I’ve recently finished reading the entirety of the Daggerheart book, and I figured I’d share my thoughts about the system. Yes, I know I’m late to the party, but look, I work two jobs and have a toddler…time is precious LOL
I want to be clear that this is not a highly technical review of the system. I initially just wrote this for myself to decide if it was a game I wanted to run (spoilers: it is), and from there, I kept making notes about what I liked and didn’t. I was trying to figure out what the system wanted to do, what kind of game it wanted you to play, what was important to it, and what wasn’t. I also just made some notes about things that I thought were particularly cool (the death moves and campaign frame) and things I particularly hated (like that the ranger’s pet is unkillable).
So, without more rambling, I present:
My not-quite-review of Daggerheart
One Sentence Summary: A collaborative narrative game in a high fantasy, high-powered setting.
What this feels like:
Anime (Demon Slayer, Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood)
Final Fantasy
The Iliad and the Odyssey
What this does NOT feel like:
The Lord of the Rings
Old-School D&D (OSE, B/X)
Hexcrawling or Dungeoncrawling
Before we get into some of the more detailed notes, I thought it would be worth mentioning my overall thoughts about the system.
First, this is a system I absolutely want to run games for. The combination of crunch and narrative-driven gameplay has grabbed me in a way that no other narrative-driven games have. Like, I honestly don’t like PbTA games because they don’t have enough crunch for me, and are often very “low-power”. Daggerheart seems like it was made for people who want a narrative game, but want it to have more tactical options and a higher power level than most narrative games.
I do think that this system is going to put a lot of the workload on the Referee. There’s just so much that you have to manage because the game doesn’t really have “procedures” the way many D&D adjacent games do.
Partially as a result of this, Daggerheart is a system with the ability to adjust pretty much anything you want without breaking the game or needing to reinvent anything. It practically begs to be tinkered with and adjusted.
Overall, I think this game will appeal to people who want both a narrative-driven system with plenty of crunch, complexity, and an exceptionally high power level.
Core Resolution Mechanic
The players roll 2d12, called Duality Dice. One is labeled a Hope die, and one is labeled a Fear die. If they have advantage or disadvantage, they are rolling a d6 and adding or subtracting it from the result.
When you roll to see whether your character succeeds or fails at a task or challenge, you roll your Duality Dice, take the sum of their results, and then add any bonuses your character has that apply to the action. If that total is equal to or higher than the Difficulty set by the GM, your character succeeds. If it’s lower, they fail. You’ll also tell the GM whether your Hope or Fear Die rolled higher, as the situation around you changes based on that result.
If your two Duality die match, it is a critical success!
Resolving Situations
There are 5 different results you can achieve based on your total duality roll and the Difficulty set by the GM
Critical Success: You get what you want and a little extra. You gain a Hope and clear a Stress. If you made an attack roll, you also deal extra damage.
Success with Hope: You pull it off well and get what you want. You gain a Hope.
Success with Fear: You get what you want, but it comes with a cost or consequence. The GM gains a Fear.
Failure with Hope: Things don't go to plan. You probably don't get what you want and there are consequences, but you gain a Hope.
Failure with Fear: Things go very badly. You probably don't get what you want, and a major consequence or complication occurs because of it. The GM gains a Fear.
Story Is Consequence
In Daggerheart, every time you roll the dice, the scene changes in some way. There is no such thing as a roll where nothing happens, because the fiction constantly evolves based on the successes and failures of the characters. A failure doesn’t mean you simply don’t get what you want, especially if that would result in a moment of inaction. For example, if you fail a roll to pick a lock, it’s not just that the door doesn’t open. On a failure with Hope, it might mean you can hear the rumble of footsteps coming down the hall behind you—the adversaries you previously escaped are getting close, and you have to hide, or find another way through. On a failure with Fear, the door might’ve been magically warded to keep thieves away, and its arcane alarm triggers. Meanwhile, on a success with Fear, you might succeed in unlocking the door, but you’re spotted by the adversaries within.
I’ve included this snippet as written because it is a very good indicator of how this system wants to be played.
General Thoughts
This is a system made by theatre kids!
The game wants to be everything, or at least leave space open for someone to customize it to be anything. This leaves it in a weird space where it doesn’t really have a specific focus. I couldn’t really tell you what the theme of this game is outside of “narrative adventures”. Time and time again, the book provides examples of customizing the game to the extent that it could become a completely different game. I think this is probably the game’s biggest strength and its biggest weakness.
I’ve personally found that I like games that focus on a very specific theme or style rather than trying to be all things to all people. If I want to play a space-horror game, I’ll use Mothership; if I want to play a game with Arthurian Knights, I’ll play Mythic Bastionland. I like that Daggerheart gives you the tools to make your game whatever you want, but it will put more work on the GM since the game doesn’t really have a “default setting.” That said, I do think that this game really could be adjusted to be anything given the way it uses campaign frames.
Very epic feel compared to games with similar themes and mechanics (PbTA games). This is the game to play if you want a high fantasy, high magic, narrative-focused game. I can’t see using this system if you want a low-power, low-magic game.
I really like the Core Rules, but not sure I like the philosophy of the game. It does very much match the style of the game that Critical Roll has been running forever. Very highly narrative-focused, where they are telling a predetermined story that the players heavily impact. But the story as a whole was determined long before the players started interacting with it. I don't think this is bad. It's just a very different style of gaming. It very much makes me think of the incredibly epic but fairly linear adventure paths that Paizo produces for Pathfinder. They're incredible, but everyone playing has to sign up to do this adventure and follow this plot line, otherwise you're not playing the game.
An example of this is in the Preparing Combat Encounters section, where it says, “The most important element is to ensure that combat is being used to give players more information about the unfolding story—it reveals more about the world, the plot, or the characters.” I tend to disagree. I think combat is either a sport (combat as sport or combat as war is a whole other thing), or combat is a consequence. If combat is fundamentally a function of story, then the heroes will always move forward. It feels like this is where Daggerheart diverges most from PbTA, a game that is a heavy influence on this one. I will likely run this system at some point, but I will mostly take the ruleset, not the philosophy.
I think this system will put a lot of work on the GM. There are just so many things that the GM is expected to do that it feels like it will be a lot of work. Picking then modifying (or building) the Campaign Frame, coming up with interesting narrative tweaks every time the players roll with fear, customizing classes, ancestries, and communities to match the campaign, and helping manage player flow in combat since there isn’t an initiative system. Just to name a few. This is another part of the system that I don’t think is bad, but if you’re looking for a game that you can just pick up and run, then I don’t think Daggerheart is it.
It is possible to adjust anything to do almost anything, far easier than any other system I’ve seen. As I mentioned, it might take some work from the player and GM, but because of how everything is written, you could just change the ranger to be a character that has hollowed out their body to become a living hive for bees (you know, as just a random example). While you could do this in many systems, the advantage of doing it in Daggerheart is that it isn’t too hard and won’t break anything. The system makes it easy to reskin things.
Random thought, but this system would be INCREDIBLE for Dimension 20 games. (Interestingly, since I first wrote this, we found out that Brennan Lee Mulligan will be the GM for Critical Role Season 4)
I think that, as written, the system is too collaborative. It wants the players to have a say in almost everything (see running a One-Shot as an example, or the 6-hour suggested session-0 time), and I know that I don’t always want the players to have a say in literally everything. I know this is something I could just change, but again, more work from the GM's perspective.
Everything below is just my thoughts on each chapter and section of the book as I read through it. I don’t spend a lot of time explaining the different features, but they should be at least reasonably obvious. It’s also just my thoughts, not a critique, not some thoughtful insight into the nature of the game, just what popped into my head as I was reading, or things I found interesting.
Enjoy….
Chapter 1: Preparing for Adventure
Character Creation
When creating characters, you generate “experiences” that your character has. These are very freeform and can be anything from Snake Handler or Horse Racer to Never Again or Addicted to Magically Enchanted Elixers. When your character does something that might relate to their experience, you can spend a hope and gain +2 to the roll. I love this system and how your character's experiences can have a small mechanical bonus, but you would need to work with the players to make sure it wasn’t too vague. “I’m a Winner” is gonna get used constantly and would lose some of the narrative impact of a good experience.
Classes
Interestingly, Evasion (AC / Defense Score) and HP are tied to class. I wish they had doubled down on this and tied damage to class rather than equipment. Lean into the idea that a Guardian would do more damage with a dagger than a Sorcerer would with a sword.
Love the way they handle druid beast-forms as a template to apply to your character rather than a whole new creature block.
I DESPISE that the Ranger’s companion is mechanically unkillable. They have no HP and take Stress instead, then are just removed from the scene, only to come back later. (I blame every player who wants their animal companion to actually just be a super violent pet…and Laura Bailey and Trinket)
Rogues are the superhero rogues, not the sneaky thief rogues. Largely identified by the fact that they can “Sneak Attack” if an ally is within melee range of their target. Games should just start calling this precision strike if they are going to treat it this way.
I do love the Syndicate subclass and the way it leans into the story.
All of the classes seem “strong”, as in they all have reasonably similar Evasion and HP when looked at together. Classes with lower HP just have higher Agility. Since it looks like any class can wear any armor, it feels like it heavily reduces “combat roles” if the wizard can also tank.
Having watched this in play, this is only partially true, based on how the game uses Attacks and Damage, some classes do feel more fragile than others. This is also due to the different class abilities.
Ancestry (or Race/Kin/Species)
Love that they didn't tie stat increases into ancestry, but I dislike all of the crazy anthropomorphic and robot ancestries. I'm very aware that this is a personal preference, but I like the more traditional fantasy races, and if there are odd ancestries, I don't want them to be a common playable ancestry. I also think this is continuing the trend of the system, being so open to customization that it's trying to do everything. Even some of the example ancestry images are wildly different.
The way giant eyes develop is super cool.
Though they can have up to three eyes, all giants are born with none and remain sightless for their first year of life. Until a giant reaches the age of 10 and their features fully develop, the formation of their eyes may fluctuate.)
I hate their goblins, though I know this is personal preference. They’ve decided to focus on the “cute” style goblin over the insane style. I want my goblins to be psychopathic little chaos monsters, even if they aren’t evil.
Overall, everything has a really long lifespan, like 100+ years, with very few exceptions.
Community (Where you Come From)
Communities are effectively your geographic background and grant you a community feature. I like that these are more “styles” of a community rather than being tied to a specific place or location.
With so many choices, I do wonder if players will simply find the Community Feature they like and then choose that Community.
Chapter 2: Playing an Adventure
Core Mechanics
Replacing “initiative” with the spotlight is an interesting choice. I like what they’re going for, but it could be super easy for several players to dominate the game sessions, even if they aren’t trying to. I think it would take constant work by the GM and players to share the spotlight at the table. The real question is whether it’s worth it and how effective it is.
I do like the “spotlight tracker” idea as a backup, essentially limiting the number of actions a player can take before they need to pass the spotlight.
GM Moves. This typically happens when the players roll with fear or fail a roll. The GM moves the scene forward, probably with a downward beat.
Tip: When the GM has the spotlight, PCs can’t use features that require spending resources or making rolls unless those actions specifically allow for it, such as reaction rolls or features that interrupt attack or damage rolls.
Using Hope to Help an Ally. You have to spend a hope and describe how you help an ally and grant them an advantage. I love how this eliminates the “infinite advantage via help action ” that crops up in 5e. It feels like a good balance between being able to help your party fairly frequently without turning into always having advantage on every roll.
Group Action Rolls. This is like a small group skill check…sort of. One person is selected to “lead” the party, and makes an action roll. Everyone else makes a reaction roll (reaction rolls are the same as action rolls but don’t generate Hope of Fear). For each successful reaction roll, the leader gains a +1 to their action roll, and for each failed reaction roll, the leader loses -1 from their action roll. This feels like a lot of rolling with very minimal change in the final roll.
As an example, if a group of 4 is attempting a stealth check with a DC 15, then 3 players would make reaction rolls. Let’s assume 1 fails and 2 succeed. The last player makes the main roll with a +1 to their roll (+2,-1). That’s technically 3 extra rolls to gain +1 to the main stealth check.
Tag Team Rolls. In combat, allies can spend 3 hope to make a tag-team attack. Both players roll the dice and then choose which set they want. If they succeed, they both roll and combine the damage. Very cool both narratively and mechanically. There is a limit to only being able to initiate a tag-team attack once per session, and I’m not sure if that is too restrictive.
Reaction Rolls. Just an action roll taken as a reaction to something, but it does not generate hope or fear.
Battling Adversaries (AKA Combat)
So, no more “Action Tokens,” and we instead just use Fear or Failure to spotlight an adversary and can then burn fear to make additional GM moves (aka attacks). Thank God! This is definitely an improvement over two different meta-currencies that you could exchange for each other at different exchange rates. - This was only in the playtest, but man alive was it obnoxiously complicated. It made a world of difference to have it removed.
When moving further than close range (30’) while in danger, or under pressure, a character now has to make an Agility roll. I like this method of keeping characters from just dashing all over the battlefield while still making it possible to do so. It’s really just discouraging characters from constant long-range movement without telling them they can’t.
They have absolutely just taken standard fifth edition ranges and converted them to a name rather than a specific number of feet.
Gold
Gold is so abstracted that I wish they hadn't included it at all. It’s measured in handfuls, bags, and chests. About 10 handfuls make a bag, and about 10 bags make a chest. Anytime a system does not list prices for items and equipment, it immediately tells me that gold is not important and honestly just shouldn't be there. They’ve really abstracted it as much as they can without removing it, but honestly, I think they should have removed it and just said that Daggerheart wasn’t a game about tracking money and buying stuff.
Death
When a character drops to 0hp, they have 3 options they can choose from:
Blaze of Glory - Choose once last thing to do, critically succeed at it, and then die. While this is narratively super cool, I think it’s underwhelming and not many people will choose it. When I think of a character going out in a blaze of glory, I think of Gandalf on the Khazad-dûm, Cole McGrath in Infamous, Iron Man in Endgame, etc. Characters that save their friends, or the world, by willingly sacrificing themselves. Not dying just to do some extra damage. I would almost certainly make this more impactful in my games. - So I watched a character use this in the Critical Role Umbra game, and it immediately confirmed my thoughts. The moment was beautiful, tense, and narratively fantastic. But it basically just did some damage and knocked the bad guy down. He simply got up a few moments later.
Avoid Death - You don’t die and just fall unconscious until healed or until after a long rest. You also roll a d12, and if it is equal to or lower than your character level, you gain a scar. If you gain a scar, you permanently cross out a hope slot, and if you ever cross out your last hope slot, you die (or retire, I guess). Oddly, this means that the higher level you are, the easier it is to gain a scar. This feels a bit weird because it means that, technically, the higher level you are, the easier it is to die in the long run.
Risk It All - Roll your duality dice. If the Fear die is higher, you die. If the Hope die is higher, you get back up and heal the difference between the two dice. This is for sure the best one. It’s incredibly tense and stressful, but also leads to those superhero moments where the villain “defeats” the main character and turns their back on their broken body, only to have them stand back up “stronger than they were before”. (Looking at you every anime ever)
Leveling Up
I don't really like that the “party” has a level rather than each character. It sort of makes sense for such a narrative game, but still feels…odd. It means that if a character dies, the replacement character is always just the same level.
Leveling up is very PbtA in that you choose from a list of options when you level up, and the list is different / better the higher level you are. You also get some other features every time you level up.
Equipment
Retrieving an item from your inventory while in danger doesn’t take an action, but it does require that you spend stress to do it. This is fantastic and very narrative. I like that it has a cost, but it doesn’t affect your ability to do something else on your turn.
I like that wielding a secondary weapon doesn’t give you another attack. Instead, it provides benefits to your general attack. Seems like this does a good job of making dual-wielding interesting without it just being a little more damage, or absolutely busted.
Weapons and Armor
I’m not sure what I think about this. I like that plenty of weapons have cool traits, especially the secondary weapons, and that none of the weapons seem like redundant duplicates once you take into account the traits, damage, and feature options. I dislike that, for the most part, weapons of a higher tier just do more damage, they don’t really change in any signification way. I also still really wish that damage was tied to class.
Overall, though, I do think this section is helpful. If nothing else, it gives you an idea of the types of weapons that are appropriate for each tier. Given how easy it is to change/reskin things, I still would have just preferred a table listing the appropriate damage per tier and a large list of traits.
I. LOVE. THE. LOOT. All of it, the actual items, the rollable tables by tier, the effects. It’s great and very succinct. Other RPGs should learn from this.
Chapter 3: Running an Adventure
Core Guidance
One of the GM Best Practices is to “Cut to the Action”. This doubles down on the fact that the game is not about inventory management like many NSR-style games. They are not trying to use the number of torches or rations to create drama. They want epic heroes, not an expedition team. No one wants to “watch” what happens to heroes on the road between cities…unless a dragon attacks them.
GM Moves
They list 16 different GM Moves, and they are exceptionally vague. They kind of list with different examples for moves that the referee can make always confuse me because they are so large and so vague that it's almost unhelpful. And if that's the case, why not just say anything can be a move and then give a few actual examples?
Fear
Spend Fear To: So we finally get some examples of what to actually do with all the fear the GM gains.
Interrupt the players to make a move.
Make an additional GM move.
Use an adversary’s Fear Feature.
Use an environment’s Fear Feature.
Add an adversary’s Experience to a roll.
Unlike the last list, I think this one is really helpful. It’s short and actionable.
Improvising Fear Moves
Hmmmm…so this is concerning. Several of these examples feel like they take agency away from the players by nullifying what they’ve done to “stay with the fiction”.
Example 1: The party has confronted a corrupt noble who the GM, Stella, planned to use as 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, Stella improvises a Fear move to allow the noble to escape using a method that makes sense for the adversary but hasn’t been set up in the fiction yet.
This is the kind of thing that I have always hated about PBtA-inspired games. They tend to give the GM/Referee fiat to nullify what the group does under the pretense of sticking with the narrative. Clearly, you can just not do this, but I worry when the GM instructions tell you to.
Difficulty
Pretty simple, DC increases in increments of 5. I really appreciate the different example difficulty tables they have. For each trait/skill they list an example action at each level of difficulty. It just makes it a lot easier to know what the designers were going for.
Countdowns
I mostly like this, and it's incredibly similar to the clocks popularized by Blades in the Dark. What I don't like is their recommendation for timing for long-term countdowns. They recommend it ticks down 2-3 times a day. That's wild. You'd need 14-21 steps for a 2-week-long countdown.
Gold & Equipment
I like that they finally gave some guidance on prices for equipment, but it still very clearly indicates that this game is not about gold and managing supplies. I'd probably play this game very unconcerned about money at all.
Session 0
THEY RECOMMEND A 4-HOUR SESSION 0?!?!? Holy lord in heaven, that would be two full sessions for the session 0. So I get that they are trying to make the game a full collaboration with the players. They have the players take turns placing important locations on the map, naming them, and telling the group about them. If that’s something the entire group is into, then you’ll all love it, but I wouldn’t call it a session 0. I’d call it a campaign prelude or something. The idea of spending 4+ hours just getting ready to play the game feels insane to me.
Social Encounters
I like the idea of using stress as the “hp” for a social situation.
Combat
“If you didn’t prepare a phase change but the party is defeating a major foe more easily than expected, it’s okay to let the PCs have the easy win. However, if that feels anticlimactic, feel free to improvise a phase two.”
This is just another example of the game valuing story over player agency. I hate it.
Character Death
If your players aren’t interested in a heroic tragedy at the moment, work with them to decide what makes sense in the scene. Death is a real threat in Daggerheart, but the game is always a collaboration. If the party is going to meet their end, it should be because everyone at the table wants to tell that story. If the players don’t want the party to die here but it’s difficult to come up with a way they survive, look to their background questions and their relationships with factions and prominent NPCs. Are they taken captive by the enemy? 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?
I can’t stand the recommendation that the GM and Players could just “decide” a TPK doesn’t happen and then come up with a reason it doesn’t, so they keep playing the campaign. Very video-gamey, but maybe this is just my lack of experience with more narrative-focused games?
Running a Campaign
There is a lot of potentially helpful information in this section, but it is complicated. Like, this is not advice to give a beginner GM. It could very easily become overwhelming. It also could very easily lead to railroading because you've constructed this big plot with multiple threads and multiple sub plots that are all interconnected and anytime you do that as a GM you will inevitably try to push the players in that direction, this isn't necessarily bad if your next several plot points are somewhat short term or very in the background but if you're graphing this stuff out like they recommend it's hard not to make it a linear story. But to be fair, most of this system, beyond the core rules, is promoting a very linear story.
Chapter 4: Adversaries
They have some pretty tight math on “building” an encounter. I wonder how well it holds up. It also doesn’t say this specifically, but I’m assuming you would choose enemies from the same Tier as the player characters.
I like that they walk through how to create a custom adversary for each creature type, and the small, simple improv chart is a godsend. Every RPG about killing monsters should do this!
The minion type is especially well done.
Not sure that I like the “Social” types. On one hand, this looks potentially pretty cool; on the other hand, I wonder if it’s just gamifying social mechanics too much. Most of the statblocks used for these creatures are very clearly not designed for combat, and the features seem more story-driven than something you would need a mechanic for. Take these two abilities for example:
No Hospitality - Action: Mark a Stress to forbid any of the Elder’s allies from selling or providing comfort to a target or their allies for the next 2d6 days.
There Will Be Peace - Reaction: When a creature attacks someone within the village who the Elder can see, you can spend 2 Fear. That creature must lose all Hope, mark 2d4 Stress, and succeed on a Presence Reaction Roll (15) or fall Unconscious until 1d4 hours have passed. While Unconscious, the target can’t make action rolls, can’t speak, and automatically fails all reaction rolls. Once the Elder uses this reaction, they can never do so again.
The no hospitality thing is just odd; that seems like just something an elder could do. Why do they need to mark a stress? The second feature is almost wildly overpowered, but then they can never do it again? So they’ve clearly never needed to do it in their lives until this point? Weird. Every social “adversary” I look at just seems like something you could easily run by adjudicating players’ normal die rolls rather than building a full character out.
Overall, I do like the way Adversaries are built out. They keep the stat blocks simple enough that even with multiple cool abilities, it isn’t too large. Even the Tier 4 enemies don’t take up a full page. But there is also enough information that you don’t need to constantly make stuff up like you do in many PBtA games.
Using Environments
These are very interesting, like an enemy stat block for an environment. I don’t think every environment needs a stat block (don’t want a PbtA situation where everything needs a move), but having an environment stat block for a region or point crawl would be very cool. Or maybe a lair…like 5e lair actions but done right.
Chapter 5: Campaign Frames
These are amazing…and some of them are very complex. Of all of the things I’d like people to create for Daggerheart, it’s adventures and campaign frames. Trying to build one of these yourselves would be exceptionally time-consuming and challenging; you’re sort of building half the RPG. The ones in the book are very cool and very fleshed out. If I were to do this myself, I think the intent would be to start small and build as we go, rather than fully fleshing out all the ancestries, kins, and classes like the ones in the book do.
I like the intent here, though. It could really help nail down what makes your campaign different from everyone else’s. You really wouldn't need to fully flesh out these big descriptions and changes to every feature and add a whole bunch of new rules and stuff. The more I think about it, the more it's similar to a campaign pitch, just with more information. I also think the “front page” layout they use for the campaign frames is worth stealing (Pitch, Tone & Feel, Themes, and Inspiration/Touchstones). You could use this set of information to pitch pretty much any campaign in any system so that players would know what they're getting off the bat. I will almost certainly be doing this going forward.
I am super surprised that Taldorai isn’t one of the Campaign Frames.
5 Banners Burning. Yaaaa…if I ran this, I would just 100% use the Mausritter faction rules. Much simpler, but I get what they’re going for.
Age of Umbra. You can tell Matt wrote this because there is SO—MUCH—LORE.
Motherboard. I really applaud their decision not to allow Clanks in this campaign frame. It would quickly become complex when most machines are mindless enemies you can kill, but these other machines have sentience. They built a language for this?!?!? AND IT’S SUPER COMPLICATED WTF GUYS!??!?!!
Colossus of the Drylands. While I don’t like the wild-west flavor of this, the underlying rules for hunting colossal foes are really, really good. I’m 100% stealing them for my games. They would also combine very well with the Nested Monster Hit Points blog post by Mindstorm Press
It’s interesting how several of the campaign frames are just very clearly their version of an already well-known IP. Beast Feast is Delicious in the Dungeon. Motherboard is Horizon Zero Dawn. Colossus of the Drylands is Shadow of the Colossus meets Deadlands.
More Frame Ideas
Arcane-inspired dual cities at odds with one another
Solo Leveling (portal dungeons in a “real world”)
A rip on Witherwild crossed with Worlds Without Number (really just a heavily Ghibli-inspired thing)
Thank you for the deep analysis. It confirms my suspicions and reinforces my choice to back The Broken Empires over Daggerheart.
Just bought it for running a Solo Game. Appreciate your thoughts and agree with a lot of things. The thing about narrative focused games is that they tend to be system agnostic. They even used experiencea as you can find in games like Loner or Tricube Tales. Overall I think it is somewhat similar to Ironsworn but as you said, with a bit more crunch. The campaign frames are awesome but also something that I am not sure if I will try when starting a solo adventure. I like it a bit more simple.