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Introduction

Welcome to Daggerheart

Daggerheart is a collaborative fantasy roleplaying game of incredible magic and heroic adventure. During your journeys, you may find yourself rubbing elbows with nobles to investigate and stop an assassination plot, delving into an ancient dungeon to prevent an apocalyptic creature from breaking free, sailing across a vast ocean to face a terrifying sea monster, or preventing a precious relic from falling into the hands of a dangerous enemy. No matter the adventure your party embarks upon, Daggerheart provides the tools to tell a story that is both heartfelt and epic.

What is a Tabletop Roleplaying Game?

A tabletop roleplaying game, or TTRPG, is an interactive storytelling experience where players take on the roles of characters within a shared world and collaborate to tell a story about those characters. Daggerheart is meant to be played by three to six people—known as your group or table—with one person taking on the role of the game master (or GM) while the others each play a single character, referred to as a player character (or PC). The GM facilitates the story that takes shape around the PCs—they introduce rewards, complications, and consequences to the narrative, embody the story's other characters (also known as non-player characters or NPCs), and help the story progress each time you play together.

Like many roleplaying games, Daggerheart uses dice to determine the outcome of some uncertain events, providing an element of unpredictability to the results of choices you make. Even so, the game embraces player agency and imagination; the type of character you choose to play and the decisions you make about their background and experiences will make your odds better (or worse!) on those dice rolls.

What Kind of Roleplaying Game is Daggerheart?

Daggerheart is a heroic, narrative-focused experience that features combat as a prominent aspect of play. The system facilitates emotionally engaging, player-driven stories punctuated by exciting battles and harrowing challenges. The game takes a fiction-first approach, encouraging players and GMs to act in good faith with one another and focus on the story they're telling rather than the complexity of the mechanics. The rules provide structure when it's unclear how actions or moments will resolve within that story. The system takes a free-flowing approach to combat to avoid slowing the game down with granular rounds, and it doesn't rely on grid-based movement for maps and minis. These aspects coalesce to create a game that allows for the terrain and map-building that miniature-based systems are known for while facilitating a streamlined, narrative experience for players.

If you're looking for a TTRPG that tells heroic fantasy stories with a modern approach to mechanics, focusing on both epic battles and the emotional narrative of the characters who fight in them, you've come to the right place.

Daggerheart also utilises an asymmetrical design, meaning that it plays differently for the GM than it does for the players. Players roll two twelve-sided dice for their PCs' standard actions, including their attacks. The GM can make most moves without dice, but they roll a twenty-sided die for adversary moves that require a roll. This asymmetrical design is intended to help all participants contribute to a memorable experience for everyone at the table.

Heart of the Game

In Daggerheart, you and your fellow players all take turns describing what your characters do. The GM determines the consequences of those actions, then guides the group into collaboratively evolving the narrative because of those consequences. When the rules call for it, or when a situation demands, you'll roll the dice to inform what happens next. Depending on the result of the roll, the events of the ongoing story will unfold in new and unexpected ways.

There is no winning or losing in Daggerheart in the traditional "gaming" sense. The game is a collaborative storytelling experience, where the goal is to play out an incredible story together. Even if the characters fail to achieve their goals right away, make big mistakes, or even die, they never "lose." If a character dies, the party can look for a way to bring them back to life, or that player can make a new character for the party to meet along their journey. If the group fails to stop the villain from enacting a terrible plan, they might face the consequences of that failure and try to make it right. If they succeed, they may triumphantly win the day—or they might anger or embolden an even stronger enemy who retaliates. No matter what happens during the story, as long as you're working together to craft a narrative that is fun and exciting to everyone, you've already won.

Touchstones

Daggerheart derives inspiration from a variety of sources. Below is an abridged list of media the design team drew from while crafting this game.

TTRPGs: 13th Age from Pelgrane Press, Apocalypse Keys from Evil Hat Productions, Apocalypse World from Lumpley Games, Blades in the Dark from Evil Hat Productions, City of Mist from Son of Oak Game Studio, Cortex Prime from Fandom Tabletop, Cypher System from Monte Cook Games, Dishonored from Modiphius Entertainment, Dungeons & Dragons from Wizards of the Coast, Flee, Mortals! from MCDM Productions, For the Queen from Darrington Press, Genesys from Fantasy Flight Games, Lady Blackbird from One Seven Design, Masks: A New Generation from Magpie Games, Pathfinder from Paizo Publishing, Shadowrun from Catalyst Game Labs, The Quiet Year from Buried Without Ceremony, The Wildsea from Mythopoeia Games Publications, Slugblaster from Mythopoeia Games Publications.

Books: Sabriel by Garth Nix, A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Films and Television: The Dragon Prince, The Legend of Vox Machina, The Lord of the Rings, The Witcher, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Dark Crystal.

Video Games: Borderlands from Gearbox Software, Dragon Age: Inquisition from BioWare, The Elder Scrolls series from Bethesda Game Studios, Outriders from People Can Fly.

Special Appreciation

  • The Genesys System from Fantasy Flight Games was a major inspiration for the two-axis results of the Duality Dice.
  • Cypher System from Monte Cook Games and its GM Intrusions paved the way for spending Fear to interrupt a scene.
  • Among many other things, Wizards of the Coast's Dungeons & Dragons advantage/disadvantage system was particularly inspirational in the dice mechanics of this game.
  • 13th Age from Pelgrane Press developed Backgrounds that heavily inspired the Experience mechanic.
  • Blades in the Dark from Evil Hat Productions and Apocalypse World from Lumpley Games helped shape the narrative flow of the game, and their playbooks inspired a lot of the character sheet development.
  • The Wildsea from Mythopoeia Games Publications and its phenomenal section on Reaches provided inspiration for the Campaign Frames section of this book.
  • The design of Wizards of the Coast's Dungeons & Dragons fourth edition and the monster design of Flee, Mortals! from MCDM Productions informed the enemy types and ways of managing minions.
  • The Quiet Year from Buried Without Ceremony inspired the map-building section of this book's campaign guidance.
  • Apocalypse Keys from Evil Hat Productions informed the sample session zero structure.

Core Mechanics Overview

The dice players use in Daggerheart most commonly fall into two different categories—your Duality Dice and your damage dice. Your Duality Dice are two differently coloured twelve-sided dice (or d12s) that represent Hope and Fear. These dice embody the fate of the world and its effect on the characters' success. Your damage dice correspond to the weapon or spell your character wields, expressing the deadliness of a successful attack.

When you roll to see whether your character succeeds or fails at a task or challenge, you roll your Duality Dice and take the sum of their results, then add any bonuses your character has that apply to the action. If that total is equal to or higher than the Difficulty set by the GM, your character succeeds. If it's lower, they fail. You'll also tell the GM whether your Hope or Fear Die rolled higher, as the situation around you changes based on that result. We'll discuss this more in-depth in the "Core Mechanics" section of chapter 2.

Sessions and Campaigns

When the GM and players gather to play Daggerheart, that game is called a session. Each session is a small story, and if the group plays more sessions, those small stories become part of a larger narrative known as a campaign. Longer campaigns may be broken into arcs—multiple sessions collectively focused on a specific part of the story. If overthrowing a corrupt ruler is a campaign, recruiting allies from a neighbouring kingdom is an arc within that campaign.

Daggerheart is built to accommodate many kinds of stories. Your group might enjoy playing an open-ended campaign that lasts months, meeting every week to continue your characters' stories indefinitely, or you could designate a set number of sessions and play with a definite end point. Your group might enjoy a short ten-session romp with a party of characters before making new ones, or you may only want to play one session, known as a "one-shot." All of those options are wonderful ways to play—do what works best for your group.

The Golden Rule

The most important rule of Daggerheart is to make the game your own. The rules included in this book are designed to help you enjoy the experience at the table, but everyone has a different approach to interpreting rules and telling stories. The rules should never get in the way of the story you want to tell, the characters you want to play, or the adventures you want to have. As long as your group agrees, everything can be adjusted to fit your play style. If there's a rule you'd rather ignore or modify, feel free to implement any change with your table's consent.

Rulings Over Rules

While playing Daggerheart, the GM and players should always prioritise rulings over rules. This book offers answers for many questions your table may have about the game, but it won't answer all of them. When you're in doubt about how a rule applies, the GM should make a ruling that aligns with the narrative.

For example, Daggerheart has a weapon called a grappler that lets you pull a target close to you. If you try to use it to pull an entire castle, the weapon text doesn't forbid you from doing that—but it doesn't make sense within the narrative. Instead, the GM might rule that you pull a few bricks out, or pull yourself toward the wall instead.

Similarly, if your character does something that would logically result in immediate death—such as diving into an active volcano without protection—you might not get to make one of Daggerheart's death moves, which normally give you control of your character's fate in their final moments. This kind of consequence should be made clear before the action is completed, and it should always follow the logic of the world.

As a narrative-focused game, Daggerheart is not a place where technical, out-of-context interpretations of the rules are encouraged. Everything should flow back to the fiction, and the GM has the authority and responsibility to make rulings about how rules are applied to underscore that fiction.