Daggerheart Core Set

by Spenser Starke, Rowan Hall, Matthew Mercer

Genres: Fantasy, Role Playing Games, Games

366 pages, Hardcover

Published June 3, 2025

Reviews

[Gerry Sacco · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was exceptionally put together. I don't know that I've ever seen a TTRPG book be this good from top to bottom before. Fantastic for beginners and experienced alike.

The accessibility and disability section was really impressive. Also having contributors who are disabled themselves was a really nice surprise. Seeing invisible diseases and disabilities mentioned made me really happy. The care involved in this book, is just top notch.

Campaign frames along with their respective maps were outstanding and I'm honestly not sure which I will start with, because several fit my group perfectly.

This is a really well designed game. everyone should be really proud.

And the art... my gosh the art. 5 stars and beyond.

Also shout out to Darrington Press as a whole. The amount you worked with, and actually listened to your beta testers, is truly commendable. Companies should take notes of your entire process.

[Kevin Leung · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to give it 5 stars because I love the system, and the art is great. I guess my knock down to 4 is to see how well the system holds up over time, and I’m not sure you actually need to read this compared to just the SRD

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book was really interesting. I come from a D&D 5e background so a lot of my thoughts will be in comparison to that mental context.

The combination of extra mechanical crunch for the sake of more customization options paired with streamlining for the sake of story-first narratives struck a neat balance. From the perspective of always being the DM/GM, I appreciate the duality dice and the fear/hope mechanics. Pair that with the addition of stress and there are a lot more resources and levers to push and pull on when creating with friends (not everything is about depleting HP).

I think what I enjoyed most about the book was reading their takes on encounter balance, mechanizing scenes, and campaign frames. It highlighted for me how mechanics can be used to enhance narrative and turn just about anything into a piece of the larger storytelling puzzle.

4 stars instead of 5 because I felt there were a few too many typos (double-commas in a list) and grammatical errors (correctly spelled words that were incorrect in context and other subject/verb disagreement). I understand that it's bound to happen in almost any printed media, but there was one section in particular where I doubted that it had been proofread at all. So that pushed me a bit over the edge. I'd give it 4.5 stars if the review system would let me.

That being said, still highly recommend as a story-focused alternative to other TTRPGs.

[Abdulrahman W Alawadhi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fresh take on narrative-focused storytelling in a Table Top Role-Playing Game System that works to an insanely fun gameplay loop.
The Hope and Fear mechanics lend themselves to being both loose rules that favour telling a story, and also rules to facilitate number crunching gaming so both types of players can feel satisfied and find their fun.

I ran their quickstart adventure from their website, and my players heavily enjoyed themselves, spending almost an hour after the game discussing the rules, player choices, abilities, and combinations players can make. One player outright said they preferred Daggerheart over our main TTRPG system of play.
There is a lot of potential to go from here, for players and GMs. As a GM, the many different tools I can use to further the fiction definitely excite me, and one of the campaign setting frames has definitely caught my interest; I hope to one day run it for players!

However, some of the rules and mechanics aren't clearly defined. This is done in favour of the GM and players deciding how they want to use those rules, but without a clear baseline, both GMs and players are left confused on how to proceed. This meant the game had to pause as we scoured the book for additional rulings or clearer messaging. It also meant that in the game, the consequences that occurred felt cheap as we didn't know if it was supposed to happen this way or not.

Overall, I'm very happy with Daggerheart and am looking forward to playing more of it with family and friends.
Kudos to Darrington Press and their Daggerheart team for creating such a fun table-top system to share with my loved ones!

[Anas Alrowaili · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book — very well put together and explains the game clearly while keeping a lighthearted tone. I managed to finish it surprisingly quickly considering how much information it contains. I have to say, it’s inspirational and really sparks creativity. Trying the Daggerheart system was a very different experience from D&D, and honestly, I like it more. That’s what made me want to go through the book in detail so I could GM my own games.

The book doesn’t shy away from telling you the inspiration behind its mechanics or the worlds it provides, and I love that. It gives you a step-by-step guide for running a campaign or playing, and they even provide the cards and character sheets for free. I really appreciate that it’s not built around microtransactions but made for the love of TTRPGs.

4.5 out of 5 — highly recommended.

[Nunya · Rating 4 out of 5]

the fact that I sat down to read this and did not for DnD says enough honestly

[Alacrity17 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not DnD. This is a different set of rules for people who want to focus on storytelling, world building and creativity.

The mechanics of the game are easy to learn but also a set away from the concept of Hit pints are everything and armour makes you harder to hit. By breaking the system down into HP, Stress, Armour and Damage Thresholds the rules enrich the role playing so that you are not just AC and HP. I cannot say for sure, but I think the opportunity for min/max characters is reduced.

The duality dice using hope and fear is an interesting concept that I look forward to seeing in actual gameplay. The lack of an initiative system is also something I am interested in seeing how it plays out.

The game is new, the classes and ancestry is limited at the moment but I am sure it will grow and develop. Certainly there is a lot of room for home-brew here.

If you want the crunchy, tables filled RPG with the usual classes and races - this might not be for you. If you want the badass combo of abilities, multi-class, I can do SO MUCH damage in a round - this is definitely not for you.

But you want be part of the story and play a part in world creation - well, pull up a chair, bring your dice and let us continue where we last left off.

[Finn SA · Rating 3 out of 5]

PLAYER EXPERIENCE
I could identify two strengths to the Daggerheart player experience; however, they come with heavy caveats:

BREADTH
As part of creating a system that can facilitate any number of narratives, the mechanics of Daggerheart take a broad scope. There are SO MANY MECHANICS within Daggerheart - take a look at the 150+ domain cards, many that apply unique conditions to enemies and allies. Daggerheart's approach to its breadth varies in levels of success.
For a good example, apart from a couple of integral conditions, a player or adversary can gain (vulnerable and restrained) a condition that is defined by the ability it is created by. For example, both the red ooze stat block and the cinder grasp domain card explain what it means to be “on fire”. For an effect that only appears twice in the book, it makes more sense to define the condition twice rather than abstracting it to some glossary, let alone conditions that only appear once (ie horrified). This also complements Daggerheart’s niche as a narrative-first TTRPG, as it streamlines play and eliminates the time sink of flipping through pages during an otherwise fast-paced, dramatic encounter.
On the flip side, some features get left in the dust due to a lack of representation. The tag team roll sounds like a good idea - spend a sizeable amount of hope (a key resource in Daggerheart) to collaborate with another player to perform a powerful combo move that is not only narratively impactful but also provides a sizeable mechanical benefit - rolling twice and choosing the better result to count for both rolls. There are a couple of problems with this system, however, that make tag team rolls underwhelming. Firstly, limiting each player to a single tag team roll per session makes it easy to forget the feature, especially when the only place there’s a reminder for the players is on the optional play guide or from the GM’s head. The one-session restriction is an interesting way to make tag team rolls feel rare and exciting, but this is overshadowed by many domain cards that allow a player to achieve the same effect of rerolling dice, often after a failure rather than before, and often for a cheaper price, sweeping the tag team rolls under the rug.

CLASSES
For player experience, the class system of Daggerheart is the highlight. Each class's features, and especially the hope feature, feel extremely powerful and fulfil key player fantasies - especially the druid's beastform and sorcerer's volatile magic. On top of that, most classes have all their information and all of the information for their subclasses on a single double-spread, making it easy to understand their core identity at a glance, and to start playing quickly. Supplementing these are the domain cards: each card gets two domains to select features from, and each domain is shared by two classes (for now, Daggerheart is releasing new classes through playtesting - such as the assassin, which bridges the midnight and blade domains). Each class fits well into the concepts of each of its two domains, but the domains themselves have varying levels of success at representing the classes they feed into. While it makes sense for both a sorcerer and a rogue to create a fan of blades (either magically or physically, as Daggerheart leaves features vague enough to be reflavoured to fit a character), the midnight domain also features very rogue-heavy cards, like being able to pick locks and pull enemies into chokeholds, that are harder to fit into the sorcerer fantasy. While these diverse cards don't harm the overall game mechanically, they show a shallowness to a game that's meant to support the narrative at every step. Additionally, some cards within domains are just rescaled for level versions of abilities from other domains. For example, the level 4 glamour spell "Through your eyes" is a slightly more powerful version of the level 2 arcana spell "Floating eye". This also happens with "Conjure Swarm" from the sage domain, which is another version of many other domains' high-level abilities to reduce damage without spending armour slots (like Valour's level 7 "Shrug It Off"), at just second level and, unlike "Shrug It Off", without the risk of sending it to your vault. With this overlap of domain identities, it begs the question of whether the domain system was worth it in the first place, as they fail to feel truly unique.

GAME MASTER (GM) EXPERIENCE
GM MOVES
The GM moves system is surprisingly comprehensive - take the spotlight and make the people and setting around the players act any time they do not succeed with hope. The hope/fear, success/failure roll results also create a consequence hierarchy that helps keep play moving - on a result with fear, introduce a consequence, when that result is a failure, make it worse. These clearly communicated expectations on what will result from a certain roll aid the GM in keeping the narrative moving - failure can just as easily progress the story by making things harder or inflicting repercussions in the form of stress or damage, and is a strength carried on from Critical Role's other TTRPG, Candela Obscura.

ADVERSARIES AND ENVIRONMENTS
The point of the stat blocks that come in the Daggerheart core set isn't to act like the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual, but to instead provide an insight into how a GM can make their own adversaries to run in their sessions. This goal is aided by a breakdown of how a couple of example stat blocks were made - one for each main enemy type. These breakdowns are a helpful tool, but numbers and features are assigned to the example adversaries with very little justification - just an "We want x, so y" without a "because z" that would actually achieve the goal of allowing a GM a deeper understanding of the Daggerheart adversary system. On top of this, the stat blocks provided inside the book do nothing to help clarify this confusion - especially with adversaries being split by tier rather than level. This makes it hard to identify whether a tier 2 adversary should be aimed at a level 4 or level 2 party, and their power differences only further muddy a learning GM's understanding of the game's balance. Another minor redundancy in the stat blocks provided within the game is that they are a majority of tier 1 difficulty - the tier of the game that the GM and PCs will spend the least amount of time in, which only encompasses one level of play.

CAMPAIGN FRAMES
The number one highlight of the Daggerheart Core Set is the campaign frames provided to the GM. Rather than pre-built campaigns, they are pre-built worlds that can facilitate play within them, and include their own lore and mechanics that make each campaign frame feel unique (I especially like how the "Collosus of the Drylands" create a narrative reason for players to mechanically level up). The frames in the core set are written by a plethora of different authors, and each one is written to convey the essential details of each world concisely, leaving room for GM and players to work together to add their own details. For example, the "Five Flags Burning" frame only provides information about the five nations in tense armistice within it, not the leaders of those nations themselves, leaving the table to find characters that best suit their own preferences and the story they want to tell. Every single campaign frame was able to fulfil its purpose of inspiring me to run a daggerheart campaign within it, giving me plenty of starting points to come up with ideas while leaving specific details vague enough to allow me room to come up with ones that supported the narrative I was encouraged to imagine. Additionally, the campaign frames also act as a synthesis of an earlier section within the book that steps a GM through a session 0 - providing campaign tone & feel, touchstones, player and GM expectations, a unique map for players to add their own locations to, and most importantly questions to spark collaborative character creation and deeper consideration of the intricacies of one's character (such as "why are you afraid of the dark" in "The Age of Umbra", in which darkness is an everpresent threat and thus a fear of it would have narrative impacts. In this way, campaign frames pick up the slack of providing a comprehensive learning experience to a GM that the example adversary stat blocks do not.

READING EXPERIENCE
TYPOS
There are many typos inside the Daggerheart Core Set, indicating possibly a rush to release it that would justify some of the issues with domains I mentioned above.

ART
All of the art within the Daggerheart Core Set is beautiful, and the colour coding of art on the play cards to fit with related domains is an excellent decision that helps further clarity within the game.

FINAL THOUGHTS
As a game system, Daggerheart definitely has some refining to do, especially in the domains and adversary stat blocks available. This is an active process through The Void, which is the playtesting portal for the daggerheart system. As a book, the campaign frames held in the last chapter more than justify the purchase, especially for newer GMs.

[Forrest Crock · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great core rulebook for a TTRPG system. I have been playing TTRPGs for about 40 years and this is one of the best systems I have ever read. (Still waiting to get my group to play it). In one book it gives you enough information to make characters, designs adversaries (as well as some of their own). They have a great system for determining success and failure (best I have ever read about), and has about 6 potential campaigns for you to play in. I can recommend this to either beginner or advanced players.

[Arseni Kritchever · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review is based on a read-through of the core book, some theorycrafting of characters and encounters, and a read-through of the quickstart adventure. I might go back and change the rating after I actually run the game.

I think this is a phenomenal core set of an RPG and a great bang for the buck. The core book contains everything that both players and GMs need to play and run Daggerheart. It contains all the starting classes, subclasses, abilities, huge amount of loot, equipment, and adversaries, and excellent advice for both players and GMs. In addition it also contains not one but several settings, most of which are really quite neat (one is basically Delicious in Dungeon, another is Shadow of the Colossus meet Monster Hunter meet Deadwood!). The GM section - something I always go through particularly thoroughly - is really comprehensive, extensive, and has a lot of actionable advice. The art is also phenomenal both in the book and on the cards. The system is quite interesting and it didn't take me long to understand it; it's a 2d12 system where each roll might succeed with Hope (best outcome), succeed with Fear, fail with Hope, or fail with Fear (worst outcome). It's a very fail-forward type of system, and the GM uses accumulated Fear tokens to introduce complications, power up adversaries or hazards, while the PCs use Hope to help each other, bring their characters' Experience into play, or activate fun and powerful abilities. It is a mid-crunch system with some strong narrative elements as well. This one book is really all you need to run multiple campaigns of Daggerheart for months or even years.

My minor points of criticism boil down to the following. Firstly, some of the book becomes quite repetitive - I'm sure I saw the same advice for GMs being repeated at least three times throughout the book. This is space that could've been given to other content. Secondly, I would have liked more tools for generating new adversaries; there are some in the book but I would've liked more. Thirdly, I would've liked more detailed rules (optional or otherwise) for running travel and travel encounters beyond just "make an interesting travel scene or cut to the chase". And finally, some more random tables would also help aspiring GMs.

But overall, amazing amount of content for the price. I was quite skeptical when the game was first announced, especially because of the seeming reliance on cards and tokens and vague settings, but it has won me over.

[Thomas Jager · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting game that I'd like to try out, but the book itself needed more editing for clarity of rules on the GM side (especially spending Fear).

Being the equivalent of the D&D 5e Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual all in one, (or alternatively the Pathfinder Player Core, GM Core, and Monster Core,) none of the sides end up with as much depth. That's not necessarily bad, since Daggerheart is supposed to be more rules-light and narrative-driven than D&D 5e, but some parts felt lacking, especially in mechanics, monsters, items, and lore. The respective sections felt like an abridged preview of what you'd find in a DMG or MM.

There are a few Campaign Frames, but they're mostly light on world lore and what's there is extremely specific to those frames. I had hoped for a feeling of a larger "default" world like the Great Wheel, with history, planes, and pantheons.

Overall, I'm happy that I got it, but think that it's missing some ingredients.

[Luli Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Looks very fun, I’m very excited to play. Clearly written to work for beginners and veterans alike, and I love the ancestries — wish we got more details about each of them, I love the little tidbits in the sketches. I know the reason why some of the distances and prices are so loose is for the sake of fiction over specifics, but I do wish they had a liiiiittle bit more specifics for anxious, autistic folk such as me haha. I loved the section about playing disabled characters, but found it a little disappointing that despite adding an aside that many invisible disabilities exist, they didn’t add some more details or ideas over playing neurodivergent or chronically ill characters, too. Overall a very, very solid debut for a system!

[Steve Lucido · Rating 4 out of 5]

An ambitious and exciting approach to TTRPGs. I was impressed with the author's recognition of inspiration from other successful game systems they employed to create this system . It was an impressive mix of rules that support more lite rules for Narrative and yet some satisfying Crunch to the character creation and building as well as Combat. I enjoyed the Campaign Frames that show the flexibility of the system to be applied to a variety of Fantasy and even Sci-Fi and Weird West settings. I'm really impressed and hope to have a chance to play or even run this game. I think Daggerheart will have a bright future.

[Andy Hoover · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprised with the crunch level of what I thought was going to be a largely atmosphere/acting game designed for streamers and content creators - but there is a really good game, maybe, here - have to play to see - the book is pretty, not all of it is great (to me) but the game has teeth - I really appreciated how open and honest they were with what games inspired what, and often, that inspiration is very transparent and obvious.

Would like to try and run/play this game someday. Has promise. Would buy a rule supplement probably if one came out.

[Garrett Henke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This game is going to be great. Positioning itself as a replacement for 5e if you are into more narrativism, I think it succeeds at this goal. But its biggest problem is that it’s only one book. Based on the play test files on The Void, more stuff is definitely coming, but it’s going to need a bit more of a foundation before it truly can replace the big elephant that is D&D. Honestly, the only reason I took away a Star was because the bestiary/depth of antagonists is really shallow - a problem easily resolved with a separate monster manual which I am sure is in the works.

[Libby]

This looks fascinating and I absolutely cannot wait to play it soon

[M B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Daggerheart is Dungeons and Dragons by way of much better narrative focused games.