THE GAME MASTER ADVENTURE GUIDE

Introduction

Welcome to the Game Master’s section of the Quickstart Adventure Guide! If you’re here, you’re probably about to run the Sablewood Messengers quickstart adventure for your players. Whether you’ve run numerous RPGs in the past or this is your first time taking on the GM role, we’ll lead you through everything you need to know to have a successful first session of Daggerheart. It is recommended you read through this entire guide before beginning. You’ll also want to cut out all the Sablewood Messengers standees and gather 10 tokens you can utilize to represent Fear during the game.

Character Packet

After they receive their character packet, ensure your players read through the first page. It will give them the background information on their character.

At the end of the Breakdown section, there will be a question for them to answer. Go around the table sharing the responses to each question. Then, ask the players to assign their Connections to other characters in the party. They may choose one, two, or all three. Encourage them to talk about why they’ve given these connections to each other, and build their relationships together. Take notes on anything that might be useful from their conversation to work into the adventure.

Then ask them to cut out their character standee, fold it, and place it next to them. They’ll need it during combat.

FIELDING QUESTIONS

Your players may have questions about how aspects of their character sheet, cards, or the game works. If they ask something you don’t know yet, that’s okay! Remind them that this adventure is designed to teach everyone as you play together.

The Sablewood

As your players look over the first page of their character packet, take a moment to read through the Sablewood summary below to familiarize yourself with the setting of this adventure.

The Sablewood is a region in the Core Rulebook designed for level one characters, so when you finish this adventure, you can easily continue the story by exploring additional areas of the forest.

SUMMARY

The Sablewood is a seemingly-endless forest of dark trees that reach hundreds of feet towards the sky–some say they have been here since the time before the Forgotten Gods. It’s famous for its unique hybrid animals, like the lemur-toads and tiger-elk, as well as its well-worn trade routes populated by traveling merchants.

The hybrid animals in this place range from completely docile to extremely vicious. A cat-squirrel might come feed gently from your hand, while an eeligator would launch itself out of the nearby river to snap you up as an easy meal.

Within the Sablewood there is a small, friendly village known as Hush, the PCs’ destination during this adventure. There are no inns in Hush. Any travelers passing through are treated as honored guests and invited to stay in the home of a member of the community.

Many of the people of Hush (and the Sablewood at large) still worship the Forgotten Gods, despite having no names by which to call them. The Whitefire Arcanist is the leader of Hush’s primary religious order and maintains the magic of the wards that protect the village.

Teaching The Game

guiding players

Mechanical Overview

This section will cover the very basic mechanical elements of Daggerheart. Read the boxed sections aloud. As you do, ask the players to follow along.

We’re going to quickly cover the basics of what you need to know to start playing. First off, Daggerheart is a collaborative, narrative-focused roleplaying game. That means we’ll all be working together to tell a story using the mechanics of the game as our foundation. You will each make choices for your characters during the adventure, and I will describe the rest of the world reacting around them. Sometimes I might ask you a question—what your character knows about a place or has heard about a person. I’ll do my best to integrate your answers into the story we’re telling, so that we’re building this world together!

Okay, let’s turn to your Character Sheet. You’ll find an additional page underneath that we’ll call the “Character Sheet Explainer.” Slide it out to the left until the arrows are pointing at the left side of your character sheet.

Character Sheets

You have a character sheet and an explainer sheet below. Use them to walk your players through their own character sheet, starting on the left side of the explainer sheet. Moving around the table, have each player read a section aloud. Then, slide the character sheet explainer out to the right side and do this again. Once you’re finished, come back here.

View PDF

Rolling Dice

Before reading the next section, ask players to grab their dice and roll them with you.

Action Rolls

Now that we’ve looked at our character sheets, let’s talk about how we roll some dice in Daggerheart. I’ll give you the basics and we’ll learn more as we go! First, grab your 2d12 dice, called your Duality Dice. Decide which represents Hope and which represents Fear .

When you have your character do something in the story that is dangerous or could result in consequences, I’ll probably ask you to make an action roll. You’ll roll both of those d12 dice, and add the applicable character trait to the result. I’ll usually tell you which one it is, but sometimes I might ask you. If you want to, you may use some of the tokens you have to represent the modifier for a roll.

Let’s say you are making an Agility roll and you have a +2 in that trait–you’ll take 2 tokens into your hand and roll them along with your dice. Then, you’ll count everything up and tell me the result, along with which die rolled higher. For example, if you rolled a 6 on the Hope die and a 10 on the Fear die, that would be 16, plus the 2 tokens you rolled, bringing it to a total of 18. Because the Fear die rolled higher, you would tell me that you got an 18 with Fear.

If you roll with Hope, you mark a Hope on your sheet. If you roll with Fear, I can make a move. This means I might impact the narrative now, or take a Fear token to use later. I start the game with 2 Fear, just like you start with 2 Hope. Take 2 Fear tokens to illustrate this.

Take 2 Fear tokens to illustrate this.

Sometimes, you might have an Experience *that applies to a roll. Maybe you have “Expert Climber” and are attempting to scale a wall, or “Eagle Eye” and you’re trying to spot tracks in the dirt. You can spend a Hope before the roll to describe how that Experience helps you, and add its value to your roll. *

Lastly, let’s talk about Spellcast rolls. Those are action rolls using your Spellcast trait, which will be on your Subclass’s Foundation card if you are a spellcaster. For example, Marlowe’s Spellcast Trait is Instinct .

How Dice Rolls Affect The Story

Alright, we’ve talked about how dice roll, let’s talk about what they do in the story! Usually, I’ll set a difficulty for the roll based on the situation, like 6 or 14 or 25, and your goal is to meet or beat that number. If an ability or spell has a number on it, like Spellcast Roll (13), that’s the difficulty of the roll. If you succeed, you get what you wanted! If you don’t, you fail and something new happens in the story because of it. Hope and Fear also play a part in this:

If you get a success with Hope, that means you accomplish your goal and all is well. You can continue to pass the scene around the table to the other players as you’d like.

A success with Fearmeans you do it, but there is a consequence or a complication, so I can gain a Fear or make what we call a “GM move.” This just means I’ll change the story in some way. You might have to mark a Stress , bad guys might attack, the environment might change, I might gain a Fear on a roll with Fear, or something else entirely. The move I make won’t undermine your success, you will get what you wanted, but it means I’ll continue to push the story we’re telling forward in an exciting way.

If you roll a failure with Hope, you don’t get what you wanted, but things don’t go as badly as they could. I’ll make a move that matches the narrative, and then I’ll turn things back to the rest of the table.

If you roll a failure with Fear, the situation goes very badly. I’ll make a move that raises the stakes to highlight the consequences.

Saving the best for last, if you ever roll two of the same number, no matter what that number is, that is a critical successin Daggerheart. You get what you wanted and a little extra. You get to mark a Hope and you can also clear a Stress, if you have one. If it is an attack roll, you get to add the maximum your damage dice could roll as a modifier to your damage roll. If you deal 1d8+4 damage, you’d add 8 to the roll.

Combat

Next, put the action tracker card and some standees on the table to showcase how combat works, and continue.

Finally, we’re going to talk about combat. When you want to attack a target, you’ll ask me if it is in range of your weapon. If it is, you can make an action roll with that weapon, using the trait it calls for. This is called an attack roll . If you succeed against the target, you’ll then make a damage roll. Look at the damage dice section of your weapon and roll what it says, then tell me the total and whether the damage is physical or magic.

When a fight breaks out, I’ll usually place this action tracker on the table. Whenever you make an action roll or activate one of your features that says “use an action”, you also place a token on the tracker. You aren’t limited in how many tokens you put on, so if you ever need more, feel free to grab them.

Then, when any player rolls a failure or with Fear , I can use my GM move to spend as many of those tokens as I want to activate the enemies. We’ll see it all in action soon, but for now, let’s take a short break before we play.

Teaching The Game Cont’d

gm’s guide

While the players are taking a short break, review the mechanics and narrative below. The quickstart adventure will lead you through what you need to know, but it will help to have a primer before you jump in.

Mechanical Overview

You always set a difficulty before an action roll. Sometimes the difficulty will be noted by an adversary, other times you’ll have to make it up. Use the below as basic guidance:

10 - Easy | 15 - Medium | 20 - Hard

Remember that when PCs roll with Hope, they gain Hope, and when PCs roll with Fear, you may choose to gain Fear as your GM move.

You can always give advantageor disadvantage to a PC on a roll, if it makes sense in the situation. If a player has advantage, have them roll a d6 and add the value to their roll. If they have disadvantage, they instead subtract that value. When you have advantage as a GM, you roll an additional d20 and take the higher result. When you have disadvantage, roll an additional d20 and take the lower one.

When you make a GM move, you should aim to create a complication, signal that a new threat is on its way, reveal a new danger, spend tokens on the action tracker to activate adversaries, have the PC mark a Stress, or anything else that seems narratively relevant in the scene. 

You can spend tokens that are on the action tracker 1-for-1 to activate any adversaries that are on the battlefield. Activating an adversary means it is their turn to act, usually to move and/or attack a target in range of their weapon, or use one of their Actions. You can only activate each adversary once per GM move, so once you’ve activated every adversary who is in the fight, any remaining tokens stay on the tracker until next time.

During a GM move, you can spend an action token to activate an adversary with a temporary condition, and end it. At any time, you can spend 2 action tokens to gain a Fear.

When an adversary attacks a PC, you’ll make an attack roll. Roll a d20 and add the adversary’s attack modifier, then ask if the total meets or beats the Evasion value on the PC’s character sheet. If it does, you’ll roll the damage dice and tell the PC what the value and type is. “That’s a 5 and a 3, so that’s 8 points of physical damage.”

While in battle, ****the tokens placed on the action tracker are a good way to keep track of who you might want to spotlight next. If a PC has not contributed to the action tracker in some time, consider shifting the spotlight to them next.

Ranges in the game are abstracted to common language and at your discretion, but if you’re playing with maps and minis, the list below is a good place to start:

Melee is two adversaries directly next to one another.

Very Close is 5-10 feet, or anywhere on the map within the length of the short side of a playing card (about 3 inches).

Close is 10-30 feet, or anywhere on the map within the length of a standard pencil (about 6 inches).

Far is 30-100 feet, or anywhere within a letter-sized piece of paper’s longest length (about 12 inches).

Very Far is anywhere beyond that, while still in the scene.

Movement during a player’s turn is only restricted if there is danger present in the scene. During combat, PCs can move anywhere within close range when they are making an action roll. If they want to move as their only action, or get somewhere beyond close range while danger is present, they should make an Agility roll to see if they get there safely.

Adversaries can move within close range and act (make an attack, etc.), or spend their activation moving anywhere else.

Below is a stat block for an adversary in this adventure. Stat blocks provide general combat details you will use when activating an adversary.

Thistlefolk Thief

Serrated Blade - Melee - 2d4+3 (phy)

Attack Modifier: +3

Difficulty: 14

Major 7 | Severe 14

HP: 4

Stress: 2

Features

Back Off - Action

Spend a Fear to make an attack roll against all targets within melee range. Any they succeed against are blasted backwards, dealing 2d6+3 magic damage and pushing them into far range.

“They unleash a shockwave of defensive magic, sending you flying.”

On the left side is their standard weapon attack, attack modifier, and the difficulty to hit the thief. On the right are their damage thresholds, hit points, and stress. On the bottom are their features, special moves they can make. Actions are moves the adversary can take that cost one or more action tokens to use, and Reactions tell you when to use them but don’t cost an action token to use. Some features also require spending Fear.

Fear Guide

• Spend a Fear to interrupt the scene with a GM move.
• Spend a Fear to add 2 tokens to the action tracker.
• Spend a Fear to use an adversary’s or environment’s Fear move.