Running An Adventure

CHAPTER THREE

Running An Adventure

This chapter is only required reading if you plan to be the Game Master in a game of Daggerheart. If you’re simply reading the book to create and play a character, you’ve reached the end of all you need to know. But if you’re a Game Master, read on!

Being a Game Master means you are responsible for guiding the narrative and acting as the rest of the world that exists around your PCs. You might be the massive sandstorm that is hindering their journey, the innkeeper they make friends with once they reach shelter, the mysterious stranger in the corner who asks them for their help, or anything else that comes up during a session. Being a GM can be one of the most fun, exhilarating, and fulﬁlling experiences at the table—but it can also be intimidating, especially when learning a new system. This chapter is dedicated to giving you all you need to know about how to run Daggerheart: understanding the core mechanics; creating memorable encounters; planning exciting sessions; how to select, create, and use GM moves; crafting a full campaign; and more.

Parts of this chapter are much more conversational than the rest of the book. The previous chapters were primarily focused on delivering the mechanics of the game; while we’re going to cover mechanics here as well, but we’re also going to talk about things that lend themselves much better to a conversation; things like story structure and improv and world-building. Because, at the end of the day, the Big Secret™ about GMing is that you get to make it all up. Whether you made it up the week before, the day before, or in that moment at the table, you are always crafting an experience for your players through the decisions you make.

Core Guidance

In this section, you’ll find some core guidance for running Daggerheart: GM Principles, GM Best Practices, and Pitfalls To Avoid. These three sections go together to provide a foundation for how to get the most out of this game. The GM Principles are your guiding star - when in doubt, return to the principles. The Best Practices and Pitfalls sections that follow give you examples of approaches to take and traps to avoid when GMing Daggerheart. Meanwhile, chapters 4 through 6 contain resources for creating your world and filling it with dynamic adversaries, environments, and more.

As you read, don’t forget “The Golden Rule” from chapter 1: make the game your own. Whether you are a ﬁrst-time GM, a veteran behind the screen, or anything in between, we encourage you to embrace the parts here that resonate with you and modify any that don’t.

GM Principles

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
Fill the world with life, wonder, and danger
Make every roll carry weight
Collaborate at all times, especially in conflict
Ask questions and incorporate the answers
Hold on gently
Play to find out what happens

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.

GM Best Practices

Cultivate a curious table.
Gain your player’s trust.
Treat the characters as competent.
Cut to the action.
Keep the story moving forward.
Help the players use the game.
Create a meta conversation.
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

Tantalize players with a suspiciously-coded line muttered under a character’s breath, illustrate the signs of a lingering magical threat, hint at future danger coming over the horizon. Throw out hooks and see what catches their interest. Fostering an environment of creative inquiry at the table and that curiosity can lead you to incredible places.

Another way to foster curiosity at the table is to practice it yourself - ask questions of the characters to prime the players to think about the world through their character’s interests.

Do you think Reyna has run across the Twilight God’s inquisitors before? What does she think of them as a Seraph of the Dawn?

Marris, have you been to this town before in your travels as a Bard? What do you remember about the audiences here?

The GM is part of the table, so this can extend to you as well. Follow your own curiosity and share it with the players. “Did you mean it when you said you’d never go home again?” “How is your character feeling after the confrontation with the inquisitor?” Asking these kinds of questions also gives the table insight into the PCs’ internal monologue, and helps you all to understand these characters on a deeper level.

Gain Your Players’ Trust

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

Make promises and then follow through on them. Let players’ hunches be correct where you can, let them feel like their understanding of the world is correct even if it’s incomplete. In resolving an action, deliver on the expectations you set before the roll was made. This also means admitting when you mis-step or mis-speak, and checking in with your players when you’re unsure about something.

Strive to believe the players when they bring in their character’s Experiences. The bonus they gain is no guarantee of success, and validating a player’s vision of their character while still representing the difficulty of an obstacle honestly creates a healthy balance of dramatic uncertainty. The Rogue is a skilled climber from her years as a sailor, but will that be enough to scale up a siege tower while it’s careening down a bumpy hill…and on fire?

Treat the Characters as Competent

The characters in Daggerheart are skilled adventurers and heroes, even early in their journey. Don’t call for a roll when a task is simple and/or without danger. The Rogue probably doesn’t need to roll pick a standard lock, especially if they have the Burglar Experience—but if the lock is warded by a powerful wizard, that’s another story.

Because every action roll can cause consequences and complications, as well as generate Hope and Fear, asking for more rolls or letting players roll for tasks that wouldn’t require a roll can cause an imbalance of the system. Primarily call for rolls when the characters take bold, dangerous actions. If you don’t see an interesting result from either success or failure, you can skip the roll: “I don’t think Arielle needs to roll to cross the bridge, I’m not really interested in what a failure here would be like. What do you think?”

Cut to the Action

Heroic fantasy stories are generally comprised of dramatic scenes, travel montages, and downtempo moments around a camp as the heroes decompress and prepare for what’s ahead. If the travel between two places isn’t going to result in much danger or interesting challenges and everyone is excited to press forward, you can just cut to the action. You could instead say something like, “So you travel to Oldhome. Clear all your marked HP, Stress, and Armor Slots. We pick up on the edge of town. It’s only twilight, but you haven’t seen anyone in any of the outlying farms. And there’s no sound coming from the tavern just ahead on your right. What do you do?”

You might tell the players they can flash back to the details of the plan or get their story straight later. When a scene feels like it’s dragging or going in circles, you can always ask the players to trust you to cut away so that you can keep the story moving.

Note that action doesn’t always mean combat. Action can be a tense political drama as the party tries to maintain an alliance hanging by a thread. Action can be navigating an archmage’s warded and trapped hedge maze. Action here means anytime there is tension and uncertainty–it means situations that will 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, surrender, or just ask the players how they finish out the fight. You should do your best to not let a scene become a grind where everyone feels obligated to see it through, but no one is having fun. Part of being the GM is picking which moments to focus on.

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 situation. If there aren’t any interesting consequences for failure on an action, you don’t need to call for a roll.

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 the rules of this game. Regardless, work with players so that everyone understands the rules. If you have a question about something, another player might have the same question. Help players get to the point where they see the game’s rules as a toolkit to help 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 the GM is working with the players to tell the story. If they’re missing something obvious or seem to be forgetting a mechanic or ability, ask if they think that ability might apply here. If they seem stuck, you might outright state that you think they have an ability or item that would help.

Create a Meta Conversation

Ensure that players always feel comfortable utilizing the safety tools in-place for the game and know that it’s okay to shift out of character to ask something at the player level as creative collaborators or at the table level as people enjoying a game together.

Additionally, while the characters live in the world and have all their senses to experience it, the players only know what is established at the table together. Help the players by sharing details about their environments, giving them critical information, and offering facts and realities that their characters would easily know or have already discovered.

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 in ways that extend her power. A large swamp serpent is motivated by hunger and the desire for safety within its territory, so it hunts outsiders, but it might not chase them beyond its territory if it’s full.

Each adversary stat block suggests a couple general motives, but when you’re depicting important NPCs, consider both their short-term and long-term goals and desires. A renowned thief might be most immediately driven by a desire to steal crown jewels from a caravan traveling through the forest, but their ultimate goal is to avoid being caught by the king’s guard—if both of these impact their decisions, this helps create a multidimensional 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, this helps the players make moves to push and pull on those hopes and fears. Show how motivation leads the party’s allies to act in solidarity with them even at personal risk.

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

Bring the Game’s Mechanics to Life

The game’s rules are there to help facilitate the storytelling process. Set a good example of how fiction and mechanics work together to enhance the experience of the game for everyone involved. When there’s an oncoming storm that will bring disaster to the nearby port town, place a countdown on the table labeled “The storm ravages Port Emerald” to show that the threat is real.

Be clear about stating the risks of an action should something go wrong. When a PC rolls a failure with Fear, go hard with your description of the consequence to convey the gravity of the situation and the difference between a failure with Hope and one with Fear. Embody the enemy’s fatigue and desperation as they mark their last Stress but continue to goad the party on.

If the heroes are ambushed by a large band of raiders, lay out your battlemat and set out figures for all fourteen enemies to show how outnumbered the party is.

Reframe Rather than Reject

If a player’s suggestion or description is out-of-sync with what has been established in the game or is generally implausible, 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 for an implausible task to become doable, or call out a part of the suggestion that is more workable and encourage the player to build on that aspect.

“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 move around if you wanted.”

Work in Moments and Montages

When framing a scene or proposing a way to play 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 or climactic moments their due, linger on the emotion and give players time to savor the scene. However, not every part of the story needs to be told in moment-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 is especially good for actions that take place over minutes, hours, or days.

“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 roll with Presence.”

Pitfalls to Avoid

Like any game that relies heavily on collaboration, the tactics and behaviors of people at the table with have a large impact on the way the game runs. There are areas where hang-ups are more likely to occur than others. Here are a few things to look out for 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
Letting Fear Go Unused

Undermining the Heroes

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

On a failure, things go badly and the character doesn’t get what they want. But rather than describing the PCs being incompetent, it’s usually better to show how the failure comes from environmental factors or unexpected surprises. An easy way to make this work is to start by describing the cool or smart move the character was making, then saying “but…” and describing a surprise, complication, or escalation.

“Your blade slices through the air with grace, the cut coming in perfectly at the guard’s shoulder . But she reacts just fast enough to bring up the haft of her halberd to block your blow, then swings her weapon to try to pin you against the wall. She’s way faster than a random guard at an outpost like this should be. What’s a soldier with skill like that doing stuck all the way out here?”

If the group has decided on a more silly or goofy tone, this guidance may not apply, but the default for Daggerheart is to assume the PCs competence as adventurers and to make the story exciting by depicting capable heroes struggling with extraordinary challenges.

Always Telling the Players What To Roll

An important part of the creative collaboration in Daggerheart is allowing 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 (traversing a slippery bridge is almost always going to be an Agility roll). But in many situations, when a challenge or threat is presented to the characters and you know they’ll need to roll to address that threat, you can give them the freedom to decide how they’re going to handle the challenge and what trait they want to use to accomplish it.

GM: “The spellrider on the giant bat just broke the enchantment keeping your airship aloft. You’re all going to need to give me a roll to deal with the imminent fal l . What do you do?”

Player 1: “I’m going to jump over and grab a hold of the bat to climb over and wrestle the spellrider out of the saddle. Can I do that with Agility?”

Player 2: “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

Many tasks can be completed with a single roll, and every roll should aim to move the story forward and build or resolve tension. So if the Wizard gets a success on a Knowledge roll to search a library for a book that will provide answers to solve a specific problem, give them find a useful book, even if it’s not the perfect one. Especially if just finding an applicable book won’t automatically solve their next problem, but is required to attempt that solution.

If most obstacles take one successful action to address, major obstacles and threats will feel more significant when they take multiple steps to overcome. Many adversaries take several hits to defeat, but if a battle starts to lose its excitement, look for ways to shake things up or create a resolution.

Singular Solutions

If the GM has exactly one idea in mind of how the PCs can solve a given problem, it can become challenging if the players get excited about another idea or solution. You might have good reason for why the solution you have in mind is the best option, but if the players have a good idea, it’s often smart to adjust in the moment and think about how to make their approach work—not automatically, but something to work toward with daring actions.

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, it’s usually wise to find 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 to check 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 PC’s background and connections serve as the primary fuel for the game’s plot. For these reasons, it’s recommended to leave space for the story to breathe.

The game works better when more preparation time goes into situations for the characters to explore and engage with than in 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 certain forms of preparation while still enriching the game through player agency and creativity.

Another reason to be wary of overplanning is that Daggerheart is designed for player agency. Your players will often surprise you with great ideas or by taking daring or unwise actions in keeping with the characters’ motivation. When those surprises come up, try to read the energy of the table and see if they’re all excited to take that new direction. And it’s okay to tell your players, “That took me by surprise. How about a quick 10-minute break while I think about how this exciting change will play out?”

Always Taking Fear

Whenever the players roll with Fear, you have a choice between making a GM Move and taking a Fear. If a move doesn’t ﬁt the story at the moment, or if you’re not sure which move to make, you can always take a Fear.

However, making moves is the main way you keep the story moving and raise the stakes. Taking Fear defers complications until later; sometimes that can bleed tension out of the current scene, and when you later use that Fear, it can feel disconnected and potentially punitive.

Try to ﬁnd a balance between the two: make moves when they’re interesting or logical, and take Fear when you’d rather not interrupt the party’s ﬂow of actions, then plan to make big dramatic moves later on. For example, you can use stored Fear to add tokens to the action tracker at the start of combat, creating tension because the players know a wave of adversary actions could hit at any moment.

Core GM Mechanics

The GM’s Die

The players use two d12 Duality dice as their primary dice for action resolution, but as GM, you’ll instead use one d20. This creates a less predictable outcome for your rolls than those of the players; you’re just as likely to roll abysmally high or low as you are to roll a middling number, whereas rolling two d12s creates a more stable bell curve of results. When you succeed, it creates a new and exciting challenge for the players, and when you fail, it is a relief and a boon for the players. The swingy nature of the d20’s results helps to facilitate both of these experiences throughout a session (but if you ever want to increase the chances an adversary will succeed or fail, you can increase or decrease their attack modiﬁer).

Making GM Rolls

When an adversary attacks a PC, you roll the dice to determine the outcome. This follows a similar process to PC action rolls (see “Action Rolls” in chapter 2), except using your d20 instead of two d12s:

Roll your d20 and add the adversary’s attack bonus (along with any other dice, such as advantage or disadvantage).
If the roll result meets or beats the target PC’s evasion, it succeeds and hits the target. Otherwise, it fails and doesn’t hit.
On a success, roll the appropriate damage dice to determine how much damage the attack deals.

Critical Success

PCs aren’t the only characters who can roll a critical success–their adversaries can too! Whenever you roll a 20 on the d20, your roll automatically succeeds regardless of the PC’s evasion score.

If you critically succeed on an attack roll, you also deal extra damage. Start with the full value of the damage dice, and then make a damage roll as normal to add to that value.

Calling for Action Rolls

When players make moves during the game, sometimes you’ll want to ask them for an action roll to determine how the scene progresses. After a player tells you what they want to do, use this guide to determine if you should call for a roll, choosing whichever option best ﬁts the situation:

Skip uninteresting rolls. If the consequences of failure won’t be interesting or signiﬁcantly change the story, let the PC act without the need for a roll. Similarly, assume the PCs are competent in simple tasks—a PC generally doesn’t need to roll to climb a ladder or open an unlocked door, even if the consequences of failure would be interesting.
Let the PC guarantee their success in exchange for a consequence. If there is an opportunity for an interesting consequence, offer them the consequences for performing the move without a need for a roll. If they decide they are okay with those consequences, let them perform the move without a roll and inﬂict the consequences as agreed. For example, rather than rolling to see if a PC can jump from one roof to another, you might allow them to automatically succeed in exchange for being noticed by bystanders on the street below.
Establish the stakes. If a move is particularly difﬁcult or dangerous and offers interesting consequences that depend on their success or failure, establish the stakes for the roll so that the player knows what to expect. Once everybody is aligned, ask them to make the roll to see how the ﬁction changes. For example, if a PC wants to jump from one roof to another and roll for it, you might inform them that on a success, they’d jump without anyone noticing, but on a failure, they’d likely fall to the street below.
Make clear any guaranteed consequences. If a move is particularly difﬁcult or dangerous, and if it will certainly have consequences regardless of whether the PC succeeds,, tell them the certain consequences that will come from their move and establish the stakes for the roll. Once everybody is aligned, ask them to make the roll to see how the ﬁction changes. For example, if a PC wants to jump from the roof of a burning building to safety, you might inform them that after they jump, the roof will be devoured in ﬂames and they won’t be able to return to that building regardless of how well they roll.

Experiences Impact Fiction

When determining whether or not a roll is necessary, always consider a PC’s backstory, including both their chosen Experiences and their narrative history. For example, if a PC chose “Expert Climber” as an Experience, and they’re attempting to scale a wall with no other danger around, you might decide there is no need for a roll to be made–they can just do it. If the climb would be tricky due to weather, but you don’t want the story to focus on what happens if they fail, you might offer them the option of marking a Stress in exchange for climbing without a roll. If there are archers shooting down at them from a parapet above, or if they’re trying to avoid onlookers noticing their climb, establish this danger with them, then let them choose whether to roll or make a different move. If the wall is old and crumbling, and putting weight on it will make it unclimbable for anyone else behind them, establish this consequence with your table, then let them choose whether to roll.

Making Moves

Just like the players have moves they can make during the game, you also have GM moves that help drive forward the fiction in response to their actions. Unlike the PCs, you are not typically bound by rules of success and failure on die rolls or given only certain effects you can do—your job is to facilitate the fiction, whatever that requires. GM moves provide inspiration on how you might make that happen.

At its most simple, a GM move is anything you do that guides the story forward. These moves often introduce conflict, reveal new information, or put the PCs in further danger, but they don’t have to—they are simply your opportunity to change the scene in some way. The “Softer and Harder Moves” section offers guidance on when your move should introduce danger or difﬁculty, versus when your move should simply nudge the story along.

Moves are your chance to make things happen in the scene. So what should you do? The upcoming sections provide suggestions, but these decisions are hard to make in a vacuum. The best tool you have at your disposal is listening to your players as they add to the narrative, then weaving your moves into the shared story.

When to Make a Move

Knowing when to make moves (and what kind of moves to make) is almost certainly the biggest part of learning to GM Daggerheart. The frequency and severity of these moves depends a lot on the kind of story you’re telling, the kinds of actions your players take, and the tone of the session you’re running, but the general rule of thumb is: You can make a GM move whenever you want. That’s right! You’re the GM—your job is not to crush the PCs or always act adversarially; your job is to help tell a story, so you should be making moves whenever you see an opportunity to do that.

Always consider make a GM move when a PC:

Rolls with Fear on an action roll.
Fails an action roll.
Does something that would have consequences.
Gives you a golden opportunity.
Looks to you for what happens next.

They roll with Fear on an action roll.

If a PC rolls with Fear, you always have the opportunity to make a GM move (see the upcoming “Fear” section). Whether their roll failed or succeeded, your move should usually build on the action the player just attempted.

Tip: We recommend you only choose to take a Fear when you can’t think of a GM move to use in the situation, or would prefer the narrative keep moving forward without interruption.

They fail an action roll.

If a PC fails an action roll (see “Action Rolls” in chapter 2), you have the chance to describe the failure and what comes next in the story because of it. If it’s a failure with Fear, consider choosing a more harsh consequence or complication than you would otherwise.

They do something that would have consequences.

Sometimes, a PC makes a move that would deﬁnitely have narrative consequences, regardless of whether they succeed or fail. In these situations, you can make a move to reﬂect that outcome. For example, if a PC wants to save someone from a building that’s engulfed in ﬂames, the player might say they want to run inside the building. You could tell the player that if they do, no matter how high they roll, they’re going to take damage from the ﬂames. If they move into the building anyway, you can deal them whatever damage makes sense for the story.

They give you a golden opportunity.

Sometimes, a PC’s decisions give you the perfect opportunity for a dramatic move—perhaps they move too close to a waiting predator or get distracted while keeping watch for intruders. In these cases, a roll doesn’t prompt your move, but you can seize the opportunity for a great dramatic beat. For example, if the PCs are hiding from bandits while discussing the bandit leader’s plans, a PC might say with dramatic irony, “But surely they won’t look in the eaves of every barn in the district!” In response, you might describe the barn door noisily swinging open as a bandit steps inside, a lit torch in one hand and a sword in the other.

They look to you for what happens next.

Your job is to keep the story moving, so when the players aren’t sure what to do, they’ll likely look to you for an idea of what happens next. This is usually a sign that you should make a move to forward the narrative. For example, if the PCs are conversing with each other during a dinner party then they reach a lull in the conversation, they might glance at you to see if it’s time for an NPC to speak or take action.

Similarly, make a move when the PCs seem to be stumped as to what course of action to take in a scene, or when the players seem frustrated about lack of information. When you need to get the scene moving again, a softer move usually does the trick (see “Softer and Harder Moves”), but sometimes a harder move is needed to provoke the PCs to action.

How to Choose a Move

When a player makes an action roll (see “Action Rolls” in chapter 2), the result inﬂuences how the scene changes—but those changes depend on your chosen GM move. Consider the following examples of what you might say to the player after an action roll, and what moves you might make:

“That’s a critical success! You get what you want and a little extra. Gain a Hope and clear a Stress . Tell me how this happens…” Let the player describe their success, then give the party an additional opportunity or advantage in the scene because of it.

“That’s a success with Hope, so you get what you want. Gain a Hope . Tell me how this happens…” Let the player describe their success, then show how the world reacts to it.

“That’s a success with Fear , so you get what you want, but it comes at a cost. Here’s what happens…” Work together to describe the PC’s success, then introduce a complication or cost—but don’t negate their success with this consequence. Maybe they face an attack or gain Stress from an enemy they’re engaged with, get new information that raises the stakes, or realize their ally is in imminent danger.

“That’s a failure with Hope, so things don’t go to plan, but you do gain a Hope . Here’s what happens…” Describe how the PC fails to get what they want, and how the situation goes wrong as a result, by introducing a minor complication or consequence. Maybe they spot a new danger they must now contend with, face an attack or take a Stress from an enemy they’re engaged with, or face collateral damage that puts them in a more difficult position.

“That’s a failure with Fear, so it doesn’t go well! Here’s what happens…” Describe how things go wrong by introducing a major complication or consequence. Maybe the information they get is not good news and also puts them in immediate danger, they become the focus of multiple adversaries, they are separated from their party, or an important opportunity is lost for good.

Tip: If you’re not sure how to resolve a roll, think about it like this:

***Success with Hope:*Yes, and… (You get what you want and take a Hope.)

Success with Fear: Yes, but… (You get what you want, but there’s a consequence.)

Failure with Hope: No, but… (Things don’t go as planned, but you take a Hope.)

***Failure with Fear:*No, and… (Things don’t go as planned and it gets worse.)

Obvious Moves

Sometimes, you’ll know without hesitation how to make a move in a scene. A PC just rolled a success with Fear on a melee attack against a powerful enemy? They get what they want, but it comes at a cost. In response, your move might have the enemy strike back or throw the PC across the battleﬁeld. Maybe you’ve set up the scene so that they’re ﬁghting on a precarious ledge, and the attack from the PC was successful, but momentum carries them dangerously close to the cliff’s edge and they now must make an Agility check to see if they can keep from slipping off.

Other times, the move might not be immediately obvious. In that case, you can draw inspiration from the following “Example GM Moves” section.

Player-Drive Moves

If you’re still not sure what to do, you might turn the decision over to the player, giving them an option of two different things or simply asking them what happens next. They will sometimes put themselves in a more interesting situation than you ever would have done on your own! As a last resort, if the scene should have a cost or consequence and you can’t come up with something, you can always simply have the player mark a Stress and move the scene forward.

Keep in mind, these moves can be used in any situation you ﬁnd them useful. While the mechanics of combat naturally lends itself to tracking when enemies attack, how much damage they do, and so on, the concept of “making moves” applies across all scenarios within Daggerheart. A tense dinner between rivals, an important negotiation, an emotional confrontation—all of these scenes have a back-and-forth between the PCs and the GM. You can use moves to accomplish the single most important part of GMing: listening to your players and responding in a way that builds on the ﬁction you’re creating together.

Avoid Undermining Success

On a success with Fear, one pitfall GMs can run into is undermining their players’ success when making a GM move as the consequence. For example, if a PC makes a Finesse roll in an attempt to move stealthily through a hallway, and they succeed but roll with Fear, don’t use your move to sound an alarm bell or make someone bump into them. The PC succeeded on the roll, and that success should be honored, even if it comes with a consequence. Instead, you could consider options such as introducing a new obstacle at their target destination.

Example: The PC making the Finesse roll gets a success with Fear, so the GM invites the player to describe how they avoid notice. Then,the GM thinks about what move to make that will push the scene forward without invalidating the PC’s success. They could decide to add a patrol in the room ahead that the PC will have to contend with, they could make the PC mark Stress as their skill lets them make a quick move to avoid detection, or they could choose to simply take Fear and defer the consequence. The GM decides to introduce a new hurdle, telling the player that once they’ve made their way through the hallways, they come to their destination. But even before they approach the door, they hear the chatter and shufﬂing of armored ﬁgures inside as the GM reveals there is a guard patrol on break in the next room.

Similarly, if a PC does something cool—such as cleverly casting a spell—you may want to let them enjoy it instead of immediately foiling their schemes, and decide to let the scene play out for a while. Once you feel like the player is satisﬁed with the effect, you can use a GM move and explain how the scene changes to end the effect. If the players are used to you following this approach, then when a particularly dramatic moment or powerful adversary arrives, you can make a big impression by using your move to shut down an effect immediately—showing just how dire the scene is.

Keep this principle in mind as you consider which moves to make (see “Example GM Moves” below), and implement the harder actions with care (see “Softer and Harder Moves” below). Stealing a powerful artifact from the adventurers can spark an exciting story arc—or it can throw icy water on the party’s excitement and make them feel all their work to retrieve it was pointless. As always, communication and collaboration are key, and hard actions shouldn’t negate player agency or feel punitive.

Softer and Harder Moves

When play turns to you, you have many options for how to respond. Some are soft moves that are generally easier on the players—they give the party new information about the scene and offer them an opportunity to react to it. Others are hard moves that are usually harsher, bigger or more direct—the ﬁction happens without the ability to intercede.

The next section contains examples of softer and harder moves in approximate order of severity. Remember that your choice of move is a powerful way to set the tone for a challenge or threat. Before making a hard move, consider whether a softer move might be a better ﬁt, but don’t shy away from hard moves when they further the story.

Example GM Moves

GM moves are your most important tool as a storyteller in Daggerheart. Everyone who picks up the game will interact with them in different ways, and that’s okay! The way you make moves truly defines the story you’re telling, so no GMs should feel like they have to use them the exact same way as anybody else. As long everyone is having fun, you’re staying true to the story, and you’re acting as a fan of your PCs, that’s what matters.

The following examples span the gradient from softer moves to harder moves. Rather than jumping straight to a hard move, it’s a good idea to look down the list until you ﬁnd the move that seems appropriate. Don’t describe your move in the terms used in this section, however—instead of saying “I show the cost of collateral damage“, contextulaize it for the players, describing how to comes to be and why the scene changes because of it.

When you make a GM move, you might…

Show how the world reacts.
Ask a question and build on the answer.
Make an NPC act in accordance with their motive.
Lean on the character’s goals to drive them to action.
Signal an imminent off-screen threat.
Reveal an unwelcome truth or unexpected danger.
Offer the PC what they want in exchange for marking a Stress.
Make a move the characters don’t see.
Force the group to split up.
Show the cost of collateral damage.
Make a character mark a Stress as a consequence for their actions.
End a temporary condition or effect.
Make an attack.
Gain a Fear (on a roll with Fear).
Spend Action Tokens.
Capture someone or something important.
Use a character’s backstory against them.
Take away an opportunity permanently.

Show how the world reacts.

To show how the world reacts, simply think about the way the PC’s move has affected the world and narrate that change in a way that drives the story forward. At its softest, you might describe them successfully breaking down a door, then give them a description of the next room and what danger they find there. You could also make the person they are negotiating with present an option for compromise, or have an enemy they just hit attempt to retreat. This is your opportunity to make the world around the PCs feel real and alive. This option also includes ticking down a countdown (like a consequence countdown) to show the world reacting and/or time passing.

Ask a question and build on the answer.

This is perhaps the most collaborative move—presenting the player with a question, and using their answer as truth to build the scene. You might ask them something like, “What do you see here that reminds you of home?” or “What about this place tells you somebody else has been here before you?” Usually utilized when establishing information about a scene or when you’re interested in a specific character or player’s perspective on the current situation, this can be a great way to get the whole table involved in worldbuilding during the game.

Make an NPC act in accordance with their motive.

When a scene includes characters other than the PCs, you can spotlight what these NPCs are doing in response to the actions being taken. You might show a friendly NPC helping the party in a fight, a group of townsfolk taking cover, or an enemy moving positions. Make sure their actions always follow from their motive.

Lean on the character’s goals to drive them to action.

One of the most powerful things you can do as a GM in a scene is use something personal to the PCs to drive the fiction forward. If they have an NPC they care for, you might reveal something they desperately need or put them in danger. If they are seeking out a specific object or creature, you might reveal where it is and why it’s going to be so challenging to get there. Using a PC’s own desires to drive them forward is a great way to reinforce why this scene matters to them.

Signal an imminent off-screen threat.

The rustle in the trees, an alarm bell being sounded, the clanging armor of reinforcements headed their way—this move creates a ticking clock for your PCs in the scene. They need to get moving now.

Reveal an unwelcome truth or unexpected danger.

This is a very versatile move that’s usually applicable in any scene—you’re simply heightening the drama or tension in a narrative way. Maybe an unexpected person steps out of the shadows, or the characters receive is bad news or information that makes them rethink what they thought they knew. A soft version of this move might be to have a Guard Captain emerge to see what her guards are yelling about as you’re fighting them, or simply to move a group of dangerous foes into striking range of the party. A harder version of this move might be an enemy pinning a PC up against a wall or tackling them to the ground, making a PC Restrained until they make a roll to escape the adversary’s grasp.

Offer the PC what they want in exchange for marking stress.

The PC can can get it done, but it’s not going to be easy—this is usually used on a success with Fear when you’re not sure what other consequences apply. When you have a player mark a Stress, describe why it’s stressful in the narrative—or ask the player to do so. Is it physically taxing in some way? Does it bring up painful memories? Are they under significant pressure?

Make a move the characters don’t see.

This is usually most useful when you have something happening behind the scenes that you’re waiting to reveal. You might mark a GM clock, tick a current Countdown an additional time, add more damage dice to an enemy’s upcoming damage roll, adjust a narrative situation the PCs have yet to encounter, or anything else the players don’t see the result of immediately. When you do this, don’t tell them the move, but do create fun tension at the table by letting them know your machinations have changed: “Everything is ﬁne… for now.”

Force the group to split up.

Usually used as either an environmental hazard or an enemy’s trap, splitting up the party can make your players have to think differently than they normally would about how to accomplish a task. It can also make for some fun cutting back and forth in the scene as the two groups work independently before finding a way back to each other.

Show the cost of collateral damage.

This is a great move to use when the player tries to do something powerful and there’s a consequence. That fireball that missed? Maybe it went wide, struck the side of the mountain, and now they hear rumbling from above. An avalanche is headed this way. Whenever the PC does something that could have a significant impact on the world around them, you can use this move to show them the natural ramifications of that event.

Make a PC mark a Stress as a consequence for their actions.

In a parallel move to “Offer a PC what they want in exchange for stress,” this is usually used when a player fails a roll and you’re not sure what consequence to offer—they don’t get what they want and they mark stress because of it. Again, it’s important to investigate the why here. What about that failure is particularly stressful for them?

End a temporary condition or effect.

You can clear a temporary condition or other effect. In combat, you can easily do this by spending an action token (see “Activating Adversaries”), but you can use a move to end an effect at any time. If a PC just started using an effect, however, think twice before ending it—you’ll likely want to wait until ending it would be narratively satisfying, giving it a chance to play out and affect the scene ﬁrst.

When you make this move, lead with the narrative, describing who or what causes the effect to end, then how it changes the PC’s situation. For example, if an adversary is Vulnerable because they’re being held down by a tangle of vines, you might describe them using their blade to hack away at the vines to break free. Or if the effect is caused by a spell, you might describe the adversary unleashing a hail of arrows toward the caster, missing them but inhibiting their ability to focus on the spell any longer.

Make an attack.

This move raises the stakes of a scene very quickly. For example, maybe a discussion in a tavern escalates to violence, or a shady diplomat is tired of being questioned and tries to stab the PC with their hidden blade in an attempt to escape. When you choose to do this, you can have an adversary move anywhere within Close range, make an attack roll with your d20 (see “The GM’s Die” earlier in this chapter), then describe the attack and whether it succeeds or fails. If the PCs decide to ﬁght back, that’s a good time to bring out the action tracker. Once the action tracker is active, you don’t need to use this move to attack—instead, you’ll use action tokens to make future attacks (see “Spend Action Tokens” below).

Gain a Fear (on a roll with Fear).

On a roll with Fear, you don’t have to introduce an immediate cost or complication—instead, you can gain a Fear token and save it for later. When you make this move, describe how the tone or mood of the scene shifts and tension mounts before passing play back to the PCs. See the “Fear” section below for details on how you can later spend this token to augment the scene, such as by using an adversary’s Fear action or adding additional tokens to the action tracker.

Tip: If you are struggling to come up with the consequences of a PC who rolls a success or failure with Fear, this move lets you just take a Fear and move the story forward. But try to avoid making this choice too often—immediate consequences help to drive the story in unexpected and engaging ways.

Spend action tokens.

If the action tracker is active, you can spend an action token to activate an adversary or the environment. This often means making an attack roll, but can be anything that spotlights the adversaries’ tactics and motives or changes the environment in interesting ways. Some adversary and environment moves allow you to spend Fear (along with an action token) on especially unique or dramatic actions. You may also spend these tokens to end temporary conditions or effects. Once you are done spending tokens, play should pass back to the PCs.

Capture someone or something important.

Taking away something the party desperately wants or needs can quickly ratchet up the tension in a scene. You might knock a weapon from a PC’s hand, capture a fellow party member or ally of the group, or steal an object of power right from under their noses. These moves are an exciting, ﬁction-forward way to advance the story.

Use their backstory against them.

Integrating a player’s backstory into your move you make can leave a huge impact on the PC and make the story much more personal to them. Maybe someone from their past shows up here, or a mistake they made long ago catches up with them, or the scene simply parallels something they’ve already been through before—giving them the chance to make a different choice. By grounding the move in a character’s own experiences, it makes the moments that happen next in the scene matter even more to them.

Take away an opportunity permanently.

When things get really dire, sometimes the PCs forever lose the opportunity or opening they once had. A softer version of this move might be collapsing the party’s straightforward pathway through a cave system, forcing them to find another, more treacherous way through. As a harder application of this move, you might instead kill a valuable NPC or destroy a desperately needed object of power. These moves can be used to great effect when you want to twist the trajectory of the story in a new direction.

Fear

While PCs have the opportunity to gain Hope as a metacurrency during the game, you have the opportunity to gain Fear.

Gaining Fear

When you first start a campaign, you begin with 2 Fear, just like each PC begins with 2 Hope. Whenever a PC rolls with Fear (see “Rolling Hope and Fear” in chapter 2), you have the opportunity to gain Fear as your GM move. You can also get Fear by converting tokens on the action tracker (see the upcoming “Using the Action Tracker” section), as well as from certain abilities or spells used by the PCs.

You can never have more than 6 Fear at a time, so don’t hesitate to spend it!

Tracking Fear

You can track Fear with tokens in a pool (the Fear pool), a die, or other counting methods. You’re encouraged to keep this pool visible to the players too. Between sessions, Fear carries over just like PCs carry over Hope, so at the end of each session, note how many Fear you have, then start with that many during your next session.

Spending Fear

Whenever you spend Fear, describe what changes in the world as Fear manifests. What interrupts the PCs? How does an adversary prepare for a powerful attack? What does it look/sound/smell like when an avalanche crashes down on the PCs?

When you spend fear, you can:

Interrupt the players while the action tracker is out to make a move.
Add two tokens to the action tracker.
Use an adversary’s fear feature.
Use an environment’s fear feature.

Tip: As with any GM move, spending Fear shouldn’t undermine the players’ fun. Fear is a tool for you to enhance the scene, create dramatic tension, and raise the stakes, not to outright shut down a PC’s heroic actions.

Interrupt the players while the action tracker is out to make a move.

You can spend a Fear to interrupt between PCs while the action tracker is out and make a GM move as if they had rolled a failure or with Fear. This is most useful when PCs have been rolling successfully with Hope for a signiﬁcant number of actions and you want to act in response. For example, if the PCs have placed five tokens on the action tracker but you haven’t had a chance to spend them yet, you can convert two of those tokens into a Fear, spend that Fear to make a move immediately, and have three tokens left on the action tracker to activate adversaries during your move.

Add two tokens to the action tracker.

You can always spend a Fear to add two tokens to the action tracker. This is most useful if you have a large number of adversaries on the battlefield and a decent pile of Fear built up when play returns to you—you can spend a few Fear to put more tokens on the action tracker, and use them to activate those adversaries.

Use an Adversary’s Fear Feature.

In addition to each adversary’s standard features, some some adversaries have powerful Fear features (see “Using Adversaries” in chapter 4). You can use an adversary’s Fear features by spending an action token (as usual) along with the indicated number of Fear.

Even if an adversary has other Fear features, you can always spend a Fear to improvise a big adversary move that might otherwise feel overpowered or arbitrary.

Use an Environment’s Fear Feature.

Environments can have their own features that require spending Fear to activate (see “Using Environments” in chapter 4). You can use an environment’s Fear Feature by spending an action token (as usual) along with the indicated number of Fear.

Even if the environment has another Fear feature, you can always spend Fear to improvise a big environment move that might otherwise feel overpowered or arbitrary.

Improvising Fear Moves

When you’re improvising adversaries or environments or when you’re using existing ones, you might ﬁnd a moment where you want to put your thumb on the scale to make something dramatic happen or to escalate the scene. You can always improve a GM move, whether it’s for an adversary, an environment, or otherwise, but there may be situations when you want to make an especially hard move. In those situations, you may want to treat it as a Fear move. You can spend Fear and declare the move, spending the resource to communicate and respect the scale of the action you’re taking.

A Fear move should redeﬁne a scene, change the terms, raise the stakes, modify or change the location, etc.

Fear moves commonly include one or more of these elements:

Introducing new adversaries to a scene.
An adversary activating a powerful spell or transformation to deal massive damage or boost their capabilities.
An environment taking strong action against the party.

For additional guidance on creating Fear Moves, check the existing Fear Moves included in the “Adversary Features” and “Environment Features” sections and stat blocks of chapter 4.

Examples of Improvised Fear Moves:

The party has confronted a corrupt noble who the GM had planned to be a recurring villain, but most of the noble’s HP are already marked and the party is close to dispatching them before their plans can be revealed. Deciding that they don’t want to change plans and let the PCs claim this unexpected victory, the GM improvises a Fear move to allow the noble to escape using some method that makes sense for the adversary but hasn’t been set up in the ﬁction. A noble not known to have magic might produce a token allowing them to teleport away even if it hasn’t been established in the story. In that case, the GM might decide to spend a Fear on an improvised “Take away an opportunity” move that lets the villain survive to ﬁght another day.

In a battle with the party, a solo enemy whose damage output isn’t proving as much of a threat to the party as the GM would have liked. The GM might decide to adjust their damage dice on the ﬂy, or they might decide to spend Fear and improvise an adversary feature where the enemy goes into a rage, increasing their damage for the remainder of the scene. The GM leads with the ﬁction, explaining why the adversary’s damage output is increasing and signaling the escalation to the PCs.

During a scene where the PCs are tracking a kidnapper, a PC rolls a success with Fear. The GM invites the player to describe how their action allows the PCs to gain ground, then spends a Fear and describes that just as the party spots the kidnapper on the horizon, a massive shadow passes over the group as a Wyvern decides that the party will be their next meal. The GM hadn’t mentioned anything about Wyverns being known to hunt in this area, so the GM decides it’s appropriate to spend a Fear rather than just introducing the new threat with a normal GM move.

While the party is exploring an ancient temple of a dead god of conquest, moving through a room with statues of long-gone heroes and their burial goods, the GM sees a way to enhance the scene. When given an opportunity by the Rogue cracking open one of the sarcophagi, the GM spends a Fear to improvise a Fear Move. They describe the stone walls of the temple lighting up as if shot through with veins of glowing gold light. A booming voice calls out, saying “I may be dead, but I will not tolerate the desecration of my temple” as the god’s vestige animates the statues of her champions to defend the temple against intruders. It doesn’t really matter that the GM didn’t prepare ‘animated statues of buried heroes’ as a Fear move before the session, only that it makes sense in the moment and adds to the scene based on the PC’s actions.

A PC rolls a Success with Fear on an action during a combat, and when considering what move to make, the GM realizes that the move they want to make is a very hard one, above and beyond just using action tokens to activate adversaries. They might decide to spend a Fear as they make the move to acknowledge that this is a much harder one than would normally come from a success with Fear.

Using The Action Tracker

The action tracker (see “Action Tracker” in chapter 2) should come into play whenever an encounter will likely last longer than a dice roll or two. The ﬁrst couple times you use it in your campaign, ensure your players know that the game generally continues as usual. The action tracker’s presence doesn’t mean that violence is the only option left on the table–just that the narrative is shifting to a moment-by-moment focus. You can use the image provided in the game materials as your action tracker, or you can use something else like a bowl, a labeled notecard, etc. Just make sure everyone at the table knows what and where the action tracker is.

Whenever a player makes a move that tells them to “use an action” or makes an action roll, they add a character token to the action tracker. When you make a GM move (usually after an action roll that fails or is rolled with Fear), you can spend any number of these placed tokens to activate adversaries or the environment. It doesn’t matter which player’s tokens you spend—they all work the same—but after you spend one, return it to the player who placed it.

Activating Adversaries

You can spend tokens to activate adversaries on the battleﬁeld (see “Adversary Features” in chapter 4). For each token you spend, one adversary can take an action of your choice, such as:

Moving within Close range and making a weapon attack.
Moving within Close range and using an adversary action.
Ending a temporary condition or effect (as described in “Example GM Moves”).
Sprinting somewhere else on the battleﬁeld.

Adversary actions work much like PC actions do, but instead of a PC adding a token to the tracker, adversary actions spend a token from the tracker. Think of this as the adversaries catching up to where the players are in the ﬁction. You can continue acting until you’ve exhausted all available tokens (or all you wish to utilize at this time). Once you’re done spending action tokens, play returns to the PCs.

Typically, you shouldn’t activate the same adversary twice between PC moves, no matter how many tokens you have available. If you’d like to activate that adversary again, wait until the next time you make a GM move.

Tip: When you begin a GM move, if there are many tokens on the action tracker and numerous adversaries in play, it can be hard to remember which adversaries you’ve already activated during your move. You can help track this by moving each action token you spend next to that adversary’s stat block (or next to their miniature on the map), so you know that they’ve already acted during this move. When you ﬁnish your move, you can then return those tokens to the players.

Activating the Environment

Scenes can become more exciting when the environment comes alive. Sometimes these changes are simply descriptions you give as the GM—“the ground begins to shake violently.” But if you’d like to include mechanical effects, feel free to use an Environment stat block to guide how the world changes (see “Using Environments” in chapter 4).

Exchanging Fear and Tokens

At any time, you can clear two tokens on the action tracker in exchange for storing one Fear; while this gives you an extra Fear to spend, it also reduces the number of tokens you can use to activate adversaries. Similarly, you can spend one Fear to place two tokens on the action tracker, allowing you to activate more adversaries during a GM move.

When combat ends or you decide the action tracker is no longer necessary for play, you gain a Fear for every two action tokens left on the tracker (rounding down). For example, if there are ﬁve action tokens at the end of combat, you gain two Fear.

Tip: If you’ve got some Fear built up when the action tracker comes out, consider immediately spending one to add two tokens to the tracker, increasing the tension. If it makes sense in the scene, you can also spend a Fear to cut into the action ﬁrst and activate adversaries before the players. This is especially useful if you’re running an ambush or using a particularly powerful adversary.

What is the Purpose of the Action Tracker?

When roleplaying using theater of the mind, it’s easy to remember that things are happening “off camera” even though they’re not actively being described, and shift your focus between characters or scenes on the ﬂy. However, when a battle ensues on a map with miniatures, it can feel odd to see portions of the battleﬁeld change while others remain frozen. The action tracker can help to shift between different parts of the battleﬁeld, reminding everyone of who has acted recently and who might want a chance in the spotlight. This helps focus the group’s attention on major events without worrying about the exact passage of time or turn order. For more on using the action tracker to spotlight players, see Sharing the Spotlight.

Additionally, the tokens on the action tracker help the players anticipate your GM moves. When the players take a large number of actions in a row, the tracker ﬁlls, raising the stakes by providing you more currency to spend.

Full Example of Combat

The party is facing off with a group of bandits trying to steal a chest of treasure the group is transporting for an ally. The Warrior just succeeded on an attack roll with Fear against one of their adversaries. After the Warrior has dealt their damage, because they rolled with Fear, play passes to the GM.

The GM has five tokens on the action tracker and decides to spend them as their GM move. On the battleﬁeld, there are two ribbet bandits and a group of ﬁve bandit minions.

The GM spends one token to activate the ﬁrst bandit. The GM describes her leaping down from a nearby tree to slide beneath the party’s traveling wagon and break off some of the wooden ﬂoorboards to get to the treasure inside.

The GM spends another token to activate the second bandit, a large bullfrog-like ﬁgure with heavy armor. They leap down to put themselves between a few members of the party and swing a massive hammer, using their “Better Surrounded” action that lets them hit all targets within range of their weapon. The GM rolls against the PCs’ evasion and succeeds. They then roll the adversary’s damage dice and deal 12 points of physical damage to each target. Some of the PCs use armor to reduce the damage and each marks their sheet accordingly.

The GM spends the third and fourth tokens to use the minions’ Group Attack action. This moves all ﬁve minions into Melee range of the warrior. The GM makes an attack, describing the scene and rolling against the warrior’s evasion. The GM succeeds, so the horde deals 3 damage each for a total of 15 points of damage to the warrior. The warrior has no armor slots left, so they take Major damage—marking 2 hit points.

There is one more token left to spend, but no more adversaries left to activate, so the GM returns play to the PCs. The GM can spend that token on a future GM move.

Setting Roll Difficulty

When a player makes an action roll, you’ll often have to set the difficulty of that challenge to know whether they’ve succeeded or failed. Setting a target number for difficulty can feel like it relies on a lot of factors, but it’s best not to overcomplicate the question—how hard is the thing they’re trying to accomplish in the scene? Use the rubric below as a general guideline when setting difficulty.

Difficulty needn’t be a multiple of 5, so feel free to choose numbers between two of the above options. Additionally, while most difﬁculties fall between 5 and 30, you can select numbers outside that range to ﬁt the story. You may always choose to keep this difﬁculty secret, or tell the player what they’re aiming for up-front, whatever play style you might prefer.

Remember to only have players roll when the outcome matters. If the thing they’re doing is easy, the scene remains the same whether they accomplish what they want or not, and there’s no possible consequence to failure, then you can and should just let it happen.

Degrees of Success and Failure

Often, instead of setting a single value for success, you might instead give a player different outcomes based on the relative success or failure of their roll, especially on rolls to see what information someone spots in a scene or can remember from their past. Simply pick a target number and scale up or down the amount of information you give them based on the player’s relative roll result.

Difficulty Rolls

When a PC rolls against an adversary, the stat block provides a difﬁculty for the roll (see “Adversary Breakdown” in chapter 4). However, if an NPC doesn’t have a stat block—or if you like the unpredictability of rolling—you can have that NPC make a roll to determine that difficulty. Though this can add to the time it takes to resolve the scene, it can also be a useful tool in situations where you’re unsure what the difficulty should be. To make a Difficulty Roll, roll a d20 and add any relevant experience the NPC or Adversary has to its total.

Tip: Attack rolls against adversaries use that stat block’s assigned difﬁculty. For other PC action rolls, if an NPC already has an assigned difﬁculty and Experiences, it’s often easiest to add the relevant Experience to the current difficulty to get a value instead of rolling.

Example Difficulty

Included here are difficulty examples for each trait. Do not feel the need to refer to these during play—just to use them as a sense for how difficulty works so you can make a judgment call on the fly as your players take actions.

Agility

Sprint

5 = Sprint a Close distance across an open field with an enemy present.

10 = Sprint a Far distance across an open field with an enemy present.

15 = Sprint a Close distance across rough terrain with an enemy present.

20 = Sprint a Close distance through an active battle of multiple enemies.

25 = Sprint a Far distance through a thick battle in rough terrain.

30 = Sprint across the heads of your enemies in a thick battle.

Climb

5 = Scale a high ladder.

10 = Scale a stone castle wall or moderate incline.

15 = Scale a stone castle wall in the rain or a sharp mountain slope.

20 = Scale a siege tower during a battle. Clamber up a massive foe.

25 = Scale a sheer cliff or inverted wall with miniscule hand/foot-holds.

30 = Scale a sheer cliff in a hurricane. Climb the back of a hostile dragon diving through a thunderstorm.

Leap

5 = Running jump of half of your height (about 3 feet for a human)

10 = Running jump of your height (five and a half feet for a human)

15 = Running jump of double your height (about 10 feet for a human)

20 = Running jump of three times your height (about 20 feet for a human)

25 = Running jump of five times your height (about 30 ft. for a human)

30 = Running jump of ten times your height (about 55 ft. for a human)

Strength

Lift

5 = Lift a chair.

10 = Lift a table or small chest.

15 = Lift a grown person or large chest.

20 = Lift the side of a laden cart or carry a large chest up stairs.

25 = Lift a horse, an ox, or a large monster.

30 = Lift a falling portcullis gate.

Smash

5 = Destroy a glass cup.

10 = Destroy a small wooden table

15 = Break through a wooden door.

20 = Break through a stone wall.

25 = Break through a dragon’s teeth.

30 = Break a god’s grip.

Grapple

5 = Subdue a child.

10 = Subdue a weak adult.

15 = Subdue an average adult.

20 = Subdue a skilled wrestler.

25 = Subdue a large beast.

30 = Subdue a legendary beast.

Finesse

Control

5 = Ride an average horse through easy terrain.

10 = Drive an ox-pulled cart.

15 = Drive a horse through rough terrain.

20 = Drive a cart through rough terrain.

25 = Ride a wild horse through dangerous terrain.

30 = Drive an enraged beast through dangerous terrain.

Hide

5 = Evade notice in full cover on a moonless night.

10 = Evade notice in cover on a moonless night. Sneak through heavy cover.

15 = Evade notice in cover on an average night. Sneak through average cover.

20 = Evade notice in the shadows on an average night. Sneak through low cover or past many guards.

25 = Evade notice with minimal cover in ample light.

30 = Evade notice with no cover in full daylight.

Tinker

5 = Open a sticky lock with the appropriate key.

10 = Open a simple puzzle box.

15 = Disable a standard trap.

20 = Disable a complicated trap.

25 = Open a door locked by a sequence of elaborate locks.

30 = Disable an incredibly sensitive and deadly trap.

Instinct

Perceive

5 = Hear a loud noise twenty paces away.

10 = Hear a speaking voice fifty paces away.

15 = Hear someone walking in the woods fifty paces away.

20 = Hear someone sneaking through the woods fifty paces away.

25 = Hear a prowling animal fifty paces away.

30 = Hear a diving bird a hundred paces away.

Sense

5 = Detect an obvious ambush. Notice an obvious deception.

10 = Detect a looming threat. Notice an average person’s lies.

15 = Detect hostile intent from an average foe. See through a merchants’ lies.

20 = Detect veiled hostility from a courtier. Detect an assassin’s approach.

25 = Identify a spymaster’s plot. Read the true intentions of a master courtier.

30 = Sense a shred of doubt within a God’s pronouncement.

Navigate

5 = Follow a well-trod path in good lighting and weather.

10 = Follow an average path in good lighting and/or weather.

15 = Follow a subtle path through rough conditions. Find your way in a city.

20 = Follow a subtle path through harsh conditions. Find your way in a crowded city without signage.

25 = Find your way through a city, blindfolded. Find your way through a giant maze filled with hazards.

30 = Find your way through a Trickery god’s maze.

Presence

Charm

5 = Win the trust of a friendly neighbor.

10 = Win the trust of a friendly stranger.

15 = Win the trust of a cautious stranger. Talk your way into a noble’s party.

20 = Win the trust of a sympathetic foe. Talk your way into an enemy’s party.

25 = Turn an enemy against their liege. Talk your way into a fae court.

30 = Talk a hostile god into granting you a boon.

Perform

5 = Earn a meal from a friendly crowd.

10 = Earn room & board in a small town. Impress a small crowd.

15 = Earn room & board in a low-end tavern in a city. Impress a crowd.

20 = Earn room & board in a high-end tavern in a city. Impress a full theater.

25 = Earn your keep in a royal court. Impress a full colosseum.

30 = Save yourself from execution after intruding on the Winter Queen’s chambers.

Deceive

5 = Trick a trusting acquaintance.

10 = Trick an average stranger.

15 = Trick an average merchant.

20 = Trick a trained courtier.

25 = Trick a spymaster.

30 = Trick a leader of the Fallen.

Knowledge

Recall

5 = Uncommon facts about your community.

10 = Uncommon facts about a neighboring community.

15 = Uncommon facts about a distant community

20 = Specialized facts about a distant community.

25 = Specialized facts about a fallen kingdom.

30 = Secret information about an obscure historical group.

Analyze

5 = Unpack an obvious metaphor in a simple work.

10 = Identify obvious subtext in a standard work.

15 = Break a standard cipher in a coded message.

20 = Identify the weakness in a complicated battle plan.

25 = Predict the downfall of a nation based on concealed financial misdeeds.

30 = Identify the weakness in a divine champion’s fighting form.

Comprehend

5 = Learn simple skills from an excellent teacher.

10 = Learn simple skills from an average teacher.

15 = Learn complicated skills from an excellent teacher.

20 = Learn complicated skills under poor conditions.

25 = Learn complicated skills quickly under dangerous conditions.

30 = Learn complicated skills instantaneously from incomplete information.

Giving Advantage and Disadvantage

Whenever it seems appropriate in the narrative, you may give a PC advantage or disadvantage on a roll (see “Advantage and Disadvantage” in chapter 2). This is often a tool you can use to explicitly show a player that the situation is helpful or harmful to the action they are attempting. For example, if a player is attempting to sprint through deep mud or knee-high water, you might impose disadvantage on their agility check. If they say something clever to a guard or use knowledge they obtained about an NPC against them, you might impose advantage on their roll.

NPC Advantage and Disadvantage

Some PC abilities can add disadvantage to an NPC’s roll, or you might choose to give an NPC disadvantage due to the circumstances of the narrative. If an NPC has advantage, roll an extra d20 and take the highest result. Similarly, if an NPC has disadvantage, roll an extra d20 and use the lowest result.

Advantage vs Difficulty

Because you control both the difﬁculty and the addition of advantage (or disadvantage) on a roll, why not just lower (or raise) the difﬁculty instead? You certainly can, but the advantage/disadvantage system allows players to feel good about their advantage and the chance to roll extra dice. “For any standard adventurer, it would be a difficulty of 15 to sneak by the head guard without being noticed. But because you knocked out one of their lackeys and stole their attire, you’ll take advantage on a Presence roll to move by them without catching their eye.“ The world exists, and the characters’ actions and their current situation can modify how successful they are in interacting with it.

Adversary Action Rolls

Adversaries aren’t limited to just the attacks and unique actions in their stat blocks (presented in chapter 4); those represent their special abilities, but they can do most anything a PC would do (such as picking a lock or climbing a cliff). However, other than the attack rolls described in the next section, adversaries don’t typically make action rolls.

When you want an adversary’s action to have a chance of failure, you can offer the PCs a chance to make a reaction roll or otherwise respond to the situation. This highlights the agency of the PCs and keeps the story focused on them.

For dramatic or difﬁcult tasks that the PCs can’t inﬂuence, you may occasionally want to roll to see if the adversary succeeds. To do so, roll a d20 and add any relevant Experience they have. These rolls are more interesting if you tell the players the difﬁculty and roll where they can see the result.

Adversary Attack Rolls

When an adversary you’re controlling attacks a PC, you’ll make a simpliﬁed version of the attack roll made by players. Every adversary can make normal attacks using the weapon in their stat block, and some adversaries can also use special moves to attack (see “Adversary Features” in chapter 4).

Step 1: Add Attack Modifier

Unlike PCs, adversaries don’t use traits or Experiences on their attacks; instead, the stat block’s Attack Modiﬁer is usually the only number added to the adversary’s attack roll. Set aside a number of extra character tokens equal to the Attack Modiﬁer to help you keep track (see “Counting Character Tokens” in chapter 2).

Step 2: Choose Dice

You make your attack roll with a d20 instead of Duality Dice. If the adversary has advantage or disadvantage on the attack, add an extra d20 to that roll (see “Giving Advantage and Disadvantage”).

Step 3: Roll the Dice

Once you’ve gathered your d20, any other dice, and tokens for the Attack Modiﬁer, roll them all at the same time. Counting each token as 1, add the tokens and dice rolls together to determine the total. If you rolled with advantage (or disadvantage), don’t count both d20s, only the highest (or lowest) one, as described in “Giving Advantage and Disadvantage”.

Step 4: Resolve the Situation

Step 4: Resolve the Situation Share your roll total with the player (or players) who were attacked, and ask them to compare it against their Evasion score. iIf the attack meets or beats that score, it is successful and deals the damage indicated in the stat block for that weapon. If it rolls below their evasion score, the attack misses and no damage is dealt; invite the player to describe how they avoided the blow (blocking, parrying, full-body dodge, magical deﬂection, etc.)

Attacking Multiple Targets

By default, all adversaries can only hit one target with their standard attack. When an adversary’s action lets you make an attack against multiple targets with the same adversary, you make one Attack Roll and ask if it hits any of the targets. If you are making individual attacks with multiple adversaries during the same GM Move, make an attack roll for each.

Attack Rolls As Story

Whenever an attack roll is made, that is an opportunity for you to show the way that attack changes the scene. When your attack roll hits, you are taking away resources from the PCs (hit points, stress, armor, etc.) so ensure you are providing the context for that change in the ﬁction. When your attack roll is a failure, it’s an opportunity to celebrate the prowess of the PC—it’s often a great time to ask the player to describe how their character avoids the attack.

If a player isn’t sure how to describe their Evasion, remind them it’s not just about how quick a character is, it’s about how skilled they are at not getting hit. This could manifest as the sorcerer reaching out and stopping an arrow in its tracks mid-ﬂight or the wizard throwing up a magical barrier at just the right moment. It could be the rogue transforming into a swirling mass of darkness for a moment and letting the axe pass straight through them, a ranger doing a backﬂip out of the way, or anything else that feels like it aligns with the kind of character they have built.

Adversary Reaction Rolls

Some PC moves can force an adversary or other NPC to make a reaction roll. When you need to do so, roll a d20 to determine whether they succeed or fail. If you meet or exceed the roll’s difﬁculty, the NPC succeeds on the reaction and avoids the consequences. If they roll below the target number, the NPC fails on the reaction and suffers the consequences.

Because NPCs don’t have character traits like PCs do, you can add any of the adversary’s relevant Experiences as a bonus to their reaction roll.

Example: Krasz is chasing a Katari Burglar and unleashes a Fireball to slow them down. The Katari Burglar has the very relevant Experience of Acrobatics +3, so the GM adds +3 to the Reaction roll.

On the other hand, if you feel like the adversary would be particularly weak against the PC’s move, you can instead impose a penalty on the adversary’s roll.

Example: Krasz the Wizard casts Fireball on a Zombie Horde and their commander, a Skeleton Knight . The difﬁculty on the Reaction Roll is 13. The GM rules that a Zombie Horde is particularly ill-prepared to avoid a Fireball, (being both weak against ﬁre and unlikely to dodge given that they move slowly and are bunched up), so they impose a -3 penalty on the roll.

The GM rolls 1d20 for the Zombie Horde, getting a 13. That would have been enough except for the -3 penalty the GM declared, so they miss and take full damage. The GM rolls again for the Skeleton Knight, getting an 18, which passes the Reaction roll. The Skeleton Knight takes half damage, per the mechanics of the Fireball spell.“

Countdowns

You can use a countdown to track progress toward a certain event, adversary move, or consequence. Some stat blocks and adventures speciﬁcally call for a countdown, but feel free to use them in any scene you wish.

Countdown Die

When you want to track the passage of time or speciﬁc events leading to a dramatic moment—such as an impending adversary move or a signiﬁcant narrative event—you can use your d20 or another die as a countdown die to track its progression. Choose a die that has the needed starting value available on it, and put it on the table with the desired number facing up (see “Using a Countdown” below for guidance on choosing this value). For example, if your starting value is 5, you can use a d6 set to 5 as your countdown die.

Each time the countdown ticks down, turn the die to reduce its value by one. When the countdown ticks down from 1 to 0 (which doesn’t appear on the die), the countdown ends and triggers whatever you were counting down to.

If you ever need to continue a countdown across sessions, make sure to record the current countdown value so you can continue counting at the beginning of the next session.

Using a Countdown

When you introduce a countdown, you can either directly tell the players you’ve done so (“I’m starting a countdown to when the army attacks—what do you want to do before then?”), or you can imply it through your narration (“the bridge is starting to crack, and it won’t last long”). It’s up to you whether you keep the countdown die visible to the players (increasing tension each time it ticks down) or secretly use it to track an event they can’t predict.

When you’re designing a countdown (or using one from an adversary stat block), consider three elements:

Activation: When does the countdown activate in the narrative, prompting you to set your countdown die on its starting value? For example, a countdown might activate when the PCs stealthily enter an enemy camp.

Advancement: When does the countdown advance, prompting you to tick down the die by 1? For example, a countdown might advance whenever a PC makes an action roll (see “Standard Countdowns”), or it might advance only on certain roll results (see “Dynamic Countdowns”).

Effect When Triggered: What happens when the countdown ends? For example, a countdown might trigger a powerful enemy attack or a wave of allies arriving to save the day.

Standard Countdown

Many enemies and events use standard countdowns, in which the die begins on a speciﬁc number (such as “Countdown 4”) and ticks down every time a player makes an action roll, regardless of the result. When the countdown die reaches 0, the countdown’s effect triggers immediately after the last action roll is resolved.

Short countdowns (2–4) work well when you want a move or event to quickly trigger in an encounter regardless of how the players roll (but if you want the countdown speed to vary with the players’ rolls, see “Dynamic Countdowns”). Longer countdowns (5+) are best used on powerful moves or events that you want to build up towards in the narrative.

When in combat, standard countdowns for adversary moves are usually reserved for the major antagonist of an encounter. Running more than one countdown at a time can be complex, so most encounters include no more than one adversary with countdowns.

Dynamic Countdown

When a certain situation is being actively influenced by the players, you may choose to use a dynamic countdown to track it. Unlike a standard countdown, this doesn’t tick down every time a player rolls—instead it’s influenced by the outcome of their rolls or choices. Dynamic countdowns are often used to track larger-scale events or situations happening in the background of a complex scene. Typically, these countdowns have a starting value of 5–10.

For example, if the PCs are trying to destroy a wall or other object that doesn’t have Hit Points, a dynamic countdown can track how close they are to destroying it. Similarly, if the party’s skyship is under attack, you could use a dynamic countdown to track their escape—or if the PCs are chasing or searching for an enemy, the countdown can track how close the PCs are to catching them. (See “Chase Countdowns” below for guidance on using these countdowns for chase scenes.)

Most dynamic countdowns can be categorized as either a Progress Countdown (if working toward a desired outcome) or Consequence Countdown (if trying to avoid a dreaded outcome). The Dynamic Countdown Advancement table suggests how much to tick down the countdown die each time a PC makes an action roll.

Dynamic Countdown Advancement

Roll Result	Progress Advancement	Consequence Advancement
Failure with Fear	No advancement	Tick down 2
Failure with Hope	No advancement	Tick down 1
Success with Fear	Tick down 1	Tick down 1
Success with Hope	Tick down 2	No advancement
Critical Success	Tick down 3	No advancement

Advanced Countdown Features

You can use additional features to make countdowns more complex or unique.

Randomized Starting Value

Instead of assigning a starting value, a countdown might instead use a randomized value, like “Countdown 1d6”. This means that you roll 1d6 and use the result as the countdown’s starting value. Randomized countdowns are most commonly used when you want timing to be unpredictable—usually to keep the PCs on their toes.

Loop

Some countdowns loop after they trigger; this is common with adversaries who can recharge an ability over time. After a countdown loop triggers and you apply its effects, the loop resets to its starting value and begins counting down again. For example, “Countdown (Loop 5)” resets after 5 ticks.

Increasing or Decreasing

Some countdowns repeat like loops, but the timing between them increases or decreases with each loop, reﬂecting an event that changes frequency in the story.

Each time an increasing countdown triggers and resets, its starting value increases by 1. For example, “Countdown (Increasing 8)” begins at 8, then after its effect triggers, the loop resets to 9, then 10, and so on.

Similarly, each time a decreasing countdown triggers, its starting value decreases by 1. For example, “Countdown (Decreasing 8)” begins at 8, then resets to 7, then 6, and so on. Once a decreasing countdown reaches 0, a major event triggers, such as the cave collapse in the example below.

The cave system the heroes are exploring is collapsing more and more over time, so the GM sets a Consequence Countdown called “Rubble Falling.” The GM decides to use a decreasing seven-step countdown: “Countdown (Decreasing 7).” After the ﬁrst time the countdown triggers and rubble falls on the PCs, the starting value resets back to 6, then 5, and so on until the PCs accomplish their goal—or until the countdown resets to 0 and the caves collapse entirely.

Chase Countdowns

You can use dynamic countdowns to track the progress of a chase scene, whether the PCs are pursuing or being pursued. When the chase begins, set two countdowns: one for the pursuing party, and the other for the escaping party. First pick a die size for the pursuers’ countdown—the more time you want the chase to take, the larger the die should be—then set that die at its highest value. Then use another die of the same size for the escapee’s countdown, but set that die at a lower value to reﬂect how much of a lead they have.

For example, a chase through a town market could use d6 dice and each tick of the countdown could represent one range band (Very Close to Close, Close to Far, Far to Very Far, etc). For a chase playing out over a longer distance, such as the PCs pursuing a group of bandits across the countryside, each tick on the countdown might represent several kilometers or miles.

Regardless of whether the PCs are escaping or pursuing, their action rolls advance both countdowns, as shown on the earlier Dynamic Countdown Advancement table. When a PC succeeds on an action roll, it ticks down their countdown, which is a Progress Countdown. When they fail on an action roll—or roll a success with Fear—it ticks down the other party’s countdown, which is a Consequence Countdown. (Yes, this means that on a success with Fear, both countdowns advance by one!) When setting the difﬁculty of these rolls, consider the adversary’s difﬁculty plus any other narrative considerations.

Example Chase

A thief has stolen the Wizard’s spellbook and so the PCs are chasing them across a market square. The GM decides on a d6 for the thief’s countdown—a Consequence Countdown—and sets its value at 3 since the thief has a slight head start over the PCs.

The Rogue asks to go ﬁrst, clambering up onto the market-stall tents to run over the top rather than pushing through the crowds. The GM calls for an Agility roll against the thief’s difﬁculty of 15, and the Rogue uses her Second Story Experience to get a bonus. The Sorcerer spends a Hope to Help an Ally, describing how he channels his afﬁnity with air to boost the Rogue up. With the help of the sorcerer, the Rogue rolls a success with Hope, so the GM ticks the PC’s Progress Countdown from 6 to 4; this represents the Rogue gaining on the thief and helping the group catch up by providing a quicker route through the crowd.

Next, the Wizard wants to take things into his own hands. Using his Book of Sitil grimoire, he describes how he conjures an illusion of a runaway horse charging across the thief’s path, forcing them to slow down rather than get trampled. The Wizard makes a Spellcast roll against difﬁculty 15, but rolls a failure with Fear. The GM describes the thief seeing through the illusion at the last moment, moving through the crowd to force others to react to the horse and bar the party’s way. The GM ticks the thief’s Consequence Countdown down from 3 to 1 as the thief makes it a Far distance away from the party. They are losing sight of the thief and now in real danger of them getting away—if the Consequence Countdown ticks down one more time, the thief will be gone.

Long-Term Countdowns

Countdowns can also be used to track long-term events during a campaign; you could count down towards the overthrow of a nation, the death of a powerful mage, or anything else that might take more than a few sessions to come to bear.

While you can use a die for long-term countdowns, it’s often easier to make a countdown track to record progress across multiple sessions. To do so, decide how far out the event should be (usually between 4 and 12 ticks), and on a piece of paper, create small boxes for each tick. Then, starting from the first and working towards the last, write some events that may occur along the way that foreshadow the final event. These steps can alternate between softer and harder moves to give a sense of variety and growing tension.

[EXAMPLE IMAGE OF LONG TERM COUNTDOWN]

Advancing a Long-Term Countdown

During a short rest, you should generally tick a relevant long-term countdown once. During a long rest, you should generally tick down a relevant long-term countdown twice.

When you tick the countdown, let the consequences ripple down to the PCs, building tension as events unfold. Often, you can reveal this progression through something the PCs witness (such as the banner of a rival leader painted on the castle, or conversations overheard in the marketplace about the strange lights NPCs saw in the sky last night). Other times, you might cinematically cut away to a scene the PCs are unaware of, narrating the accelerating effects to the players. This is best done with countdowns where the characters already know about the events surrounding the countdown, so that players aren’t asked to completely ignore out-of-character knowledge.

Example Long-Term Countdown

Early in the campaign, the party crossed paths with Marius, a galapa mercenary captain. The group suspected Marius would cause trouble, but pressing matters drew them elsewhere in the kingdom. Meanwhile, Marius makes a deal with the expansionist theocracy to the east—an action the party’s Seraph will likely view with concern because of her past with the theocracy. In exchange for helping the theocrats invade, Marius will be appointed as governor of a prosperous county once the kingdom falls.

The GM wants this invasion to ramp up pretty quickly, so they set the countdown at 8, drawing eight checkboxes as a countdown tracker. Next to each checkbox, the GM plans out story beats that can represent the countdown’s advancement.

8 - The deal is struck and Marius’s company mobilizes.

7 - Marius’s company raids a border town.

6 - The theocracy’s troops begin gathering at the border.

5 - Marius’s company captures a different border town, having misdirected the nearby militias.

4 - The theocracy’s army marches into the kingdom, establishing a beachhead in the captured town.

3 - Refugees flee the region around the border town, bringing news of the invasion with them to the larger settlements.

2 - Marius moves to harry the kingdom’s army and give the theocracy time to establish supply lines.

1 - The theocracy rededicates a temple in the captured town to their god, magnifying their priests’ power in the kingdom.

0 - The invasion becomes an all-out war, with Marius’ and the theocracy’s army executing coordinated strikes to divide the kingdom’s defenders.

The GM identifies steps 6 and 3 as prime candidates for steps where news would reach the party. This gives them at least two clear prompts to get involved before the invasion escalates to a full-blown war. And depending on the party’s movements and location as the countdown progresses, the GM may be able to bring the edges of the invasion to the party’s horizon or even their doorstep.

Gold, Equipment, and Loot

Within your campaign, it’s up to you and your players how much importance you place on gold, equipment, and loot. Your players might operate as a band of thieves who rob all adversaries they face, they might be a group of spiritual devotees who abstain from acquiring new possessions as much as possible, or they might take an approach to wealth and possessions that land somewhere in the middle. You can also utilize wealth and equipment to adjust the dial between realism and fantasy. If you’d like to add a more survivalist tone to your game and players need gold to buy food, then they’ll likely interact with opportunities to acquire wealth very differently than if you choose to handwave a full pack of rations.

Distributing Gold

Using gold as a quest reward can give your players a fun way to procure new equipment for future adventures. This book leaves the price of items up to you, allowing you to decide how much importance you want to place on gold in your campaign.

If you don’t want to worry about gold in your campaign, you can always just let PCs go to a shop and talk with the merchant there, abstracting payment and letting each player choose an item or two. When you do this, rather than letting them choose from the whole tier list, you can encourage them to shop around by only offering a few that make sense for that location or fit your party’s interests.

If you’d rather gold play a larger role in your game, the following sections provide further guidance on pricing equipment.

Distributing Equipment

At character creation, players have access to all starting weapons and armor (see “Equipment” in chapter 2). The remainder of the equipment is organized by rarity and should be made available to players as the party moves through their campaign. Often, this looks like choosing a few options to make available at shops along their journey or providing a new weapon as part of an NPC’s reward.

If you choose to give gold as a reward, but don’t want your campaign to be particularly driven by it, you can make most weapons and armor worth two handfuls of gold per tier (so two handfuls for Tier 1, four handfuls for Tier 2, six handfuls for Tier 3, and eight handfuls of gold for Tier 4).

If you want gold to play a larger part in your campaign, you might instead make most weapons and armor worth two handfuls of gold per tier (so two bags for Tier 1, four bags for Tier 2, six bags for Tier 3, and eight bags for Tier 4).

Regardless of your approach to setting prices, keep in mind how common a weapon or armor might be in a particular city or region—and how generous or stingy a particular shopkeeper might be.

Distributing Loot

When giving out loot, the lower the item or consumable number is on the list, the less impactful it tends to be. Consumables are often less powerful just by their nature, so if you want to give something to every low-level player, consider common consumables (see “Consumables” in chapter 2). If you’re looking for something a little more permanent, consider common items (see “Items” in chapter 2). On the other hand, if players are reaching the pinnacle of their campaign and you want to give them something very powerful, consider a few rare or legendary consumables and items.

You are highly encouraged to make your own items and consumables as you see ﬁt for your campaign, mix and match loot to make it personalized for your story, or make choices of what to have in your world from the list and what to make unavailable. As with equipment, loot has no set gold cost; instead, the cost should reﬂect how often you are giving gold as a reward as well as how commonplace that loot might be locally.

Economy of Your World

More guidance coming soon on how to use gold for other aspects of your world!

Class Hope Features

Every PC has a unique Hope Feature, a powerful class feature that costs three Hope to use. Whenever a PC uses their class’s Hope Feature, try to ensure their efforts make an impact on the scene. Draw attention to the way that the Druid’s empowered Beastform shrugs off powerful blows, encourage the Guardian to describe how their abundant hope allows them to weather even more punishment to represent clearing an armor slot, and so on. Give the player the stage to describe what the feature looks like or how the ﬁction changes as a result of the hero digging deep and tapping their heroic will to put Hope to use.

Optional GM Mechanics

There are a number of optional GM mechanics you can choose to implement if you or your table prefer them.

Fate Rolls

Sometimes the GM wants to use randomness when deciding something that is not dependent on a particular character’s capabilities or some other existing measurement. In these situations, you can use a fate roll, asking a player to roll their Hope or Fear die to decide the result. Your choice of die doesn’t affect the outcome, nor does the roll result grant Hope or Fear—the die type simply helps add flavor to the roll. You might roll the Hope die when determining whether fortune smiles upon the character or if there will be a lucky circumstance. You might roll the Fear die when determining if a potential hazard manifests or when deciding exactly how bad a dangerous situation becomes.

When making a fate roll, you can say that a particular result happens at a certain number or higher, or you might say that the higher the number, the more a particular thing has happened. For example:

“Roll the Fear die. On an 8 or higher, the fire spreads beyond this one house.”

“I think it’s really up to chance whether reinforcements will make it to you in time. Go ahead and roll the Fear die—that’ll determine the starting size of the countdown. When that triggers, reinforcements will arrive in your Far range.”

“Go ahead and roll the Hope die to see how big the crowd at the inn is tonight. The higher the roll, the bigger the crowd.”

Falling Damage

If a character falls a long way to the ground you can use the following as a guide:

A fall from Very Close range deals 1d10 direct physical damage.
A fall from Close range deals 1d20 direct physical damage.
A fall from Far or Very Far Range deals 1d100 direct physical damage, or death at GM discretion.

You may always increase or decrease the dice rolled to fit the story.

Moving & Fighting Underwater

Attack rolls underwater are made at disadvantage, unless it makes sense for a character to fight easily underwater.

For any creatures that can’t breathe underwater, if you want to create tension around how long they can hold their breath, you can create a Breath Countdown die. Set the starting value at 3 or more, and tick down as follows:

Tick down once whenever any PC takes an action underwater.
If an action roll is a failure or with Fear, you can use your move to tick it down an additional time. (If the roll is both a failure and with Fear, you can tick it twice instead.)

Once the countdown ends, whenever any PC takes an action, the underwater PC must mark Stress. ( See “Countdown” for more on Countdown Dice.)

Conflict Between PCs

Sometimes a player might want their character to act against another PC in the scene. Daggerheart doesn’t have rules to support this, so before jumping to rolling dice, discuss the situation with both players to decide how to resolve the conﬂict. A roll might not be necessary to decide the outcome—but if rolling will be fun for everyone involved, come to a consensus on the terms of the roll, then after it’s made, facilitate the scene accordingly.

Running GM NPCs

When you run NPCs as the GM, you should always strive to follow your GM principles, make the NPCs act in line with their motives, and use them to bring the world to life. You can either describe the unique way they speak or act, or you can even use a new voice, posture, or mannerisms to act out the NPC yourself—use whatever approach you’re comfortable with that helps differentiate them from other NPCs the party has met.

Choosing NPC Statistics

Many NPCs don’t need formal backstories or statistics—if the PCs are simply interacting with a friendly bar patron to gather information, you probably just need a name, description, and motive. These three things give your PCs something to call the NPC, a way to recognize them, and a purpose behind their actions. If they’re somebody the PCs might try to make a roll against, consider also giving them a difficulty.

NPCs can sometimes become adversaries. If this occurs, give them statistics by choosing or customizing an adversary stat block from chapter 4.

Using NPC Allies

NPCs can also sometimes become allies in ﬁghts. If this is the case, you don’t need a stat block for them—instead, describe what they do during battle, putting the spotlight on them as the story demands and narrating how the ﬁction changes because of their involvement, but don’t worry about tracking their movements on the action tracker. Instead, when they act in a way that might help the PCs, if the party capitalizes on that help during their next action, give the PC advantage on the appropriate roll.

NPC allies can always get hurt or even die as the result of the narrative. Just because they don’t have Hit Points or Stress Points doesn’t mean they are immune to the ways of the world. During your GM move, don’t be afraid to capture the NPC and threaten their life to drive the PCs to action, trap the NPC somewhere and force the party to make a difﬁcult choice, or push on the NPC’s motive so hard it makes them do something that puts everyone in danger. Hit the NPC hard when it feels justiﬁed, let them be beaten and broken as a result of a difﬁcult ﬁght, or have them die in the party’s arms if the narrative says they should. Because you are running both the adversaries and the NPCs, they are under your control to do with as you see ﬁt for the story. Follow the ﬁction, embrace your GM principles, and make moves that drive interesting conﬂict for the party.

More to come for this section in a future draft, including potentially exploring more complex NPC ally options!

Session Zero and Safety Tools

When preparing to embark on a long campaign that will tell the story of a group across months or years, it’s important to get everyone on the same page and set expectations as early as possible. If you were creating an epic fantasy tv show, you’d do this preparation work via the pre-production process, with the creator and showrunner building the writers’ room, working with the producers and heads of departments to develop the look and feel and vision for the series, and so on. If you were writing an epic fantasy book series, you might do it by worldbuilding and developing characters, by outlining and making a mood board or whatever else helps you find and maintain your vision for the project.

Many tabletop roleplaying games do this via a session zero. This term means different things to different people, but for Daggerheart, it’s the way you plan for success in telling your fantasy epic together as a group. Before making characters, before deciding on your setting, the group talks about what you all want from this campaign and this experience.

The GM facilitates session zero, but all players in the game should be active participants, advocating for what they do and don’t want from the campaign.

There are many tools for structuring your session zero. If everyone in your group has played together before, you may already have a method for conducting your session zero. If you haven’t done session zero before or don’t have a method you prefer, here are some suggestions.

Laying the Groundwork

An essential part of session zero is choosing your game’s content calibration and safety tools. These tools ensure players know they can avoid material that would be hurtful or triggering—and beyond that, safety tools empower players to explore challenging material everyone has signed up to engage with to be what we’d call “comfortably uncomfortable”). In addition to deciding on content the group does and doesn’t want in the game, these tools assist players (including the GM) in communicating during play; for example, you might use a safety tool if something unexpectedly painful or troubling comes up, or if you want to help each other remember what elements the group decided to avoid or keep “off-screen”.

We recommend tools like the following, though you can use whatever works best for your group.

CATS

One of many frameworks for discussing content and safety is the CATS Method, created by Patrick O’Leary (See: CATS Framework). This framework presents four elements to discuss with your players to decide what the group wants from the game: Concept, Aim, Tone, and Subject.

Concept

Discuss the concept for the campaign - what’s the big picture pitch? If this campaign was a book series, how would you talk about it to a friend you know would love it? Getting yourself and the group excited about the concept for a campaign is a great way to set a guiding star for your creative discussions throughout Session Zero and beyond.

For example, you might pitch one of the following concepts:

Childhood friends reunite at the funeral of their village elder and uncover a secret that could break the world…or save it.

A science-fantasy romp across the realms with a party of misfits who tries to find their origins but ends up finding a family in one another.

In a world wracked by powerful disasters, a group of treasure hunters is hired to retrieve the five lost elemental shards sto restore the balance of nature .

However, you might not know the campaign’s concept at the beginning, and that’s okay. Feel free to return to this conversation at the end of session zero or throughout the first couple of sessions as necessary.

Aim

Aim is about what you want from and for your campaign - your creative, social, and other goals. Do you have a specific creative agenda you’re looking to pursue? Do you mostly want to spend a few hours with friends every week making things up together and blowing off steam? Aim is both about format and aesthetic agenda.

For example, an aim might center on one of the following:

We’re going to play a weekly campaign from level 1-10 with strong individual and group character arcs.

Our aim is mostly to hang out and chat while kicking butt and getting new powers and cool items.

We want to tell a story that explores the relationship between grief and community through an action-fantasy in a world recovering from a near-apocalypse.

Other ways to decide on or describe your game’s aim might be to reference touchstones for your campaign or for the kind of character you want to play, drawing from books, films, comics, music, etc. You might create a mood board to help define the aesthetic of your world or a soundtrack to form an aural soundscape for the vibe you want.

Tone

While playing Daggerheart, you and your group will build a world entirely your own. Even if you’re using an established setting, your version of that setting will be distinct and grow through your creativity. An important element of defining a world and a campaign is agreeing on tone - the emotional landscape and tendency of the campaign. Establishing the tone of your game helps align players’ expectations and ensure that everyone has a good time.

A quick way of picking a tone is to list the following tones on a piece of paper or note card, then circle tones everyone is excited to focus on, and cross out any tones someone wants to avoid:

For example, a new group might want to use the provided list of tone options to discuss the following:

Josie nominates Dramatic to be highlighted and everyone agrees, so that option is circled to signal that it will be prominent in the campaign.

Kyle says he’s not interested in a Goofy tone, and nominates it to be crossed out. Dani is possibly interested in Goofy, but since Kyle’s not, Dani is willing to cross it out—but in exchange, she asks that the group consider circling Romantic.

Sita isn’t interested in Romantic being a central tone, but doesn’t want to cross it out. She nominates Adventurous for a major tone, and after discussion, it gets circled.

The group agrees that they don’t want a Gritty game, so it gets crossed out. They also cross out Whimsical. That leaves the group with the following list:

In other words, they’re interested in a game that will be especially Dramatic and Adventurous, sometimes Funny, Intimate, Scary, Romantic, and Cozy but not Goofy, Gritty, or Whimsical.

Subject

Discuss things you and the players actively want in the game as well as subjects anyone wants to avoid. For subjects to avoid, this can be big, broad things like bigotry and torture, or very specific elements like avoiding spiders or a particular name that carries big emotional weight for a player.

When discussing challenging subjects, it’s important to center the desires and needs of marginalized players who are personally affected by those issues. In heroic fantasy games, some players ﬁnd it empowering to face oppressive forces as part of the evils of the world—allowing those evils to be directly fought and overcome—but that should be a choice actively made by the players who are impacted by that oppression outside the game. Many marginalized people play TTRPGs to escape the everyday frustrations and pains of bigotry they experience in their daily lives, and they shouldn’t be forced to struggle with them in a game. Those choices should be made primarily by those most impacted by the subject matter. For instance, if your group includes LGBTQ players, prioritize their preferences on whether to include or exclude homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of oppression against queer people.

This is a good time to pick any speciﬁc safety tools you want to use during the campaign. We recommend choosing a tool for managing content to include and avoid; the following “Lines and Veils” section suggests one such option. Additionally, we recommend choosing a tool to support players in pausing or redirecting play during the session, such as the X-Card presented in the upcoming “X-Card” section.

For more information about various safety tools and how to use them, Kienna Shaw and Lauren Bryant-Monk have an award-winning collection available for free at ttrpgsafetytoolkit.com.

Lines & Veils

First developed by Ron Edwards, Lines and Veils are a safety tool designed to be ﬁrst employed in a Session 0, and revisited as much as is needed throughout a campaign. When discussing the tones and goals for the game, the GM should make a list of player’s Lines and Veils.

Lines are topics that players do not want in the game. They should not appear in any form.

Tracey lines spiders. That means that, not only will the players never encounter spiders, spiders effectively do not exist in this world. There are no cobwebs or eight-legged monsters. The GM touches base with Tracey about how she feels about other bugs, so she explains that insects and other similar creatures are perfectly fine, her line is specific to spiders. This means, the party may encounter swarms of bees, follow a line of mysteriously colored ants, or fight off a giant beetle.

Veils are topics that players do not want to feature in the game, but can still exist in the world.

Tracey veils spiders. That means that spiders can exist in the world, but they will not be a feature of the game — they will not crawl on characters, and players will never battle a spider-monster. The GM checks in with Tracey and she explains that cobwebs are fine, as long as there are no spiders in them. This means ancient cobwebs could fill an old castle, but there will not be any bugs scurrying within them.

Though the GM is keeping the list and designing the encounters, they should also announce their own Lines and Veils. This will help set the culture of a safe table, take any stigma off players having topics they wish to avoid, and let other players know what they should not include in their roleplay. It’s important to remember that the GM is also a player and deserves the same care.

It’s important to remember that Lines & Veils are a “living document,” meaning the list can be updated at any point.

Tracey initially veiled spiders but just realized in the middle of this session that she would feel more comfortable if they were lined. The GM’s giant spider is making her very uncomfortable. She flags her change to lining spiders and the GM simply switches their giant spider out for a giant beetle and continues play.

Some players may wish to keep their Lines & Veils between them and the GM. To allow for this, a GM can suggest that anyone at the table write down additional topics on scrap paper to share later, send a text, or discuss in a one-on-one conversation.

X-Card

Created by John Stavropoulos, this is a tool that allows any player (including the GM) to remove content from the game. This traditionally appears in the form of a physical card, marked with a large letter X, and placed within reach of all players at the table. That said, your table could use a designated item, someone creating an x with their arms, or other symbol that feels best to the group.

To utilize the X-Card, a player only needs to tap the paper (or hold up crossed arms, etc.) and note the moment of play they wish to “rewind” to. It can be helpful to note the detail they’re flagging for removal, but this is not a requirement for using the tool. The group will simply go back to the designated moment and play forward, making a new choice.

There are a few important details about the X-Card worth flagging:

When a player X-Cards a moment of play, they do not need to explain their reasoning, and the process of using this safety tool should not impose that on any player. If someone wishes to go into more detail, the table may break for group or private discussion as needed.
The X-Card should not be designated as a tool of last resort. No player should feel they need to sit in discomfort until the stakes become too high. Using the X-Card is not an offense, and having the X-Card used during your moment of improv does not inherently mean you made a grievous mistake in play.
Encouraging use of the X-Card in your game is often just as important as the X-Card itself. Setting up a table with safety tools establishes a culture of caring and helps make the game fun for everyone.

Open Door Policy

The Open Door Policy is a safety tool that is as simple as it sounds. Tell your players that they are welcome to leave the game at any time, for any reason, and reassure them that they will not be punished or judged. This can manifest as calling for a break from play, simply to take a few moments and grab a snack, or someone heading home early if they need to.

Example Discussion of Safety Tools

In their session zero conversation, the group agrees to use Lines & Veils, the X-Card, and the Open Door Policy.

Jo says they don’t want transphobia, homophobia, or any bigotry against queer people in the game. The GM writes those topics down on the group’s list of Lines—elements that won’t appear in the game at all. Olivia says that she’d like to put a veil on real-world current events for the campaign, so the game can feel like a break from the worries of everyday life. The game might include some unintended parallels with real-world events, but that comparison will never be in the spotlight, and the game’s table talk will avoid making those comparisons. George adds a line on tiny swarms of insects, with the caveat that he doesn’t mind having insects in the campaign, as long as they aren’t ever near his character.

Asking Questions

During the session zero discussions, it’s very useful to ask clarifying questions and dig deeper with suggestions and ideas. Regardless of whether you want to use an existing setting or build your own, one of the best ways to ensure that players are invested and excited to play is to let them bring their ideas and interests to the planning stages in session zero.

For example, you might ask questions like the following as part of your session zero conversation:

Can you talk a little more about what you mean by wanting to make a post-fantasy world?

When you said it’d be cool if elven clans worked like a beehive, did you mean physiology, or is it more about communication and hierarchy?

What aspect of that fantasy series you mentioned are you most excited to bring into the game? The plot, the setting, the vibes, or something else?

Fostering an atmosphere of constructive curiosity is also useful for interrogating your own assumptions in worldbuilding. To help yourself make conscious decisions about the world and game, instead of unspoken assumptions or just replicating what has come before. For example, your group might consider questions like:

Should all the major countries in our region be monarchies, or do we want them to have different forms of government? If they’re monarchies, are they feudal, bureaucratic, or some other structure?

How do people think about gender in this world? Do conceptions of gender vary by community, by region, or something else?

What, if anything, do we want to change in the existing setting we’re using to make it a better fit for the kind of story we’re telling?

Everyone at the table should be encouraged to ask questions to enrich the session zero discussion. The more collaborative the process, the more the setting and game will truly reflect the creative interests and ideas of everyone involved.

Finding Campaign Inspiration

Throughout session zero, look for hooks and nuggets of ideas to store and use as creative inspiration throughout the campaign. This can be things as small as a turn of phrase or the name of a creature to things as big as a player describing a climactic scene they want for their character at the end of the campaign.

You’ll especially want to take notes while players are creating their characters and what they give as their answers for the background and connections prompts. Those answers will form the bulk of the initial material for you to use to tie the story of the campaign to the characters, especially if you want the story to emerge from those characters’ worlds and lives.

You might also choose to frame your questions with additional narrative you think is interesting. If you do, leave space for that player to push back on your additions to their answers, and discuss as needed:

Guardian, how exactly did you get the last remnant of the Dawn Goddess’ battle standard? And what does it whisper to you at night before you drift off to sleep?

Wizard, the Warrior mentioned that her sister went off to study magic and was very much the kind who wasn’t in it to make friends. What do you think about having that sister be your rival?

Keep your GM principles in mind throughout this process (see the earlier “Core Guidance” section)—these apply to all stages of the campaign, not just in-scene play.

Example Session Zero Breakdown

Assuming a 4-hour time slot for session zero, here’s an example of how you might structure your session zero:

Beforehand

Ahead of the session, you’ll want to prepare materials for the game: print out/arrange character sheets, character reference sheets, play guides, any maps, a way to take notes, etc. Before the players arrive, prepare the play space (physical or VTT) for the session. Make the space comfortable for yourself and the players as best you can. If you’re playing online, you’ll want to prepare the virtual tabletop, whatever you’re using to track characters and roll dice, and any other digital play aids you need.

Player Introductions (5-10 min)

As the players arrive, if you haven’t all played together, facilitate introductions and make sure everyone knows what pronouns to use for one another. If all the players already know one another, you can spend this time catching up and settling in.

Session Overview (5-10 min)

Explain to the players what all will be involved in this session zero, point out the materials and when they’ll come into use. Many people find it useful to browse through materials before using them, but encourage people not to get too far ahead of the discussion.

CATS (40 min)

Discuss what the group wants from the game using CATS (see “Laying the Groundwork”) or another framework. This includes what the campaign should be about, what you want from the campaign socially and creatively, logistical details (how often, when, and where you’re going to play), the tone of the game, content to include and exclude, and anything else you need to cover before deciding the setting and then making characters.

Break (5-10 min)

It’s good to take breaks to let everyone move around, refresh themselves, and get a little bit of time to decompress from creative discussions that can demand a lot of energy and attention.

Worldbuilding (50 min)

Whether you’re using the guidance in the “Running a Campaign” section of this chapter or your own worldbuilding tools, facilitate the process of creating or fleshing out the setting you’ll be using for your campaign. During the process, think about the elements (tropes, settings, influences) that players are especially interested in, and do what you can to build those elements into the setting. Worldbuilding can engrossing, but remember that you don’t need to define or name every part of the map at this stage. Leave yourself blank spaces to fill in later, as you’ll continue building the setting together through play.

Break (5-10 min)

Since character creation is such an important part of preparing a campaign, it’s good to go in fresh, so consider taking another short break between worldbuilding and the next step.

Character Creation (70 min)

Walk the group through character creation using the “Character Creation” section of chapter 1 and the “Character Creation” PDF guide, helping players with their questions and facilitating discussion and coordination between players. This step may also include explaining some of the game’s rules (see the “Play Guide” PDF) so that players understand what the abilities from class, subclass, heritage, and domain cards can do.

Pay special attention to the group’s discussion of each character’s Background & Connections, as they will play a vital role in your preparations for the campaign. This is a great place to ask questions and encourage players to flesh out their answers. If time is limited or this process is taking longer than expected, try to at least complete the background questions and make one connection per player.

Break (5 min)

If you’ve got time left in your session, you can take a short break before doing wrap-up and feedback, or a longer break if you’ve got the time for a bit more play before finishing for the day.

Introductory Scene (optional; 30 min)

If you have the time, you can throw the characters into an initial scene to help the players get a handle on the rules and their characters. This scene can be non-canon or serve as a jump-start for the campaign. You might put the characters immediately into a dramatic scene or open with something more calm and slice-of-life.

Wrap-Up and Feedback (10 min)

Use the last few minutes of the session to check in with all the players, see how they felt about the session, if they have any questions, or if they want to revisit anything in terms of safety tools, content, etc.

Running A Session

This section guides you in preparing and running a session of Daggerheart for your table. If you’d like to start with a single-session adventure, the “Creating a One-Shot Together” section of chapter 5 also provides inspiration for your adventure’s setting and story. The remainder of chapter 5 includes examples of locations, factions, and more that you can use to populate your world.

Once you’re ready to dive into a longer campaign, see the “Running a Campaign” section at the end of this chapter.

Thinking In Beats

In storytelling, a beat is a moment that changes the trajectory of the narrative - it might be a shift in the world, actions and reactions, an emotional revelation or decision. Not every event in a story is a beat,

As the GM in a collaborative game, you’re going to be alternating with the players, narrating a beat and then letting them react and carry the scene forward with their own beats. It’s like a dance, a conversation, a game of tennis.

This focus on beats is very useful in preparation–rather than writing out every single thing that is going to happen, you can think in beats, the moments that give shape to the scene or sequence.

If you were preparing a session where a mercenary company seizes control of a border town in a narrow mountain pass to prepare a kingdom for invasion, and thinking in beats for a Countdown, you might do it like this:

8 - the mercenary company makes a partnership with the neighboring kingdom

7 - One of the mercenaries arrives in town and gets a job with the city guard.

6 - The undercover mercenary gets assigned to night duty, as expected for new hires in the guard.

5 - The undercover mercenary ambushes the other night guards and unlocks the town gate.

4 - The mercenaries rush through the opened gate and attack the guard barracks and the mayor’s house.

3 - The mercenaries kill or subdue the city guard and capture the mayor.

2 - Under threat of violence to the townspeople, the mayor pledges loyalty to the invading warlord.

1 - The warlord’s forces arrive to resupply as the mercenaries hold the town to protect the invaders’ supply lines.

0 - The invasion begins.

If the player characters are in the town, they can interrupt this sequence of events at any point. They might see the guard attacking his fellows, or might be in the tavern when the mercenaries stream down the main road, headed for the barracks and mayor’s house.

Knowing the major beats of the mercenaries’ plan makes it easier to maintain the integrity of the fiction while the PCs are acting. The PCs might stop the attack on the barracks but not the seizure of the mayor. This then leads to the mercenaries fortifying the mayor’s house with him as a hostage while the members of the town guard look to the PCs for assistance.

Thinking in beats is also useful for larger-scale planning and off-screen thinking. If the party is racing toward a city to prevent a coup, you can use a Progress Countdown for their progress toward the city and a Standard Countdown to represent the steps of that coup. Set the pace of when the PCs make action rolls to speed up their process based on how long the coup takes - once a day if it takes place over a week, once every few hours if it plays out over the matter of days, etc.

The countdown steps for the coup could look like this (starting at six):

6 - A band of assassins sneaks into the capital city.

5 - The assassins observe and infiltrate the homes of the prime minister and other majority party leaders.

4 - The assassins kill the prime minister and other party leaders. Meanwhile, a fifth ‘assassin’ stages a fake attempt on the minority party leader to throw off suspicion. The minority party leader is, in fact, the mastermind behind this whole plot.

3 - The minority party leader parades the ‘assassin’ through the streets and pledges justice for his fellow ministers.

2 - With the majority party leaderless, the minority party takes power in the legislative council and the captured assassin is replaced by a nameless prisoner before being executed.

1 - Under the guise of ‘security’, the new prime minister pushes a slate of legislation to increase executive power and ensure he retains power.

0 - The prime minister is now a de-facto emperor.

As the PCs take action to complete the Progress Countdown to get to the city, consequences from their rolls will progress the countdown for the coup attempt. The longer it takes the PCs to make it to the city, the farther along the coup will be. This format lets you know what’s happening as the PCs burst onto the scene rather than having to plan in the moment.

Preparing Combat Encounters

In Daggerheart, it’s important to approach each encounter from the perspective of, “What here best tells the story?” and build out the kinds of hurdles the PCs face around that question. Through this lens, we can start to think about enemies and damage as another tool in our GM toolbox for heightening tension, creating drama, and forwarding the narrative.

Balancing encounters and making appropriate enemies will become much easier as you run more sessions, and you won’t have to make as many guesses during prep—but in the beginning, you can’t expect to get it perfect, and that’s okay. Adjust on the fly as necessary to find the right balance as you play, and you’ll naturally figure out what will work best for your table. The most important thing is that the combat the players are in is being used to give them more information about the narrative that’s unfoldingIt’s informing something about the world or the plot or the characters.

That being said, there are some tools included here for you to use when prepping encounters that will make life easier. There is, of course, no way to provide exact directions, given every group will have different characters with different abilities and hit points and experiences, etc. But, using the guidelines below as a jumping off point should help, and making adjustments on the fly as needed will allow you to hone in what works best for your group.

Battles and Narratives

Battles play an important part in high fantasy adventure stories. Many challenges can be answered through cunning and charm, but often, battle serves as the primary vehicle by which obstacles are addressed. Dynamic battles create suspense—forcing players to choose between their various objectives, following their hopes and fears, and creating the crucible that the players use to forge their characters into legendary heroes.

Narrative Function

The first thing to consider when building a battle in Daggerheart is the narrative function the battle is playing. Is this battle an obstacle along the way to a larger objective, designed to show the breadth of a villain’s influence? Is an ambush the result of failed rolls to notice that the party is being tailed? Is this fight the culmination of a small or larger arc for a character as they confront a figure from their background? Whatever the answer, that narrative role should stay with you throughout the process of building and running a battle.

Adversary Motives

The next thing to think about is motive. What are the motives of the adversaries arrayed against the party? What would it take for the adversary to surrender? To flee? What objective does the adversary have beyond survival? If given the choice between capturing the artifact the PCs have with them and striking a downed character, which way would the adversary act?

Dynamic Environment

Battles become more memorable when you include compelling adversaries and dynamic environments the players (and the PCs) can interact with in interesting ways. If the enemies are on their own territory, think about how they’d manipulate their environment to stack the deck in their favor - have they built fortifications on the high ground? Have they blocked off flanking routes to force attackers into a frontal assault with exposed flanks? How can the battlefield and terrain reinforce the narrative goal of the battle and show the adversaries’ motives? Chapter 4 presents environment stat blocks you can use to bring your environment alive.

Flight and Other Features

When building your battles, consider the abilities and spells your PCs have. For example, if they can fly, consider adding enemies that can fly or make ranged attacks, ensuring the combat remains dynamic and challenging to all PCs. Remember that your players likely chose their features because they want use them! You have the chance to craft engaging opportunities for the players to show off those powers in exciting ways.

Example Battle Narrative

This example demonstrates how you might plan a battle that implements the above narrative considerations.

Narrative Function: Early in a campaign, the party is going to be traveling through a forest known to have especially strong nature spirits protecting it. The party includes a Warden of Renewal Druid who is being hunted by a corrupted High Elemental. So the party’s GM, looks to the Abandoned Grove environment (see “Environment Stat Blocks” in chapter 4) to provide inspiration for the next story arc. They have an idea of how to include an elemental threat and a conﬂict between dryads and druids and start working on how to get the party to the grove.

The GM decides that a retired ranger has returned to this town after months away in the capital answering the summons of his old party member, a Wizard turned royal advisor. This angle also lets the GM engage the Wildborne Ranger in the party, who might want to hear stories or get instruction from the ranger.

The GM knows it’ll be easy to hook the party’s Ranger into seeking out the retired ranger, who will ask the party to check on the druid grove, where his other companion hasn’t been heard from for most of a year. In exchange, the ranger offers a reward and instruction for the party’s Ranger. The fact that they’re going to investigate a druid circle is a hook for the Druid, so with two members of the party likely to be directly interested, the GM moves on to developing the ﬁrst major scene of the arc, which will occur in the Abandoned Grove.

This scenario and potential battle give the GM the opportunity to introduce the habits and strictures of other druid circles, introduce an elemental threat that brings the Druid’s background into the active story, and allow both the Druid and Ranger to work within their element and have ample opportunity to use their Experiences and Sage domain cards.

Adversary Motives: The GM decides that the dryads and other forest spirits have been warped by the High Elemental and are taking over the forest—and they notice the Burning Heart of the Wood environment could be useful inspiration later in the arc. The Elemental has possessed the dryads of the wood and set upon the druids, eliminating the major faction that could stop the corruption of the forest. But the dryads don’t remember being possessed, only a violent conﬂict with the druids over a poorly remembered disagreement. Any substantial conversation with the dryads in the grove will expose that foggy memory and provide a thread to pull on.

Dynamic Environment: The GM plans to let the PCs arrive alone in the abandoned grove, so they can use the environment’s Overgrown Battleﬁeld feature to investigate and begin piecing together clues. After that, the dryad and their forces can arrive to confront the PCs. The PCs will likely explain themselves, exposing the weirdness around the dryads’ memories. The GM also makes a note to describe some weirdness about the woods and dryads, helping signal to the PCs that something is wrong.

Next, the GM draws inspiration from the Burning Heart of the Woods environment (see “Environment Stat Blocks” in chapter 4). They utilize its Grasping Vines and Chaos Magic Locus features and adapt them to Tier 2. This can make the scene more perilous and memorable—the vines can restrain the PCs to escalate the stakes in a social or combat scene, and the Chaos Magic Locus feature could further signal to the PCs that something is magically wrong with these woods.

Alternatively, the GM could decide to skip the Chaos Magic Locus feature and develop another passive feature of their own. Maybe a certain species of curious animal is following them and can be befriended for more information, or a pack of dangerous creatures will ﬁnd them if they rest for too long before reaching the grove.

Having considered the three major elements of designing a battle narrative, the GM ﬁlls out the details of their plan. They decide that the dryad encounter will be one Young Dryad (a Leader), two Sylvan Soldiers (Standard adversaries), and ﬁve Minor Treants (Minions) for the ﬁve players. They know they have the Minor Chaos Elemental (a Solo) on deck via the Deﬁler feature, and plan to use it at some point regardless of how things go with the dryads. The elemental can back up the dryads if the PCs come to blows with the grove guardians. Or, the elemental can bring the dryads to heel if the PCs get too close to helping them realize that they’ve been compromised.

Next, the GM returns to the background and connection questions for the PCs, thinking about what relationships and motivations might come to the fore in this story. The GM ponders how to add or adjust the ideas they’ve developed to more thoroughly engage the entire party. They note the characters’ domain abilities, making sure to prepare adversaries that will let the players use those powers. With all that ﬁnished, the GM is ready to send the party into the woods for adventure.

Session Rewards

[Section coming soon!]

Crafting Scenes

One of your main responsibilities as a game master in Daggerheart is to set the scene for your players. Whenever you start a session, arrive at a new place, or the current scene changes, the players are going to look to you for what they need to know. When you do this, think with all of your senses; not just what this place looks like, but what does it smell, feel, taste, and/or sound like here? What is something unique or unexpected about this place, and what does that say about it? Your players will use these details to interact with the world, so give them enough to not only enough to picture the scene, but make choices about what they do and where they go.

It’s rare that every character will organically have the same amount of spotlight time during a given session. In any group, some players are more outgoing than others—and some player characters are likely to be instigators while others are more cautious. As the GM, you can help ensure that the story’s spotlight rotates between the characters, giving each player ample time to see their character as the focus of the story.

Tie Together Story Elements

If you know that a given character is going to be in the spotlight for a session or an arc, you can try to more fully involve other characters by thinking about those characters’ ties to the one in the spotlight, as well as other story elements you could include that appeal to the other players (and/or their characters).

For example, if the courtier Bard is invited to a debutante ball that ties into his backstory, you might decide that the ball will also be hosting a fencing tournament (which you hope will excite the swashbuckler Rogue) and social dancing (which should interest the noble-born Sorcerer). You’re conﬁdent that the Warrior will be excited about the scene already, as he’s sworn to protect the Bard and is not-so-secretly in love with him. Now you have ideas to involve every player.

Engage Quiet Players

In addition to spotlighting the PCs of quieter players through story elements, you might also directly engage them by inviting action from their character rather than broadly asking the whole table, “what do you do?” Alternatively, you might ask how their character feels about unfolding events.

Use Visual Aids

Another approach to balancing spotlight is to use visual aids. You can change your action tracker to have a space for each character instead of one for the group. When a player takes an action, they place one token on the tracker in their character’s space. Throughout a session, a quick look at the trackers will show you which players are taking more actions and help you remember to engage the players that haven’t acted as much. This visual reminder can also help players to know who could use an invitation into the spotlight.

Encourage Unguided Play

Sometimes you might realize your NPCs and the wider scene have received a lot of focus. As the GM, you too can share the spotlight by ﬁnding times to let the players and their characters speak among themselves. While you listen and observe, the players can carry out a downtime scene or interpersonal moment without your input—and meanwhile, you can take notes of story threads to weave into later scenes.

Using Conflict

Daggerheart is a game of perilous adventure, where conflict plays a key role in creating drama and provoking strong character choices.

Conﬂict in Daggerheart results from the characters’ hopes and actions being met by challenges and uncertainty. If the group’s Wizard seeks to become the world’s greatest spellcaster, her quest likely won’t be as satisfying if she’s never challenged along the way.

Conﬂicts can be external (where outside forces act against a character) or internal (where a character struggles against themself emotionally or intellectually). Our Wizard might face external conﬂict through tests of skill against other mages, solving magical puzzles using knowledge and cunning, and eventually squaring off against legendary beings who wield the most potent magics in the world. Meanwhile, her internal conﬂicts might include struggling with the ideology taught to her in her magical academy, or she might fear the destructive power of her magic.

The strongest character arcs in Daggerheart emerge from a combination of internal and external conﬂicts: external conﬂicts can bring up unresolved tensions from internal conﬂicts, while resolving internal conﬂicts can provide clarity for a character that allows them to overcome external conﬂict, and so on. External challenges to our Wizard can magnify the emotional impact of her internal conﬂicts. And external conﬂicts that push her limits will become all the more memorable by demanding the Wizard grapple with her fear as part of the challenge.

When designing conﬂicts for maximum emotional impact, challenge characters in a way that ties in their internal struggles if a character struggles with self-conﬁdence, challenge them to excel. If a character struggles with the ethics of using power, put them in situations where the use of their power has big stakes for other people and not just themselves. Conﬂicts like these are the crucible which will forge your characters into unforgettable heroes.

Battles and armed conflict will be common in games of Daggerheart, but your characters may also trade barbs with courtiers, talk their way past guards, seduce rivals, and plead their innocence to an uncaring monarch. Always keep motive in mind and think about how the characters’ request/demand aligns or conflicts with the NPCs’ motives.

For NPCs or creatures that aren’t hostile but aren’t inclined to do as the party asks, it may make sense to think about the scene less as a conﬂict and more as a collaborative process where both parties are trying to get what they want while maintaining or improving their existing relationship.

Influencing NPCs

For everyday social obstacles or foes, a single successful action may be sufﬁcient to progress, such as haggling with a merchant or talking your way past a town guard. On a success with Fear, the foe might demand a bribe or set other special terms in order to do what the character asks or demands.

When dealing with more formidable NPCs, one action might not be enough to change their mind. A hostile countess probably couldn’t be convinced to send troops to help you ﬁght a necromancer with a single roll. Since an adversary or PC becomes Vulnerable while their Stress slots are full, you can use an adversary’s Stress slots as the meter for tracking a higher-stakes or more extended social conﬂict. By default, one successful social action against an adversary (intimidation, deceit, bribery, etc.) will force them to mark 1 Stress. Some abilities (class, domain, etc.) also force adversaries to mark Stress, and are highly useful in social conﬂicts if ﬁctionally applicable. (An ability that forces an adversary to mark Stress upon a successful attack may not be advisable in a noble’s court).

Example: A Petty Noble has taken a dislike to the party. The Petty Noble has 5 Stress, so if the PCs want to get back into the noble’s good graces or force them to back down, the GM could tell the party that if they can ﬁll the Noble’s Stress track, they will have convinced the Noble to change their mind.

If a social situation is especially high-stakes, you might set a Consequence Countdown representing the adversary’s patience or a time limitation, with consequences on rolls ticking down that clock (see p. XX). The PCs take actions to mark the adversary’s Stress, while trying to minimize consequences that tick down the clock. In such a situation, if the Countdown triggers, the PCs have lost the opportunity or end up with some other bad result from the conﬂict.

The party is making an appeal to a petty noble to send troops to deal with a growing undead threat in the woods. The noble is disinclined to help even if they did believe that the undead threat was real. The GM tells the party that the noble has 5 Stress, and if they can force the Noble to mark the whole track, they’ll have convinced the noble to dispatch troops for the investigation.

The party’s Wizard goes ﬁrst, producing the still-twitching tibia taken from one of the swamp skeletons. They describe the magical power needed to maintain a necromantic effect when a corpse is rendered into such small pieces. The GM calls that a Presence roll, but the Wizard asks to roll with Knowledge, focusing on the arcane display and demonstration of knowledge. The GM says that they’d normally give disadvantage on a Knowledge roll here since Presence is usually better for persuasion, but that the evidence would give advantage on that roll.

With advantage and disadvantage canceling out, the Wizard rolls a success with Hope, and the GM marks 1 Stress on the Noble. Since the Wizard rolled a success with Hope, the GM invites the players to continue.

Next, the Bard takes the stage, recalling the story of when the party entered the swamp and ﬁrst battled the undead raised by this necromantic force. The Bard uses his domain ability Enrapture. The Bard makes a Presence roll, getting a success with Fear. The Bard chooses to mark Stress to force the Noble to mark 2 Stress, bringing them down to 2 remaining. The GM elects to take Fear rather than use a GM move to immediately end the captivating effect of Enrapture.

Since the Bard has the Noble enraptured, the GM asks the Bard’s player whether they want to continue. The Bard’s player suggests he’ll weave the words of any party member that speaks into the spell if that’s okay. The GM agrees, wanting to involve the whole party.

Next, the group’s Rogue takes the economic angle, telling the noble that if they don’t act, the noble’s subjects will die and therefore be unable to work and pay taxes. The Rouge makes a Presence roll and gets a critical! Since a normal social action would mark 1 Stress, the GM decides that on a critical, they’ll mark 2 Stress instead, which marks the Noble’s last Stress.

With the Noble’s Stress exhausted, the GM describes how the Noble ﬁnally agrees to dispatch a patrol.

Armed Conﬂict

Chapter 4 presents rules for using adversary and environment stat blocks in combat—but as you plan for combat, remember that the most resonant battle scenes aren’t about violence, they’re about people and motivation. The language of violence can inspire emotions and develop NPCs and the world they inhabit. When bandits raid a village, they’re not just looking to hurt people—their motive might be greed, or it might be desperation, but either way, violence is just a means to an end.

The drama of a battle should focus on something beyond whether the PCs will die, since most of the time, they won’t, and it’s likely the players assume that. The PCs are ﬁghting for a reason, such as defending loved ones or subverting a villain’s schemes; if their battle relates to multiple goals or narrative threads, this adds uncertainty to the outcomes and increases dramatic tension.

Example: After the Blood Mage Caressa kidnapped the Governor’s husband Osten, the PCs tracked her across the Shattered Mountains. When they confront her in the Ruins of Nix, she’s conducting a ritual to seize Osten’s latent magical power. The PCs want to stop the ritual, save the Governor’s husband, and capture Caressa. But which of those goals is most important? If the PCs are winning the ﬁght, what happens if you put Osten in danger and make the players choose between rescuing him and capturing Caressa?“

In the above example, the PCs could achieve a partial victory by capturing Caressa after Osten has been killed; they could rescue the governor’s husband but Caressa could get away; or they could stop Caressa in time to capture her and save Osten, accomplishing all of their goals.

Using Fear for Drama

During battles, spend Fear to keep the characters on their toes. Duality rolls cause momentum to dramatically ebb and ﬂow in the ﬁght as the PCs fail their rolls or succeed with Fear.

While a lucky streak of Hope rolls means you don’t automatically get a GM move, you can still interrupt the players’ momentum by converting two of their action tokens to a Fear, then spending it to make a GM move. Since you can do this every two Action Rolls, this prevents the ﬁght from becoming a pushover for the PCs.

When spending Fear, think about what move will have the biggest impact on the scene, changing the energy or nature of the ﬁght. This might mean activating a powerful foe’s ability, bringing reinforcements into the ﬁght, changing the environment, or having the foes move boldly toward their objective.

Phased Battles

Battles become more memorable when the nature of the foes or the contours of the space shift mid-combat. Consider the following ways to introduce phases by creating a natural evolution and escalation of the scene:

1) Change the terms of engagement or the nature of the scene. Turn a ﬁght into a chase (see “Chase Countdowns”), reveal information that turns the group’s allies against them, or give the party a reason to temporarily ally with one of the factions they’re battling.

Example: During a pitched battle with an infamous thief, you might use a GM move for them to steal an important artifact from the PCs, then attempt to ﬂee. This will likely result in a chase, keeping the story dynamic and forcing the players to adapt.

2) Change the battlefield itself. During a battle, the environment might shift, either because of a natural phenomenon like an incoming blizzard, or because of an adversary’s actions. Some battleﬁeld changes repeat themselves—for example, an earth dragon might occasionally crash into the walls of their lair, dropping huge rocks and changing the contours of the battleﬁeld. In a case like this, you can set the move on a countdown loop. Other changes only happen once, in which case you might create an Environment move that is triggered by a speciﬁc narrative or mechanical event; for example, when ﬁghting in a divine realm, the god’s champion marks their last point of Stress and smashes the ﬂoor, dropping everyone atop a pane of otherworldly stained glass, surrounded by the rich colors of the cosmos.

If you plan this type of move ahead of time, you might prepare two maps: one for the start of the ﬁght, and another for when the space is fundamentally changed.

3) Change the foes. Video games often use the approach of changing the adversary at a certain point in the ﬁght, such as when their HP is halved or they’re seemingly defeated. Taking a cue from those kinds of battles, you can always change the adversary in behavior, form, or both: A heavily-armored enemy throws off their armor and begins moving with blistering speed. A defeated foe courses with eldritch power, transforming their appearance and granting them new abilities.

In Daggerheart, you can create a phase change for an enemy in a few ways. You might give the foe a passive feature that triggers when half of their Hit Points are marked, or you might prepare two adversary stat blocks, one for each phase. This book presents several adversaries with the Phase Change feature, which you can use as inspiration for creating your own.

If you didn’t prepare a phase change in advance, but the party is defeating a major foe far more easily than expected, it’s okay to let the PCs have the easy win. But if that may feel anticlimactic, feel free to improvise a phase two. Describe how the adversary seems to be defeated, then have them stand back up or surge with new energy, clear some of their HP, change some of their statistics or base attack, and make up a new feature or two to represent how they’ve changed. An enemy that throws off their armor might lower their damage thresholds but gain Relentless and move about with blistering speed. You might even switch to a new stat block, transforming the foe into something entirely new.

When an enemy takes new form, try to draw upon the story to explain the second phase. If the enemy is a blood mage, then having them hold out a bloody hand and use a powerful spell to transform into a blood abomination is both surprising and inevitable. But if the players never learned that the enemy was a blood mage, that reveal won’t be as satisfying, so you might have to create connective tissue in the moment, as the transforming enemy boasts about not having revealed their full power.

Impromptu NPCs

There’s no way to prepare for every eventuality or possibility in a tabletop role-playing game, so it’s inevitable that you’ll have moments where you need to create an NPC on the fly. Depending on the situation and the character, all you might need is a name, a basic description, and the character’s motive, which you use to inform how they act and respond to the players and the events of the story.

If this NPC is directly opposing the characters, you’ll also need to pick a difﬁculty for that NPC, giving you a benchmark to decide whether the party succeeds on actions against them. You can use the examples in “Setting Roll Difﬁculty” or you can base it on similar NPCs you’ve already introduced.

If you’re improvising a creature who isn’t interacting with the party socially, it’s still important to think about motive, but you’ll want to focus more on the information needed to play them in battle. You can grab the writeup of a similar creature and make some changes—or if you prefer, improvise your own using the guidance in the “Improvising Adversaries” section of chapter 4, then decide their features when you have the chance to make a GM move. That allows you to decide something that will have the most interesting impact on the scene at that moment.

Using Downtime

Downtime lets the players recover resources during short and long rests (see “Downtime” in chapter 2), but it also provides an opportunity to zoom in on the relationships between characters and how they process the intense emotions of their adventures. You can use downtime scenes as a pressure release valve to vary the intensity of the story and give the PCs room to breathe.

Empower your players to frame their own downtime scenes—especially for their Prepare moves, which offer a strong opportunity for characterization. Ask the players what it looks like as they tend to their wounds or recover stress together, encouraging them to take the reins of the story for that scene and work together with other players whose characters are involved.

Projects During Downtime

The Work on a Project downtime move requires more GM input than the other downtime moves. If a PC wants to do something that’ll likely take a long time, rather than doing it during another scene, this is a good candidate for the Work on a Project downtime move.

These projects are typically tracked using a Progress Countdown (see “Countdowns”). When deciding the size of the countdown, consider the complexity of the project, the availability of relevant tools, and the impact of the project on the story. If completing the project will give the group essential information they need to move on, you may want to set the countdown at a low number to ensure that the group doesn’t have to spend much time waiting for the next clue or beat in the story. If the project isn’t tightly linked to other parts of the story and it simply requires time, you might set the countdown on a higher number.

Simple projects might tick down the countdown each time the player uses the Work on a Project move. However, if the project is skill-dependent, you can ask how they make progress and then call for a roll using a trait that matches their approach.

When a player rolls to progress their project, it doesn’t feel great if the roll simply ends in failure. If you use the standard Dynamic Countdown Advancement table in the earlier “Countdowns” section, consider letting a failure give the PC special insight into their project, which grants them advantage on their next roll for that project. Alternatively, instead of using that table’s advancement criteria, you can use the following criteria so they make some progress even on a failure:

Critical Success: 4 ticks

Success with Hope: 3 ticks

Success with Fear: 2 ticks

Any failure: 1 tick

GM Downtime

When players use downtime to rest and refresh, you can gain Fear and progress a countdown happening in the background (see “Long-Term Countdowns”):

On a short rest, gain one Fear and advance a long-term countdown by one.
On a long rest, gain two Fear and advance a long-term countdown by two.

This helps to make the world feel alive—and it reminds players that the more resting they do, the more the world moves along without them, so they might want to be careful how much they rest.

Extended Downtime

If you’re fast-forwarding the story across multiple days (or longer), you probably don’t need a separate scene for each long rest during that time. During these longer stretches, consider talking to your players about what their characters want to accomplish, then using montages to illustrate the passage of time.

Some PC goals might require a single roll (or none at all). Others might call for a series of Progress Countdown rolls to advance a project across several long rests. It’s trivial for a Bard to gather rumors during a week-long stay in the city, but you might ask them to make a Presence roll to see whether they learn some especially important information in the process. Similarly, you might ask your Warrior to make a Finesse roll if they’re trying to enhance their armor with rare materials obtained in their last adventure.

Character Death

Adjudicating and overseeing the death of a player character may be among the most difﬁcult tasks for a GM. In a game focused on character relationships, personal story arcs, and heroic adventure, the death of a player character should not be done casually. As the GM, you’re charged with honestly portraying the world, and death is a greater threat in Daggerheart than in some other games working in the same genre.

Tip: Adversaries follow different rules for death than PCs; see “Defeated Adversaries ” in chapter 4 for details.

Choosing a Death Move

When a player character marks their last Hit Point, they must make a death move (see “Death” in chapter 2). Two of the three moves give the player full control over whether their character lives or dies: with Blaze of Glory, the player is accepting death for the character, and with Avoid Death, the player is defying death. Risk It All comes down to a dice roll, giving the character a nearly even chance of living or dying.

When a player is considering which death move to choose, make space for them to think and talk through their decision. You might give them a moment to think by shifting focus to another character, or keep focus on the character on the brink of death to let the player take the reins of the story.

Character death is not always satisfying in the moment, especially if the character’s cause of death isn’t directly tied to their personal story. But in a heroic fantasy adventure, death is always a possibility for characters trying to change the world. The death moves give the fatally injured character a chance for a memorable moment, whether it’s going out in a blaze of glory or risking it all on a roll of the dice.

Avoid Death

If a player is certain they aren’t ready to say goodbye to their character, this option ensures the character’s survival—though they have a chance of taking a Scar and permanently crossing out one of their Hope slots. If the character only has one Hope slot remaining when they make this move, there’s a chance the player will have to retire the character. Even so, that ending may be preferable for some players, if they’d rather see their character give up the adventuring life than die.

A lower-level character is much less likely to take a Scar than a higher level character, giving a chance for their story to play out more fully. But as characters gain levels, the chances of gaining Scars greatly increases, making Risk it All or Blaze of Glory more appealing.

Using this move, the character stays unconscious until healed by an ally or until the group’s long rest. Try to give the player chances to participate in play if the group isn’t able to heal their character or get to a long rest in short order. This might take the form of inviting them to temporarily control an NPC, or it might involve narrating a scene of the character at the knife’s edge between life and death, visited by the spirit of a departed loved one, receiving a vision of a disaster they need to survive to avert, or something else to keep them involved in the story.

Even without gaining a Scar, this move still comes with a cost, as it makes the situation much worse. That might be some kind of escalation due to the others in the party tending to the fallen character (like a new wave of enemies approaching), or the character’s misfortune might turn the tide against the heroes (like an important item being seized by an adversary).

Risk It All

This is the move that you as the GM have the least say in. The Duality dice decide the character’s fate, and with the exception of the 10th-level Resurrection spell (which can only be used once), that roll of the dice is ﬁnal unless you provide other means of resurrection in your story. If the player rolls with Hope, help them decide how to divide the value of the Hope die between Hit Points and Stress to clear. You might remind the player that if they choose to clear only a small number of Hit Points, they may be forced to make another death move after just one further blow.

Though it is important to reward your player if they roll with Hope by giving them their moment to return in the spotlight, it is just as important to reward your player if they roll with Fear and their character meets their end. Let them have some ﬁnal words with a friend or a memory that plays as they fade from consciousness. This gives them a moment to say goodbye to their character in a way that feels important and satisfying.

Blaze of Glory

If the player decides that the character will go out in a Blaze of Glory, work with them to ensure that the one action they take is as meaningful as possible without breaking the integrity of the story. You might rule that when the Seraph goes out in a Blaze of Glory, leaping down the throat of the god-shark seeking to swallow the sun, the Guardian can deal a fatal blow to the foe, even if they had more HP left than a critical success could possibly deal. But it might be a bad idea to let that same Seraph shatter the barrier between the mortal realm and the Worlds Above to allow their god to walk freely among mortals. Again, think about the group’s agreements about tone when deciding the scale of action the Blaze of Glory can accomplish.

When Disaster Looms

There are times when a ﬁght goes poorly for the PCs and they’re bound for total disaster. When multiple PCs are making death moves and there’s a real risk of a complete party wipeout, it’s important to check in with the players as the scene unfolds. How do they feel about the scene, and the chances that the whole party will be left dead or incapacitated? Is this a good place for the campaign’s story to potentially end? Should the PCs cut their losses and ﬂee? PCs that choose the Avoid Death option in the death moves are left completely helpless, and if all of the PCs take that option in a scene, the party is left at the mercy of their adversaries or fate (aka the GM).

It’s also useful to consider the motivation of the adversaries present. Do they really want to kill the PCs, or do they just want the party out of the way so the adversaries can pursue their motives? Would they be more likely to leave the PCs for dead, to take them prisoner to gloat, or to extract information?

If your players aren’t interested in a heroic tragedy at the moment, work with them to decide what makes sense in the scene. Do you keep playing it out? Do you agree that the party is taken captive, living to ﬁght another day? Death is a real threat in Daggerheart, but the game is always a collaboration, and if the whole party is going to meet their end, it should be because everyone at the table is interested in that story. If the players don’t want the party to get wiped out but it’s harder to come up with a way they survive, look to their background questions and their relationships with factions and prominent NPCs. Does an old ally show up with reinforcements to drive off the enemies? Does an agent of the Seraph’s god or a nature spirit friendly to the Druid whisk the PCs away to safety? Does an associate of the Syndicate Rogue provide cover for the PCs to withdraw?

If the group decides that their party’s story is done but they want to continue the overall campaign, hold a mid-campaign session zero to make new characters and ﬁgure out how to connect these new characters and their party to the existing story in a way that everyone is excited about. The next section provides additional guidance on introducing new characters, whether one or two new PCs join the party or a new party picks up where the previous party left off.

Introducing a New Character

If a PC dies or retires from adventuring, you should work with the player between sessions to develop a new character for them to play at the current level of the party (see “Building Higher-Level Characters” in chapter 1). If your player and group want to, they can answer the usual Connections questions, giving them existing connections to everyone in the party. However, it can be more dramatic to skip the normal Connections, and instead ask them one or more of the following questions that advance the party’s story:

You have vital information the party needs to continue forward on their journey. What is it, and how did you obtain it?

You are in desperate need of help that only the party can provide. What has you in such danger and what do you have for them in exchange?

You know somebody in the party very well and have searched them out. What connection question should you ask them before the next session, and what do you need them for?

You lost your last adventuring party to something or someone terrible. What caused their downfall, and how is this new party connected to them in some way?

You are part of a faction that has opposed the party, but now you need their help. What problem does your faction face, and how are you going to prove to the party that you can be trusted?

You have been charged to deliver a lost item to a member of the party. What is it, and what personal quest is it tied to that requires working with the party?

Leveling Up Your Party

You can level up your party any time you wish, though it’s often simplest to do so at the end of an important session—such as when your party reaches the end of a story arc (see “Planning a Story Arc” later in this chapter). All players should level up at the same time, following the Level Up guide speciﬁc to their class. Ask them to reﬂect on what their character has learned in the previous arc and how it might have changed who they are, then choose two options from the level up list. For more information about leveling up, see “Leveling Up” in chapter 2.

If you are running a short campaign, you may want to level up every other session, or whatever cadence feels appropriate for your campaign length. This will accelerate the power growth of your PCs, but also allow them to experience the full arc of their characters before the campaign ends.

When your PCs level up, they’ll gain new abilities, spells, damage thresholds, experience, and more, so be sure to review what has changed for them. This is a good time to plan some opportunities for them to use those new features over the next arc. For example, if a PC’s new ability helps them eavesdrop on conversations, you could begin the next session with an espionage mission where that skill comes in handy. Similarly, if a PC chooses the Experience of “Animal Whisperer,” they’d likely enjoy encountering some wild animals that can potentially be tamed during the upcoming arc.

Running An Adventure

CHAPTER THREE

Running An Adventure

Core Guidance

GM Principles

Begin and End with the Fiction

Fill The World with Life, Wonder, and Danger

Make Every Roll Carry Weight

Collaborate at All Times, Especially in Conflict

Ask Questions and Incorporate the Answers

Hold On Gently

Play to Find Out What Happens

GM Best Practices

Cultivate a Curious Table

Gain Your Players’ Trust

Treat the Characters as Competent

Cut to the Action

Keep the Story Moving Forward

Help the Players Use the Game

Create a Meta Conversation

Ground the World in Motive

Bring the Game’s Mechanics to Life

Reframe Rather than Reject

Work in Moments and Montages

Pitfalls to Avoid

Undermining the Heroes

Always Telling the Players What To Roll

Letting Scenes Drag

Singular Solutions

Overplanning

Always Taking Fear

Core GM Mechanics

The GM’s Die

Making GM Rolls

Critical Success

Calling for Action Rolls

Experiences Impact Fiction

Making Moves

When to Make a Move

They roll with Fear on an action roll.

They fail an action roll.

They do something that would have consequences.

They give you a golden opportunity.

They look to you for what happens next.

How to Choose a Move

Obvious Moves

Player-Drive Moves

Social Moves

Avoid Undermining Success

Softer and Harder Moves

Example GM Moves

Show how the world reacts.

Ask a question and build on the answer.

Make an NPC act in accordance with their motive.

Lean on the character’s goals to drive them to action.

Signal an imminent off-screen threat.

Reveal an unwelcome truth or unexpected danger.

Offer the PC what they want in exchange for marking stress.

Make a move the characters don’t see.

Force the group to split up.

Show the cost of collateral damage.

Make a PC mark a Stress as a consequence for their actions.

End a temporary condition or effect.

Make an attack.

Gain a Fear (on a roll with Fear).

Spend action tokens.

Capture someone or something important.

Use their backstory against them.

Take away an opportunity permanently.

Fear

Gaining Fear

Tracking Fear

Spending Fear

Interrupt the players while the action tracker is out to make a move.

Add two tokens to the action tracker.

Use an Adversary’s Fear Feature.

Use an Environment’s Fear Feature.

Improvising Fear Moves

Using The Action Tracker

Activating Adversaries