love left over for the Witch and the Assassin, though. The first has the power to turn failures into successes with Fear (which pairs nicely with the new Dread domain – more on that later). It also gets a solid debuff in the form of Hex, plus the power to commune with a higher power to get narrative answers – incredibly useful in a roleplay-first game.

Subclass-wise, you’ll choose between the Hedge Witch and the Moon Witch. One casts spells using Knowledge, and the other Instinct, so be prepared for quite different-feeling builds.

Hedge Witches use consumables to heal and prevent damage, and they’re useful for defense at higher levels. Moon Witches, meanwhile, juggle party buffs with defensive abilities. Their mastery feature decides its effect based on a dice roll (a real design pet peeve of mine), but beyond this, both Witches feel consistently satisfying.

Assassins juggle Stress to use Marked for Death, a Sneak-Attack-like ability that adds d4s to their damage rolls against a particular target. Executioners up the damage capacity of the core class with several extremely aggressive (and effective) features. Poisoners play a more flexible role focused on debuffs, but it feels particularly thematic, and I’m as big a fan of this subclass as I am the stabby one.

The weakest of the new class options by far is the Brawler. It’s not bad, but its abilities are inconsistent in their usefulness.

This is obviously your muscly martial class, with a unique weapon that deals d8+d6 physical damage. Your second class feature is Combo Strike. It triggers after you roll damage on a successful attack, and it lets you roll a Combo Die over and over until your latest roll is lower than the one that came before. You total all the rolls and add them to your damage – explosive, but not always reliable. At least it only costs one Stress.

The Juggernaut tanks this class up with higher damage thresholds, the ability to throw enemies, and some solid crowd control options. I’m extremely partial to Eye for An Eye, which lets you mark a Stress when an enemy in melee damages you – forcing them to mark the exact same number of hit points.

And then we have the Martial Artist, by far my least favorite option. It gives you a range of Martial Arts stances to choose from, making it one of the more flexible characters to build. But the quality of these is extremely swingy – some brilliant, others barely worth considering.

One wobbly option aside, the class design is thrilling. Hope and Fear caters to many kinds of fantasy, and its new classes occupy pleasantly varied roles. This is helped by the Dread domain that fuels them. Its spells are all ultra-spooky, with a big focus on damage, debuffs, and defense.

For me, the most interesting aspect of its identity is that it does something the other domains rarely do. It interacts heavily with the GM’s Fear pool, basing extra damage on how much fear the GM has, or preventing them from gaining fear. That’s a level of meddling that could drastically change the outcomes of a fight that was otherwise going in the GM’s favor.

Hope and Fear expands character options further with three new ancestries and four six new communities. One of those ancestries actually had four sub-ancestries (because no elemental is a monolith), each with their own unique abilities. The perks for ancestries and communities are varied and useful (though not particularly game-breaking). And, as expected, Daggerheart provides plenty of stunning art and lore snippets to inspire play.

The most unusual new option is the Transformations, which offer ways to modify existing characters. You can now play as a Demigod, Ghost, Reanimated, Shapeshifter, Vampire, or Werewolf – spooky! (You’ll notice I’m using that word a lot.)

Each offers a benefit, from new ways to deal damage to improved rolls to the ability to phase through solid objects. Transformations all come with a downside, too, but these are vastly different in their severity levels.

A Demigod must mark a Stress or give the GM Fear every time they fail a roll, while the Shapeshifter only gets one benefit of their new form rather than all the ancestry’s features. Oh no, how terrible for them.

Still, these offer exciting new ways to tell stories that weren’t previously represented in the rules. I’m a big fan of the Reanimated’s ability to come back from death in exchange for a permanent hit point mark, and the Vampire’s thirst for blood is realized in a mechanically novel way.

Onto the GM’s side of the screen. There’s a huge number of new adversaries to spotlight. The art? Gorgeous. The playstyles? Varied (though Solo, Skulk, Standard, and Bruiser stat blocks hog slightly more page space). And the flavor? Honestly hilarious.

There’s an adversary that’s a clear reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Mothman is an actual adversary. I’ll give you three shots at guessing what a Fowlbear is. There’s an Event Environment that’s just called ‘Beach Day’. If there’s one thing Hope and Fear does well, it’s whimsy.

For the most part, the design is on-point, too. One thing Hope and Fear does brilliantly is boss fights. There’s a range of multi-phase adversaries to run, which has me itching to get back to the table. In a few cases, I wish the wording of more complex adversary abilities had been clearer, but these are rare.

My one major gripe is that, in many places, Daggerheart has unashamedly copied D&D’s homework. The Fowlbear may be hilarious (and hilariously illustrated), but it’s conceptually a carbon copy of something D&D has done before. This happens time and time again.

We have the Gobstalker, which is a legally distinct Beholder. The Ravenous Mockery similarly feels like D&D IP with a name change. Demon Lord Berzug looks and sounds suspiciously like Demogorgon. Oh, and because we need a Tiamat, we have Dragon Mother Mitera, a seven-headed dragon that shines every color of the rainbow.

I understand why Darrington Press has done this. There are many out there who will replace D&D with Dragonheart. Perhaps they prefer the narrative leaning of the Daggerheart system, but they want adventures in the exact same genre. Or maybe they have personal reasons for not wanting to patronize Wizards of the Coast.

Those people might rejoice at having a Daggerheart equivalent for their favorite fantasy monsters. And really, this imitation isn’t too different from borrowing more generic monster concepts. But for me, it feels cheap to take so specifically from another game’s worldbuilding. I want to see Daggerheart build heroic fantasy lore that feels unique.

Hope and Fear does at least achieve this in its campaign frames. These are delightful new spins on some of your favorite fantasy sub-genres. These frames are as detailed as they are creative, with each introducing its own sub-mechanics to bring the locations to life.

A floating wizard school in the sky I can get to via magical skateboard? A fated battle against a tyrannical weredragon wizard? A Soulslike monster hunting crawl through a luscious land plagued at night? A Daggerheart hex crawl through a vibrant, verdant apocalypse? Sign me the hell up.

In almost every area, Hope and Fear critically succeeds. It’s not a book that’ll change haters’ minds about the core system’s quirks. But, for established fans, it’s a must-buy expansion to the game you know and love.

Want to talk more about Daggerheart and other tabletop RPGs? We’re always keen to chat in the Wargamer Discord.

A copy of Hope and Fear was provided for review by the publisher.

Source: Wargamer