Daggerheart

Daggerheart is a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game published by Darrington Press, the publishing arm of Critical Role Productions, built around collaborative, narrative-focused campaign play in which players and a game master construct a shared world together.¹¹⁵ The game was released on May 20, 2025, after more than a year of public beta testing.⁹⁸ It is designed for three to six people total — a game master plus two to five players — with sessions running roughly two to four hours and campaigns of any length.¹¹⁶

Daggerheart originated with the actual-play troupe Critical Role, eight voice actors who had spent over a decade streaming Dungeons & Dragons campaigns on Twitch and YouTube, accumulating more than 1,300 hours of play across three campaigns.¹¹⁹ By 2024 the company had grown into a multi-division business spanning live shows, streaming, podcasting, Amazon-backed animation, and publishing, with a live show that sold out an arena in London and an $11.3 million Kickstarter run for its animated series.¹¹⁹ Its publishing imprint, Darrington Press, first announced the game at its inaugural State of the Press on April 20, 2023, describing it only as an RPG “designed for long-term campaign play and character progression” and a “fun and fresh update to the fantasy genre of RPGs,” alongside two other new titles, the deckbuilding battle royale Queen by Midnight? and the Illuminated Worlds? system.¹⁰³⁶ An early build was demonstrated at Gen Con in Indianapolis in August 2023.³¹²

Development and playtest

Spenser Starke, a senior game designer at Darrington Press, served as lead game designer, with Rowan Hall as co-designer; additional design credits went to Carlos Cisco, John Harper, Critical Role game master Matthew Mercer, Alex Uboldi, Mike Underwood, and others.¹¹² Starke and Hall described themselves as coming from “a narrative gaming background,” designing mechanics that reinforce collaborative storytelling between game masters and players.⁴ Hall characterized the pairing with Critical Role as “birds of a feather,” noting the troupe’s reputation for storytelling and his own love of storytelling games.⁴ The design deliberately balanced familiar fantasy tropes against opportunities to subvert them; Hall cited giving the game’s Giants anywhere from one to three eyes so that a Cyclops concept could fit the setting.⁴

Darrington Press created Daggerheart entirely in-house, with Starke and his team overseeing the book from art to final edits.⁹ Starke described the hardest part of design as ensuring the mechanics “felt balanced and locked together at every level,” and singled out the ancestry, community, and subclass cards as high-priority items during development.⁹ Campaign frames — a quick-start method for launching home games — were a later addition to the rulebook.⁹

An open beta playtest launched on March 12, 2024 — coinciding with Critical Role’s anniversary — with free packets available through the Daggerheart website, DriveThruRPG, and the Demiplane digital platform, where the Daggerheart NEXUS offered a character-creation tool.⁶¹² Critical Role promoted the beta on Twitch and YouTube, playing the game live at 7 p.m. Pacific on launch day.⁶ The playtest drew roughly 150,000 participants, which the designers described as one of the largest open betas for a tabletop RPG; the final release incorporated extensive feedback, with the armor system and an action tracker among the elements changed or removed.⁴ Starke described iterating rapidly, running a playtest and revising the same day before running another.⁴ Matthew Mercer, Critical Role’s chief creative officer, called the process a “wild and rewarding journey” and said the game “will most definitely be a major part of CR’s future”.⁹

Mechanics

The game’s defining mechanic is the Duality Dice: a pair of visually distinct twelve-sided dice, one representing Hope and the other Fear.⁵¹³ On an action roll, a player rolls both, adds relevant modifiers, and compares the total to a Difficulty set by the game master; the total determines success or failure, while the higher of the two dice determines a narrative consequence.⁵¹⁹ A result with Hope grants the player a Hope token even on a failure, while a result with Fear gives the game master a Fear token even on a success, producing “mixed results” in which a success carries a complication or a failure carries a perk.⁵⁸ Matching values on both dice yield a Critical Success, granting a Hope, clearing a Stress, and extra damage on an attack.¹⁹ The system functions somewhat like a d20 roll in Dungeons & Dragons, with the player reporting the total and which die rolled higher.⁵ Hope fuels player abilities — helping an ally, activating an Experience, or initiating a Tag Team Roll — while Fear, which only the players can generate through their rolls, lets the game master strengthen adversaries and complicate the story.⁵⁸¹⁴

Beyond Hope and Fear, players manage several resources over the course of play, including Stress, HP, Armor, gold, and equipment, with some classes tracking additional meta-currency.¹⁴ A character’s Evasion sets the Difficulty of rolls made against them.¹⁹ The designers advise game masters that Hope and Fear should each arrive roughly half the time, cautioning against “hoarding Fear,” and that a success with Fear should complicate a player’s action without undermining what they set out to do.⁸

Alongside the dice, Daggerheart uses a card system for character building.¹ The core set ships with 279 illustrated player cards drawn from Ancestry and Community cards, which describe a character’s lineage and culture, and Subclass and Domain cards, which grant abilities and spells.¹⁵⁹ Because domain abilities are held as a limited, swappable hand that grows as a character levels, the cards are close to a necessity in play, though all their information also appears in the rulebook.¹⁴ Character creation combines class, subclass, ancestry, community, and background; the System Reference Document lists nine classes — Bard, Druid, Guardian, Ranger, Rogue, Seraph, Sorcerer, Warrior, and Wizard.¹⁶¹⁹ Players are also invited to define narrative “Experiences” — freeform tags such as “Pirate” that grant a modifier, typically +2, when relevant — created in collaboration with the game master.⁴⁵ Worldbuilding is likewise collaborative, with the game master asking players questions and incorporating their answers, from naming landmarks on a map during a Session Zero to describing the appearance of an approaching enemy.¹⁵⁸¹⁴

Daggerheart favors “rulings over rules,” instructing groups to prioritize the fiction and adjust or ignore any rule by table consent.¹⁶ Its “Golden Rule” is to make the game one’s own.¹⁶ The full System Reference Document was released May 20, 2025, under the Darrington Press Community Gaming License, and includes the Witherwild Campaign Frame as public game content.¹³

Lineage and reception

Daggerheart wears its influences openly, naming the RPGs that shaped its mechanics in its opening pages.¹⁴ A review in EN World identified Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Fantasy Flight Games’s Genesys? system, Blades in the Dark?, and the Cypher System? among its antecedents, with worldbuilding elements echoing The Quiet Year and GM interruptions guided by the Cypher System.¹⁴ Blades in the Dark, designed by John Harper — himself an additional designer on Daggerheart — also underpinned the related Illuminated Worlds system through its Forged in the Dark ruleset.³¹ Character creation combining background, ancestry, class, subclass, and domain was compared to the newest edition of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition.¹⁴

The game was widely framed as Critical Role’s answer to the roughly 50-year-old Dungeons & Dragons, the Hasbro-owned game that first made the troupe famous.⁹¹¹ EN World characterized it as combining a “robust set of combat tools driven by high fantasy” with “a collaborative storytelling environment,” judging it too “chunky” to satisfy dedicated narrative-game enthusiasts but distinctive enough to stand apart from other games attempting to “out-D&D” Dungeons & Dragons.¹⁴ The reviewer credited Starke with distilling “a lot of great parts of other RPGs” into a game that would still feel fresh to its intended audience.¹⁴

Physical copies of the Daggerheart Core Set went on sale through Critical Role’s online shops and Darrington Press Guild stores, and reached general book retailers on June 3, 2025.¹ The core rulebook runs 366 pages, comparable in length to the main Dungeons & Dragons rulebook.⁹ Translated editions were announced in Brazilian Portuguese through Jambô Editora, French through Black Book Editions, German through Pegasus Spiele, Italian through Acheron Games, and Spanish through Devir.¹ Critical Role launched a dark-fantasy miniseries, “Age of Umbra” — set apart from Exandria, the high-fantasy world of its main campaigns — on May 29, 2025, showcasing the system on stream.⁸⁹ An expansion, Daggerheart: Hope & Fear, was scheduled for release on August 25.¹⁵