Core Guidance¶

In this section, you'll find some core guidance on how to run Daggerheart:

• GM Principles
• GM Best Practices
• Pitfalls To Avoid

These three sections provide a foundation to help you get the most out of this game. The "GM Principles" are your guiding star—when in doubt, return to these principles. The "GM Best Practices" provide examples for you to follow, while "Pitfalls to Avoid" shows you what to stay away from when GMing Daggerheart.

As you read, don't forget "The Golden Rule" on page 7.

Whether you are a first-time GM, a veteran behind the screen, or anything in between, we encourage you to embrace the parts of this chapter that resonate with you and modify portions that don't.

GM Principles¶

Daggerheart stands on the shoulders of a decades-long tradition of fantasy adventure TTRPGs that traces back to the beginning of the form as we know it. This game shares many characteristics with its predecessors—an attention to dramatised combat, familiar fantasy ancestries and archetypes, common touchstones from popular culture and folklore, and more. In addition, as you can see in the "Touchstones" section in the introduction, Daggerheart draws inspiration from a variety of TTRPGs and other media beyond the fantasy adventure genre.

Daggerheart prioritises and provides the tools for telling a certain kind of heroic fantasy story. The system is focused on building collaborative, character-focused stories full of emotion, and it weaves the narrative through the entire experience, including its combat. Battle comes alive when the dramatic beats and rhythm highlight the conflicting motivations of combatants, when the characters' bonds impact their decisions in the fight, and when there is a goal beyond simply killing every combatant. Daggerheart truly shines when the battles against adversaries are a dramatic beat in a larger, emotionally grounded story about the wants and needs of the characters.

Following these GM principles will help the whole table have the best possible experience playing this game:

• Begin and end with the fiction.
• Collaborate at all times, especially during conflict.
• Fill the world with life, wonder, and danger.
• Ask questions and incorporate the answers.
• Make every roll important.
• Play to find out what happens.
• Hold on gently.

Begin and End with the Fiction¶

"The fiction" refers to the story being created as you play. Use the fiction to drive mechanics—for example, when to call for rolls, which GM moves to use, what Difficulty a roll should be, or whether it should have advantage or disadvantage. Daggerheart's rules exist to facilitate collaborative storytelling, so the flow of play should begin with narrative and lead to mechanics when needed. The GM then connects the results of the mechanics back to the fiction so play can continue smoothly.

Collaborate at All Times, Especially During Conflict¶

When you're the GM, the players are your collaborators and their characters are the protagonists of the campaign. You're all working together to tell an exciting, memorable story where heroes face incredible odds and often win in the end. Antagonise player characters and GM should exist only in the fiction of the game, through the actions of NPCs and opposition within the narrative.

Neither the PCs nor the players are your "enemy." They're the opponents of the adversaries you play, but you and the players are on the same side: the side invested in telling an amazing story together. When presenting antagonists and challenges, your main job is to balance presenting credible threats with maintaining the trust of the players so that the collaborative process can succeed.

Part of collaboration is being a fan of the players and a fan of their characters. Being a fan of the players means consciously including story elements and themes they've expressed interest in. It also means giving them the benefit of the doubt when they forget something small—especially something that their character wouldn't forget. Being a fan of the characters means that while you'll make their life challenging, up to and potentially including death, you're never rooting for them to lose—you're working with the players to ensure that the characters' story is exciting and the environment around them is behaving with internal consistency.

Fill the World with Life, Wonder, and Danger¶

Daggerheart is a game of action, adventure, and high fantasy. One of your biggest jobs as the GM is to present a world worthy of heroic tales. When running a player-driven game, you can take the characters' details, backgrounds, connection questions, and worldbuilding notes your players provided both in and out of your session zero (see the upcoming "Session Zero and Safety Tools" section on page 169) and use those as a palette to paint an exciting world. Fill it with vibrant adventures that showcase rich cultures, take the PCs to wondrous places, and introduce them to dangerous creatures. Strive to ground all of this in a place that honours the motivations and personhood of everyone, from preeminent high nobility and demigods to humble farmers and artisans.

Ask Questions and Incorporate the Answers¶

In Daggerheart, the GM doesn't have to do all the heavy lifting in terms of worldbuilding; we encourage you to share narrative authority with the players. Many players will be drawn more fully into the story when you empower them to add their own touches and details to your shared world.

When the party enters a character's hometown, you might invite that player to describe the local market. Rather than narrating a character's deadly blow on a critical success, you can ask the player to take the spotlight and detail their triumph. In dramatic or even commonplace moments, you might ask questions about a character's motivations, emotions, and history, then connect the answers to the current moment.

Some groups may want to go even further, closing the gap in narrative authority between players and GM by letting players take authorship over entire regions or nations. Your players' involvement shows their interest in the story—so your best response is to respect their investment and fold their contributions into the tale. As the GM, it's your job to maintain the integrity of the world and make adjustments when needed, but ensuring that the players' ideas are included results in a narrative that supports the whole group's creativity.

Make Every Roll Important¶

Because the GM can choose to make a move in response to a player's failed roll or a result with Fear, and since every roll generates Hope or Fear, only ask the players to roll during meaningful moments to ensure that every roll contributes to the story. Daggerheart is designed for cinematic play, where you provide information freely and allow characters to succeed at tasks in line with their skills, the moments where characters do roll carry more risk and weight. Failures should create heartbreaking complications or unexpected challenges, while successes should feel like soaring triumphs!

Play to Find Out What Happens¶

Daggerheart thrives when the focus is on the emotional journey of the PCs and the GM leaves room for their impact. You're not playing toward a specific story—the overarching plot of your campaign will emerge when you collaborate with the players to explore the characters' stories, the world, and major events.

Actively create room to be surprised by what the characters will do, the choices they'll make, and the people they'll become. Try to prepare situations without expectations about the solutions the players will find or create. While preparing adversaries and appropriate maps can help make for exciting scenes, always know you can adjust or completely throw out plans to follow inspiration when it strikes at the table.

Hold On Gently¶

Improvisation and storytelling isn't always perfect, and that's okay. Hold on gently to the fiction, enough so that you don't lose the pieces that matter, but not so tightly that the narrative has no room to breathe. Let yourself make mistakes and make changes. Smooth the edges and shape them to fit the story. You'll be the final arbiter and editor, but don't worry if you need to go back and revisit or retroactively change something that came before.

GM Best Practices¶

The GM Principles give you guidance on what to do; meanwhile, the GM Best Practices in this section will help show you how to do it. Think of the principles as the guiding stars for your game's ship, and the practices are the sails, ropes, and oars the ship uses to traverse that route.

• Cultivate a curious table.
• Gain your players' trust.
• Keep the story moving forward.
• Cut to the action.
• Help the players use the game.
• Create a meta conversation.
• Tell them what they would know.
• Ground the world in motive.
• Bring the game's mechanics to life.
• Reframe rather than reject.
• Work in moments and montages.

Cultivate a Curious Table¶

Tantalise players with a suspicious mist-littered under a branch's breadth, illustrate the sign of a lingering magical threat shimmering among the trees, hint at future danger looming over the distant horizon. Throw out hooks and see what catches their interest. Foster an environment of creative inquiry at the table and allow that curiosity to lead you to incredible places.

Gain Your Players' Trust¶

Trust is essential for a successful game of Daggerheart. The GM trusts the players to represent their characters' actions thoughtfully while keeping the table's shared goals in mind. The players trust the GM is acting in good faith—that when you're introducing challenges and doling out consequences, you're doing so with their interests in mind.

Make promises and then follow through on them. Maybe an innkeeper tells you they heard strange sounds coming from the basement at night. When the PCs go to the basement that evening, give them something interesting to find. Let players' hunches come to fruition when you can—let them feel like their understanding of the world is correct even if it's incomplete. Perhaps the dangerous person they're tracking did come through the shop just visited, or the ancient book they're seeking can be found in the library from a PC's backstory; the party is now headed toward. When resolving an action, deliver on the expectations you set when you called for the roll. If you tell the PC that a successful Agility Roll will let them jump from their airship to another, when they succeed, let them do it.

This also means admitting when you misstep or misspeak, and checking in with your players when you're unsure what they intended. If you didn't realise a player was expecting to bypass the entire patrol of guards with a single roll, you might back the scene up and re-establish the stakes. Alternatively, you might just let them know you'll be more clear next time and allow them to sneak by the patrol this time.

Keep the Story Moving Forward¶

Every time a player makes an action roll, the story should move forward, success or failure. On a failure, the GM says how the world responds and keeps the story moving. This is often referred to as "failing forward." A character might not get what they want if the roll goes poorly, but the story advances through escalation, new information, or some other change in circumstances.

Cut to the Action¶

Heroic fantasy stories consist of dramatic scenes, travel montages, and downtime moments around a campfire as the heroes decompress and prepare for what's ahead. If the travel between two places won't result in danger or interesting challenges and everyone is excited to press forward, you can cut ahead to the action by saying something like, "So, you travel to Oldstone. Instead of playing this out and doing long rests, just clear all your marked Hit Points, Stress, and Armour Slots. We pick up on the edge of town after two long days on the road. It's only twilight, but you haven't seen anyone in any of the outlying farms. There's no sound coming from the tavern just ahead on your right. What do you do?"

When a scene feels like it's dragging or going in circles, you can cut to a new scene to keep the narrative moving, letting the players know they can flash back to the details of the plan or get their story straight later.

Note that action doesn't always mean combat. Action can be tense political drama as the party tries to maintain an alliance hanging by a thread. It can be navigating an archmagic-warded and trapped hedge maze. It can be an emotional scene between a character and an NPC from their past. "Action" simply means any time there is tension and uncertainty—situations that challenge the characters.

If the PCs have an enemy on the ropes and the players' interest seems to be wavering, go ahead and have the foe run off or surrender. Alternatively, just ask the players when they finish out the fight. You should do your best to not let a scene become a slog when everyone feels obligated to see it through, even when no one is having fun. Part of being the GM is knowing which moments to focus on and which to push off-screen.

Help the Players Use the Game¶

If you're the GM, there's a good chance that you're the person who has spent the most time learning Daggerheart's rules. Thus, you are best equipped to help your table understand how to play. Help players reach the point where they see the rules as a toolkit used to tell the story together, not as an obstacle that stands between them and enjoying the experience of play.

The GM plays the opposition to the characters, but they're working with the players to tell the story. If the players are missing something obvious or seem to be forgetting an ability, don't be afraid to guide them to it. The better an understanding the players have of the rules and mechanics, the better they're equipped to face increasingly difficult situations and find clever ways to solve problems.

Create a Meta Conversation¶

As the GM, you should ensure players always feel comfortable shifting out of character to discuss something. Whether as creative collaborators or friends enjoying a game together, players should feel empowered to utilise safety tools during the game or ask for clarifications concerning the story or rules.

Tell Them What They Would Know¶

While the characters live in the fictional world and can utilise all their senses to experience it, the players only know what is established by your descriptions. Help the players by sharing details about their environment, giving them critical information, and offering facts their characters would easily know or have already discovered. For example, three players will all imagine a "wizard's tower" differently, so include the specific details that will shape their understanding of this particular wizard's tower. In many cases, if you don't describe something, it doesn't exist in the minds of the other people at your created table.

If there is information in a scene that characters would be able to perceive just by being in the space, don't gate those details behind a roll. For instance, if a PC asks about a desk or chest within the tower that the wizard might use to store important notes, you can explain that the desk is clean and there are no drawers, but there is a large bookshelf filled with scrolls and stacks of paper. This is a detail the character could easily see without effort—you don't need to ask the player to roll.

Ground the World in Motive¶

The characters in Daggerheart are driven by their motivations. An ambitious baroness wants to gain status and increase her sphere of influence, so she acts to extend her power. A large swamp serpent is motivated by hunger and safety, so they hunt suddenly, but they might not chase them beyond the muddy water if they're sated.

Each adversary stat block suggests a couple of general motives, but when you're depicting important NPCs, consider both their short-term and long-term goals. A renowned thief might be most immediately driven by a desire to steal crown jewels from a caravan, but their ultimate goal is to avoid capture by the king's guard—when both of these motivations impact their decisions, this creates a multi-dimensional character.

The players might not always know a character's true motives, but if you keep motivation in mind, you can depict the world with depth and consistency. When you hint at or reveal an NPC's motives, the players can push and pull on the NPC's hopes and fears to create dynamic bonds.

Actions without motivation can feel like choreography. When a supposed ally betrays the party, your story will hit harder if the players understand their motivations, truly making the betrayal both sudden and (in retrospect) inevitable.

Bring the Game's Mechanics to Life¶

Set a good example of how fiction and mechanics work together to enhance the game experience. For example, when an incoming storm will bring disaster to the nearby port town, place a countdown (see the upcoming "Countdowns" section on page 162) on the table labelled "The storm ravages Port Emerald" to show that the threat is real.

Mechanics and storytelling accelerate each other in nearly every aspect of the game. When a PC rolls a failure with Fear, go hard with your description of the consequence to convey the gravity of the fallout, demonstrating the difference between a failure with Hope and one with Fear. Embody the enemy's fatigue and desperation as they march their last Stress but continue to goad the party on. If the heroes are ambushed by a large band of raiders, lay out your battlement and set down figures for all fourteen enemies to show how outmatched the party is. Wherever possible, let the mechanics of the game drive the story you're telling and let the fiction you've created reinforce the mechanics you're using.

Reframe Rather Than Reject¶

If a player's suggestion or description is generally implausible or out of sync with what has been established in the game, try to find a way to reframe the situation and work with them rather than rejecting their idea outright. You might ask the table what it would take to accomplish this implausible task, or call out a more workable part of the suggestion and encourage the player to build on that aspect.

Example: "Well, you might not be able to fly up to the platform using the telekinesis spell in your grimoire, but there are plenty of large rocks here you could levitate around if you wanted."

Work in Moments and Montages¶

When framing a scene or playing out a beat of the story, think about moments and montages. If the stakes are high and you want to zoom in on the flash of blades or the coded language of courtly flirtation, you're working in moments. Give those powerful, climactic moments their due, lingering on the emotion and giving players time to savour the scene. However, not every part of the story needs to be told in moments-by-moment description or full scenes. In those cases, consider using montage, a sequence of short descriptions or a summary that establishes what happens without lingering on the individual moments. Montage can be used for actions that take place over minutes, hours, or days.

Example: "You spend the evening working the crowds to find leads on the Scorpion Society, but I don't think we need to play it all out. Tell us a little about what that looks like and then make a Presence Roll."

Pitfalls to Avoid¶

Like any game that relies on collaboration, your Daggerheart campaign will be impacted by the tactics and behaviours of the people at the table. Here are a few areas where hiccups are likely to occur when running Daggerheart, and ways to help your games run more smoothly if you encounter them.

• Undermining the heroes
• Always telling the players what to roll
• Letting scenes drag
• Singular solutions
• Overplanning
• Hoarding Fear

Undermining the Heroes¶

Even at level 1, the heroes possess both talent and experience. This is a heroic fantasy game, and so the characters are assumed to be skilled in the basics of adventuring.

When a roll doesn't go well, things go badly and the character doesn't get what they want. Rather than describing the PCs being incompetent, it's often better to show how the failure was impacted by their target's prowess, environmental factors, or unexpected surprises. An easy way to make this work is to describe the cool or smart move the character was making, then say "But..." and narrate a surprise, complication, or escalation.

Example: "Haie slices through the air with quick grace, aimed perfectly at the guard's shoulder. But she reacts just fast enough to bring up her heft of her mace to block your blow, then swings her weapon to try to pin you against the wall. She's a fury faster than a random guard at an outpost like this should be. What's a soldier with her skill doing all the way out here?"

If the group has decided on a more comical tone, this guidance might not apply, but the default for Daggerheart is to assume the PCs are competent adventurers and make the story exciting by depicting capable heroes struggling with extraordinary challenges.

Always Telling the Players What to Roll¶

Daggerheart's collaborative approach encourages players to express their character's personalities through creative problem-solving. In some situations, there might really only be one trait that's appropriate to roll; for example, traversing a slippery bridge is almost always going to be an Agility Roll. But in many situations, you can give the players the freedom to decide how they're going to handle a challenge and what trait they want to use to accomplish the roll.

Example: Stella, the GM, says: "The spellfirer on the gnoll hurt just broke the enchantment keeping your airship aloft. You've all going to need to give me a roll to deal with the imminent fall. What do you do?"

Aliyah says, "I'm going to jump off the ship, grab a hold of the bat to climb up, and wrestle the spellfirer out of the saddle. Can I do that with Agility?"

Nolan says, "I want to make a Finesse Roll using my Pirate Experience to cut one of the smaller sails free and use it like a parachute."

Letting Scenes Drag¶

Ideally, scenes should be focused, carrying the momentum of the story forward. Each roll should progress the narrative and build or resolve tension. At the natural conclusion of a scene, when the table energy is flagging, or when the players or characters are talking in circles, consider shaking up the scene or reframing it and cutting away to a new one to maintain that momentum. In social situations, prompt them to action by making a relevant GM move: introduce new information, foreshadow future danger, or something similar. In a combat that's dragging, remember not all conflicts need to end with the enemy's death—change things up or create a dramatic resolution, such as an escape, a natural disaster, or an intervention by an authoritative power.

Singular Solutions¶

If the GM has exactly one idea in mind for how the PCs can solve a given problem, it can become challenging if the players get excited about another answer. You might have good reason for why the solution you have in mind is the best option, but if the players have a clever idea, it's often smart to adjust in the moment and figure out how to make their approach work.

Puzzles are a great example of a situation where a singular solution can cause problems. Everyone's minds work in different ways, and a puzzle or riddle with only one "right" answer can shut down interesting alternatives. If the players get bogged down or frustrated with a puzzle or scene, consider finding a way to move things along or adjust the situation to let the character's actions advance the story. This might involve showing your hand to give the players more context or checking in to ask how they're feeling about a scene.

Overplanning¶

Daggerheart is designed to be played with a great deal of improvisation to allow the players a large amount of creative agency—the group builds and discovers the world together. The game is also built to be player driven, where the PCs' backgrounds and connections serve as the primary fuel for the plot. For these reasons, we recommend leaving space for the story to breathe.

The game works better when more preparation time goes toward allowing the characters to explore rather than scripting entire scenes and a set progression of story beats. Every GM's style is different, and you may find that you benefit with more time spent on forms of preparation that allow you to utilise player agency and creativity.

Your players will often surprise you with daring or risky actions you could never anticipate. When these great ideas come up, read the energy of the table and see if they're all excited about this new direction, and what opposition or narrative responses might feed their enthusiasm. It's okay to tell your players: "That took me by surprise. How about a quick ten minute break while I think about how this exciting change will play out?"

Hoarding Fear¶

Because you gain Fear any time a PC rolls with Fear, as well as during downtime, you'll often have a stockpile of Fear to draw on when you need it. Do your best to spend that Fear when you have the opportunity. Spending more Fear at the start of a combat or during a big moment can generate a lot of tension and set the stakes. This helps give shape to the scene, where the PCs are on the ropes, being reactive not proactive as they fight to get their footing. Then, as they get their equilibrium, they become proactive, directly pursuing their objectives. Once they've made some strides toward those objectives, they may roll with Fear. This creates an opening for you to make another Fear move to complicate the scene.

This back-and-forth creates a dynamic scene, keeping the PCs on their toes and ultimately making the result all the more satisfying whether it's a hard-earned victory or a heartbreaking defeat.