Daggerheart stands on the shoulders of a decades-long tradition of fantasy adventure RPGs that traces back to the beginning of the form as we know it. This game has many things in common with its predecessors–an attention to dramatizing combat, familiar fantasy ancestries and archetypes, shared touchstones from popular culture and folklore, and more. In addition, as you can see in the “Touchstones” section, Daggerheart draws inspiration from a variety of RPGs inside and beyond the fantasy adventure genre.

Like each of the games that came before, Daggerheart has its priorities and tools for telling certain types of stories. Daggerheart is focused on collaboration in building a character-focused story full of emotion. Daggerheart’s combats come alive when the dramatic beats and rhythm of the battle highlight the conflicting motivations and combatants, along with the characters’ bonds with each other.

These GM Principles are the guiding stars for GMs running Daggerheart. Follow them as best you can to help the whole table have the best possible experiences playing this game.

Begin and End with the Fiction

“The Fiction” refers to the world of the story and what’s happening within it. Use the fiction to decide when to call for rolls, what the impact of results will be, what GM moves to use, and so on. If you’re not sure whether a roll should have advantage or disadvantage, what the difficulty should be, etc., look at the fiction -think about the situation in the story and decide how that would manifest in the mechanics. The rules of Daggerheart exist to facilitate telling a story together with the players, and when a roll or use of the mechanics is complete, the GM connects those results back to the fiction and describes them in the story so that play may continue smoothly.

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 the heroic tales you’ve all set out to build together. When running a player-driven game, you can take the backgrounds and connection questions and other character details provided by your players and use those as a palette (along with any other palette discussed in Session Zero) to paint a picture of an exciting world that honors the motivations and personhood of everyone, from high nobility and demigods to everyday artisans and farmers and everyone in-between.

You should offer hooks of wondrous places, connections to the character’s background, and potential threats to see what catches your players’ interest, then tease out that interest and present challenges that make the dramatic crucible you’ll all use to shape the PCs into heroes of legend.

Make Every Roll Carry Weight

Action rolls in Daggerheart describe and resolve a moment within a story, which might be as short as a split-second dodge or an entire exchange of blows between combatants, all the way up to a montage of running down leads over the course of an entire evening at a gala.

Because the GM gets the choice to make a move in response whenever the players roll a result with Fear or a failure, and since every roll generates metacurrency used in play (Hope or Fear), only ask the players to roll in meaningful moments to make every roll count. Provide information freely and validate the characters’ skills by giving them information they’d easily know or letting them just succeed at tasks that don’t present a dramatic challenge. That way, when you do call for rolls in dangerous moments, it carries more weight for all involved. Daggerheart’s rolls are designed to create heartbreaking complications or unexpectedly challenging obstacles with failures and exciting triumphs with successes!

Collaborate at All Times, Especially in 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. Antagonism between player and GM should exist only in the fiction of the game, through the actions of NPCs and the world.

Neither the PCs or the players are your ‘enemy’. They’re the opponents of the adversaries you play, but the GM and the Players are on the same side: the side invested in telling an amazing story together. When representing antagonists and challenges, the GM’s 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 the 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 PCs 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 world around them is behaving with internal consistency.

Ask Questions and Incorporate the Answers

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

You might ask the player whose character is from this town to describe the market. Rather than describing the critical success of a character’s blow, you can ask the player to take the spotlight and narrate their triumph. In dramatic or even commonplace moments, you might ask questions about the character’s motivations, their emotions, and their history to see how the current moment relates. Some groups may want to go even farther, closing the gap in narrative authority between players and GM, with players taking authorship over entire regions or nations.

Do your best to respect the players’ contributions and fold them into the fabric of the story. Take those answers as an indication of the player’s interest and think about how to fold them into the story. As the GM, it’s your job to maintain the integrity of the world and make adjustments where needed, but ensuring that every players’ voice is included will mean that the story is truly representative of the creativity of the whole group.

Hold On Gently

Improvisational 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. 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’s come before.

Play to Find Out What Happens

Daggerheart is a game about heroic adventures and the emotional journeys of the PCs. The group plays together to find out what these heroes will do and what kind of legends they will become. As a player-driven game, the overarching plot of a Daggerheart campaign should emerge from collaboration with the players, tying the characters’ stories together with one another and with the world and its major events.

Daggerheart thrives when the GM creates room to be surprised by what the players will do, the choices they’ll make, and the people they’ll become. It’s most useful to prepare situations without expectations about the solutions the players will find or create. Preparing adversaries and appropriate maps can help make for exciting scenes, but always know you can adjust or completely throw out plans to follow inspiration when it strikes at the table.

Lastly, remember that everything should flow from the fiction. Listen to the other players, and react to what they say and how they act. When someone rolls the dice, let the results lead you to what happens next and express that in the fiction.