Running a One-Shot

If you want to run a one-shot—a short adventure that only spans one or two sessions—you can use the guide below to build out a quick collaborative session with your players. First, begin to read the prologue aloud, and when you reach a blank, have a player fill in the answer using one of the available options. Move around the table having players make decisions until all of the blanks are filled. Then read the completed prologue to the table. Feel free to ask additional questions, clarify ideas, and expand upon the information until you all feel comfortable moving forward.

Prologue

Our story takes place within the kingdom of (1) ________________________. We are currently traveling through (2) ______________________, best known for (3) ________________________________ and the (4) ______________________ that surround it.

• Atheira | Willowfell | Ruumari | Winter’s Sun | Stonefire, Bellsong, Dathari
• Dawnhollow | Indigo’s Shadow | Rathmire | The Wonder | Mistrun | Atlas | Ta’al
• Its massive spires | The Great Tree | The shimmer hiding it | Its sacred wards | The mysterious powers that keep it afloat
• Dark Forests | Towering Mountains | Blistering Deserts | Dense Jungles

Now that you know where you’re beginning your story, follow the same process for the adventure.

Adventure

After last night’s (1) ___________________________________, many here have (2) ____________________________________. This morning, we found out that the events of the previous evening (3) _______________________________. We know to fix this, we’ll need to (4) ________________________________________. So our story begins as we all prepare to leave for the (5) ___________________________________, where we might find what we’re looking for.

• catastrophic fire | attack by the Horde | terrifying storm | assassination of the Queen
• been badly injured | decided to leave | been caught in a terrible curse | started an uprising
• left someone we care about here near death | destroyed the town’s protection rune | awoken a throng of spirits | angered an ancient beast
• search for a powerful Moonstone relic | retrieve Magister Kharix | bring an offering to the Grave of the Gods | enlist a tricksome fae
• Towers of Hyle| Broken Sea | Great Expanse | town of Wildfar | capital of the kingdom | Highland Peaks

Next, give your players a fifteen minute break and answer the questions below to prep your session. Use the answers in the next section as inspiration and build out any necessary details, including any adversaries you think your players might encounter during the session.

GM Prep

Once the party leaves town, they find:

remnants of last night’s events | something wild and dangerous | an ominous warning about their destination | they are being followed.

As the party journeys towards their destination:

they find something important that they missed before | an unlikely ally joins them | a dangerous portion of the landscape impedes their path | they unwittingly enter the home of a dangerous creature.

As the party reaches their objective, they discover:

the target is hidden or well-protected | somebody has come to intercept them | this place is unexpectedly dangerous | someone was expecting them.

When the party finally finds what they came for, they learn:

somebody else is looking for it too | it’s not quite what they expected | they need something else to succeed | accomplishing their goal will put others in danger.

After you’ve made these choices, think about the way a character’s background might tie into any of the options you and your players have chosen. Maybe the wild and dangerous creature they find outside town is the monster one of the player’s referenced in their backstory, perhaps the mysterious land they travel through is a character’s childhood home, or the person who is also looking for the target is an NPC one of the players has history with. The more you incorporate players’ backstories into the present adventure, the more you empower the members of your table to continue making bold choices. When players have more agency in story construction, not only does it lessen the responsibility of GMing, it welcomes everyone into a shared adventure.

Flesh out any further details as necessary, but don’t feel the need to overprep.

Now you’re ready to play!

Running a Campaign

You’ve got your players, you’ve made your characters, and maybe you’ve even played a session to get a feel for the game. What’s next? Most tables will start a campaign: a series of connected sessions often played weekly or monthly that let everyone explore their character’s stories over an extended period of time. When you decide to start a campaign together, you can kickstart your adventure using the guidance in this section, along with the inspiration presented in chapter 5, “Creating Your World.”

In Daggerheart, campaigns are intended to be personal, focused, and responsive. Very little should be planned until after character creation is complete, and the details players provide about these characters will be the primary scaffolding upon which you’ll craft the rest of the campaign. This means you’ll often be prepping just the material you need week after week, letting the story evolve naturally through play at the table.

Chapter 5—“Creating Your World”—provides some guidance and tools to help make this process easier. If you’re an experienced GM, you may have your own method of campaign prep that you use for other games. As always, feel free to utilize the pieces from this book that help and ignore the pieces that don’t.

Optional: Campaign Frame

Before your Session Zero, you may choose to implement a Campaign Frame to ground the players in the type of fantasy story you are interested in telling as a GM. Because the fantasy genre is so wide, this can give them a strong jumping off place to start brainstorming their characters.

Daggerheart provides several Campaign Frames to start you off, but these shouldn’t limit the kinds of stories you tell with this system. If you have a strong idea about the kind of campaign you want to run for your table, use the structure of this game’s frames to build out your own before your Session Zero.

You can find the following Campaign Frames in chapter 5:

The Witherwild

A quiet, peaceful land is overrun by a terrible scourge.

Touchstones: The Legend of Zelda,  The Dark Crystal, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

Starts here

The Colossus of Avenridge

Battle massive colossi to save a land from destruction.

Touchstones: Shadow of the Colossus, Monster Hunter World, Godzilla

(Available in future updates)

Quantum Alchemy

In a place where technology is magic, a new invention threatens the lives of everyone who lives there.

Touchstones: Horizon Zero Dawn, Arcane, The Final Fantasy Series

(Available in future updates)

Beast Feast

Every monster you kill, you can eat–and your survival in this place will depend on it.

Touchstones: Delicious in Dungeon, Toriko, One Piece

(Available in future updates)

Five Banners Burning

Long-brewing tensions between rival nations boil over, threatening all-out war.

Touchstones: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Dragon Age: Inquisition, A Game of Thrones

Starts here

Souls of Devor

In the Wretched Lands, a great evil has been awakened once again.

Touchstones: Elden Ring, Kingdom Death Monster, Bloodborne

(Available in future updates)

Building A Map

At the start of a campaign, one of the most important questions to answer is “Where are we?” To do this, you’ll choose one of the maps in [section pending] (or create your own) and print a copy of it out for your table. If you’re utilizing a Campaign Frame, use the map detailed in that section. Digital copies of these maps are available on the Daggerheart website for download. Each of the available maps represent a region of the world you’ll be focusing on at the beginning of your campaign.

If you know at character creation that you’ll be running a campaign, you can bring the map you’ve chosen to fill out during your Session Zero (see “Session Zero and Safety Tools”). Otherwise, you may always just introduce it at the top of your next session to integrate into your game moving forward.

To start, place the map on the table and explain to the players that you’ll be using it to build the region you’re all playing in together. First, you’ll choose the name of the region from the options available (or make up your own) and write that name on the appropriate section on the sheet. If you’re using a Campaign Frame, the name of the Region is provided for you. Once this is done, take a minute to remind the table about any locations that were already invented by them during character creation, and pass the map to the players who generated those locations to label them wherever they’d like on the map. If you’ve created any locations during character creation or play, make sure to add those yourself as well. If you’re using a Campaign Frame, you may have specifics that need to be added from there as well.

Once all pre-existing locations have been added, take the map back from the players and choose one of the new locations from the pick list on the bottom of the sheet and add it to the map wherever you’d like. Then describe this place for the rest of the table—what is it? Why is it called this? What makes it so significant? Then pass the map to the player on your left and ask them to do the same. Encourage them to tie in their character’s backstory or history with this place if they wish. As they tell the table about the location they’ve chosen, record any important information about it in your notes.

The sheet should continue around the table like this until it feels like the map is populated with enough exciting locations and plot hooks for you to work with. With four players, twice around the table is usually enough. Remember, you can always do this again at the start of another session to fill out the map further, or even introduce a new region that connects to the current one.

After the table feels happy with the details they’ve added, take the map back and make a choice about where the players currently are in their adventure. Maybe it’s somewhere the players have already added, or maybe it’s a new place you draw in– whatever the case may be, this will help you as the GM orient yourself for their adventure moving forward.

Filling Space, Leaving Blanks

As part of the prep for your next session, you’ll want to review the map your table built together. Think about the way that the locations your players created might affect the region, and add anything you think might be important or relevant to the sheet. For example, if someone labeled a spot with “The Healing Fields”, you might consider adding a town nearby that specializes in creating health potions or curing ailments, or a mage’s tower that overlooks the fields to protect them. Pay special attention to the area where your players currently are in their journey—where might they consider going next?

It’s also important to leave blanks. Don’t feel the need to fill everything in, and don’t worry about planning out what every labeled landmark or town is like. Leaving some things vague gives you the freedom to adapt on the fly, and it also reduces the amount of worldbuilding work you have to do for places your players may never visit.

Incorporating Player Backstories

One of the most important tools in a GM’s arsenal is to ask questions of your players and incorporate their answers—they will tell you what they find exciting through the responses they give you. The most obvious and important of these in building a campaign are the answers to a character’s Background Questions.

The Background Questions are designed specifically to generate story hooks the players care about that can be leveraged for narrative fodder when doing prep for the campaign. You’ll want to ensure you not only take good notes about each of the characters during character creation but also ask important follow-up questions. Don’t be afraid to dig deeper into anything the player offers up during this process. If they make up a person, ask them for their name. If they make up a place, ask them what it’s called, and maybe what it’s like there if it’s unclear. You’ll want to make sure with each player, you’re recording at least one or two things about the world that are important to them. The more you are able to incorporate these things into the campaign, the more invested that player tends to become.

Backstory Notes

Marigold Seok ( Wildborne **** Faun Rogue)

• Born in the floating city of Bloomfare. Had to leave her mother behind to go on the run.
• She is being chased down by the leaders of the four elemental kin for stealing their stone of power during the last ceremony.

Barnabas (Loreborne **** Simiah Wizard)

• Obsessed with finding relics, treasures, and bones of legendary creatures. He thinks these should be used for their given purpose, not stashed away into museums. Wants to gather as much knowledge as he can in his lifetime. Uses bone runes to cast magic.
• Served as the advisor to King Guthril, but failed to protect the King’s daughter Nira from being killed by wild beasts during her first hunt with him, and left the kingdom in shame.
• Is chasing down the fang of the great dragon Krugthar, because it is said to contain knowledge of every creature it’s ever consumed.
• Is rivals with Maverick, a snobby gnome treasure hunter who is trying to collect all the bones of legendary creatures to put them in a museum.

Jasper Flores ( Highborne **** Halfling Bard)

• Grew up in The Sunbearer’s Crescent with the royal Galamore family of gnomes. Was in a secret relationship with the princess, Astrid Galamore. They had a secret place they would meet.
• Astrid and Jasper were supposed to run away together, but she never showed up. Jasper still wonders what happened. There are rumors that she was forced to marry someone else.
• Was trained by Mage Yaro within Illiat’s Tower. Yaro is the one who convinced them to travel the world and learn all they can.
• They look up to a fellow bard named Quill who plays at the Golden Goose in The Sunbearer’s Crescent. Jasper met Quill through Yaro.

Geffrin Hilldweller ( Wanderborne **** Fungril Druid)

• They use their fungril network to connect to others like them by digging their feet into the ground.
• Was chased out of the city of Branishar because they accidentally spent too much time there and decimated the environment around them. They’ve learned they have to keep moving, they can’t stay in one place for too long or bad things happen.

Tying Backstories Together

Once you’ve indentified key points in each PC’s story, start to identify which of these pieces of information could be related—how these stories could potentially cross paths—and draw some connections between them.

Maybe Maverick, the snobby gnome treasure collector that Barnabas is rivals with, could be the same person that Astrid Galamore, the gnome princess, was forced to marry? And if that’s the case, what if Maverick was now forcing Mage Yaro to use his magic to invade the fungril network in order to seize more great treasures around the world without having to leave the kingdom? This would create a cross-over between Astrid, Geffrin, and Barnabas, so it seems like a good place to start our campaign. But let’s keep thinking.

This type of conflict would likely eventually lead them to return to the Galamore Kingdom to stop him, where we could find out what actually happened to Astrid. And perhaps she convinced Quill, her and Jasper’s bard friend, to use shapeshifting magic to take her place right under Maverick’s nose, so she could leave the kingdom and search for Jasper? Could be a fun opportunity to flip the “princess in peril” trope on its head, and provide an unexpected reveal once they reach the kingdom. If this is the case, I’ll also want to start to brainstorm a clue Astrid could leave behind at the secret place her and Jasper used to meet, that way they can go after her. But that’s down the road, no need to flush that out immediately.

Marigold still needs some love– maybe we could put the floating city of Bloomfare in the path of destruction by the great dragon Krugthar? This would push Marigold to return to her home and face the consequences of her actions in order to save her mother’s life, while giving Barnabas an opportunity to chase down the dragon he wants so badly. But given they’ll have to face a dragon here, this should probably be later in the campaign. So perhaps in the interim, to keep Marigold’s backstory involved, we could put some elemental creatures on the party’s trail intermittently as they travel. This will keep the threat of her home and the reminder of what she did relevant until she must return there to confront them. Maybe we even make that our first encounter of the campaign, to set up that long-running danger from the very beginning and tie Marigold in at the start.

A few extra tendrils to tie up– Geffrin should probably have to deal with what he did in Branishar, whether that’s something he faces by showing signs of the same thing happening somewhere else, or we actually make him return here. Barnabas should probably discover something unexpected about Nira’s death– could she still be alive? If so, maybe she finds him to reveal that her father King Guthril secretly set up an ambush to have her killed. That it wasn’t his fault, and she wants revenge.

That’s more than enough for now! As the campaign plays out, there will be plenty more to work with and some of these plans may change drastically– but, for now, that’s a decent foundation to work from.

Planning a Story Arc

Now that we have some ideas of what could potentially happen in our campaign, it’s time to start talking about arcs. Arcs are a connected series of sessions within a campaign that focus on a specific objective, theme, character, or idea. We can perhaps best think about this like a season of a tv show– most of the time, characters want something in the first episode, work to get over the course of the episodes within the season, and either succeed or fail by the finale.

You want to think about your arc in a similar way. Though you won’t know for sure the path your players will take, by preparing the structure of the arc, you can ensure that you’re giving them the adequate narrative fodder for a satisfying story. Arcs are typically between 3-5 sessions in length, though they can be longer depending on how large of a campaign you’re running. It’s usually good to start small and build up to larger arcs as players get more invested in the story you’re all telling together. But no matter the length, building out an arc’s structure is generally pretty similar.

There are a few different structures that stories often take, but we’re going to use the Three Act Structure as our framework here, because it is the most common and is the easiest to identify in many of today’s movies and tv shows, so it’s not hard to find references. As always, feel free to experiment with your own style of storytelling and only use the things from this section that help you at your table!

The Three Act Structure is pretty straightforward– Act One is the introduction, Act Two is the trials and tribulations, and Act Three is the finale. If we were planning a four session arc, it would probably break down as:

[GRAPHIC]

Session One = ACT ONE

Session Two & Three = ACT TWO

Session Four = ACT THREE

This is something we see everywhere, in almost every popular movie or tv show– a character wants something, they work hard and face challenges to get that thing, and finally succeed or fail– but always change because of the journey they went through. Because of this, it’s often what players expect out of a good story, even if they don’t know it. It’s what feels satisfying to us, because it’s the way we’re used to seeing stories. We can utilize that expectation in our prep to make our work easier.

Let’s take the example from our conversation in the previous chapter about our players’ backstories to form our first arc. Given how much cross-over potential Maverick has between our players, he is going to be our focus here, since that will give almost everyone a chance to have their backstories interwoven into the story at the start. As a reminder from the example player’s backstories, Maverick is a snobby gnome treasure collector who is a rival to Barnabas, and we’ve made the decision that Maverick is the one who has stolen Astrid Galamore’s hand in marriage, even though she has been in love with our party’s bard Jasper since childhood. Because Maverick is now residing in the kingdom with her, we’ve also decided that he is forcing Jasper’s old mentor, Mage Yaro, to use his arcane powers to tap into the expansive fungril network and hunt for treasure remotely.

Act One: Collision

We’ll want to think through how to make this event collide with our party in a way they can’t ignore. It’s often best to go to the most obvious answers first, then complicate things from there. For this situation, the low-hanging fruit is Maverick going after an artifact that the party has been asked to protect. If he’s using the fungril network to do it, then perhaps he is having Yaro create plant-like creatures filled with the fungus that can be controlled by him! There’s our first act encounter– and the rest of the act can build out from there.

The most important thing to keep in mind about Act One is that you want to use it to introduce a bigger conflict the party will encounter down the road– give them a taste of what’s to come and draw them into the arc’s story in a fun way. Using the techniques in the Preparing A Session section, you might end up with something like the below:

Beat One: On their way to a new city, the party runs across the collateral damage left behind by elemental creatures– something that tells Marigold that the people searching for her are close by.

Beat Two: As they arrive in a new city, they notice that plants have overgrown everything. They also meet some kind townsfolk who tell them about the attacks on the city by plant creatures at night. Upon inquiry, they’ll be taken to the place where the attacks are the worst– the University.

Beat Three: At the University, the students all know who Barnabas is– they’re studying his work with bone runes. The headmistress, Amelia Rose, who is a big proponent of the work Barnabas is doing, takes the party in and shows them what the plant creatures have been after: The Eye of the Strix, a massive owl creature from the hidden island of Boga Tiren. Her parents disappeared searching for Boga Tiren when she was a kid, and she’s spent her life trying to find where they went. If she can extract the memory of its location from the Strix’s eye, then maybe she can figure out where they ended up.

Beat Four: Amelia preserved part of the plant creature that attacked. If they investigate it, Geffrin will notice it’s using the fungril network to function, and is full of tiny mushrooms. If they connect to it, they will notice flashes of a powerful mage controlling it.

Beat Five: The plant creatures descend on the University. They must hold them back and defend the Eye of the Strix. When Geffrin attacks the creatures or tries to tap into their fungril network, they get flashes of the mage that become more clear. He cries out for help, looks like he’s in pain. Another voice echoes through the connection, telling him to get to the eye. As the final creature goes down in battle, the party hears the mage’s voice seep through it– the voice calls out to Jasper by a nickname only Yaro used to call them.

Though the session may change from the prep you’ve done, and you may have to adapt some of this to a different context than what’s above depending on what your player’s decide to do, the important thing this first act does is that it sets up the rest of the arc. It creates questions for the PCs to search after– why is Yaro doing this? Why did he look scared? Who was that other person giving him orders? If it’s somebody looking for relics, could it be Maverick? And also– what is Boga Tiren? Where is it? Why is it hidden? These dramatic questions are all the things that drive PCs forward in a campaign. Finding out what questions they want to answer next will push you into Act Two.

Act Two: Complications

In act two, players are thrust forward into a journey to answer their big questions. Before the end of act one, you can’t plan too far ahead because you can’t be sure which direction they’re going to go– they almost certainly will want to figure out what’s happening with Mage Yaro, but what if they decide to instead escort Professor Rose to Boga Tiren? Or maybe something else entirely? It’s often best to lead from behind as you approach Act Two– let the players show you the questions they want to answer the most, and fill in the gaps as they move towards finding those answers.

Once they’re off on this quest, act two is all about the complications that get in the way. And as you prep for these next sessions, the complications should matter– they should be personal, and speak to the themes and tone of the campaign you’re building together. If, for example, the party decides to head north to the Gallamore Kingdom to find out what’s happening with Mage Yaro, we know they’ll be on the road for a few days to get up there. It might be tempting to throw in a few random encounters with wild animals, some people asking for help with unrelated issues, or some rolls to see how well they’re able to survive the distant travel– but Act Two is all about the build up to a climactic finale. So what can we do instead to make it feel like a story, rather than just time that’s passing before we get to the Gallamore Kingdom?

We know Barnabas is searching for the legendary dragon Krugthar, and we’re likely going to have a future arc (when the players are higher level) centered around it’s attack on Bloomfare (Marigold’s home), so one option is to foreshadow that event on the journey to show the dragon’s power. Maybe we put a village that has been absolutely decimated by fire, with massive claw marks dug into the ground, and the city’s powerful mage killed. Those alive talk about an attack by a massive flying beast that disappeared into the sun– something Barnabas will immediately recognize as Krugthar. But to give the players something to act on now, maybe the beast had small companions or minions that leapt down into the city and are creating havoc, or dragged somebody important into the forest, or have shapeshifted to look like normal citizens. Depending on what kind of challenge your table enjoys, you can change what kind of encounter this is.

We also know from Geffrin’s backstory that if they stay somewhere too long, they will rot away everything around them—perhaps we see the devastating effect that Maverick and Yaro have had on the environment by growing lots of these plant creatures filled with fungus. They could have difficulty traversing this broken land, and encounter the remnants of these twisted arcane creatures. This could serve as a reminder to Geffrin of the place he decimated and the destruction he left behind. He could have the chance at a bit of redemption here, or at least knowledge of this kind of blight that helps keep his friends safe.

Another option to drive players forward might be to encounter an additional place where an artifact of power has been successfully stolen by Maverick’s fungril creatures—but this relic is something that can be consumed to steal another’s arcane power. Perhaps we decide this was the plan along, for Maverick to use Yaro until he could absorb his magic himself. Even without knowing the full context here, this kind of powerful object being in the wrong hands will likely push the PCs to get to Gallamore Kingdom as fast as they can.

Whatever the journey may entail, once the PCs have reached the Kingdom to confront Yaro (and learn about Maverick), we’re now breaking into the final act of our arc.

Act Three: Climax

Act Three will see our PCs resolve some of the big questions they have, and often face off against the powerful force they’ve been preparing for through Act One and Act Two. It’s important here to identify what the players are most excited about finding answers to, and providing at least some of those answers in this act– even if that means the answers spur even more questions. Oftentimes, these answers are what launch the next arc of your campaign, so having an idea of what they are going into this act will help you prepare for what’s to come.

Though not absolutely mandatory, it’s also always a good idea to plan some sort of reveal, surprise, or twist in this act—something that isn’t quite what it seems. These kinds of plot twists keep the players on their toes and can make them excited to find out what will happen next. In the case of our current example, we have a few twists prepared—Yaro is acting against his will, under the control of Maverick, who has squirmed his way into the kingdom by marrying Astrid Gallamore, Jasper’s childhood love.

As we prepare this act, we should identify the questions we are going to answer—things like: “Who is forcing Yaro into doing this?” and “What happened to Astrid?” It’s important to think through what Maverick would do to keep himself safe and Yaro under his control. Perhaps he orders the King’s Guard to attack the party when they enter the city, putting Jasper in conflict with the very people she grew up with. Maybe the kingdom is locked down, the drawbridge pulled up, and the group has to find another way in. Think about how you can create a last set of complications that ramps up the tension until the final confrontation is inevitable.

At some point, there will be a showdown between Maverick and the party. Maybe he still has Yaro under his control and uses him as a weapon against them. Maybe he’s absorbed Yaro’s arcane power using the relic he stole, and is now attacking the party with magic himself. Maybe he’s turned coward and is attempting to flee with Astrid through a secret tunnel beneath the castle. Whatever it is, it should probably be a big, exciting, and dangerous ending to the arc in a way that ties up some of the loose ends, while creating an opportunity for more adventure in the next arc.

A Living World

One of the most exciting aspects of gameplay is having the world change as the PCs move through it. After you finish each session, think about how the world at large has been affected by the events that unfolded and what story beats in the future might reflect those changes. What NPCs have been the most impacted? What adversaries or allies might come into the story because of what happened? Letting the story unfold naturally based on what the PCs have done and showcasing how the world has changed because of their actions, both good and bad, can remind your players that what they do in the game truly matters.