Discussing Daggerheart Game Design With Spenser Starke And Rowan Hall

Forbes

14-05-2025

The wait for Critical Role's summer blockbuster release is nearly over. Daggerheart, from Darrington Press, is the company's big foray into fantasy role-playing with a home grown system. Dungeons and Dragons may have made them famous but they are looking to change things up this year with their next series using Daggerheart instead.
In advance of the game's wide release, Darrington Press sent an exclusive page spread reveal. They also arranged for an interview with the designers of the game. I asked them how it felt for the game to finally be out and some tips for Critters looking to take their friends on an adventure using the game.
'It feels unreal,' said Spenser Starke, lead designer of Daggerheart. 'I think one of the great parts about the open beta was getting to see people talk about the same things we were excited to see people spin on the same ideas that we were turning our wheels on. So the final is going to be that times 100. I think for me, every time people bring characters to the table or campaigns or sessions or whatever that have even a little bit of the DNA that we play in our own home games. It feels like an extension of how we're playing with our friends that we just haven't met yet.'
'Once when you put out a TTRPG,' said Rowan Hall, co-designer of Daggerheart, 'every person who picks it up is going to interpret it differently. Every table is going to make tweaks that are just perfect for them. I feel very glad that it's going to continue to ebb and flow and breathe as we keep going.'
The chapter on running an adventure dives into advice that the designers felt they needed to give potential GMs. The first bit looks at GM Principles whih are basic concpets that GMs should focus on. If they get stuck and don't know what to do, the idea is to come back to these principles to find a way forward with the story.
'The one that I try and embody the most when I'm running games at my own table is 'ask questions and incorporate the answers,'' said Starke. "One of my favorite things is turning to the players and backstory, asking them stuff about a piece of the world that their character would know better than anybody else. These are the guards that are chasing you from your hometown that you escaped from. What does their armor look like? How do you know it's them? What sigil is on their shoulder that tells you they're from that town? Turning those questions back to the players and allowing them to be involved in the fiction is something that is really near and dear to my GMing style."
'I think when people's eyes light up when they have the opportunity to explain something,' said Hall. 'when they realize that they have ownership over the fiction, that is the secret sauce.'
Many of the priciples reflect the idea that the GM, while central to the experience, doesn't have to create everything ahead of time. It's okay to ask players to definte parts of the story in play. Sometimes choices made in the moment are more satisfying than ones written as backstory.
While GM Principles offer a solid foundation, the book also offers advice on how to run the game. These are techniques the designers use when they run not just Daggerheart but any role playing game.
'I'll take 'cut to the action', said Hall. 'I particularly like this practice because it keeps everything moving in a nice clip. It makes everything feel really cinematic. I think that I have at different times in my life, whether I'm working on writing books or stories or scripts, felt that I had to compensate for every moment, even the moments of downtime, even the dinners and the lunches. But I found the longer I've played, the more that I eagerly cut into the action. I think is such a beautiful way to uphold the adventurous tone of the game to truly drive home the characters feeling like protagonists even on a meta level. That's one thing that I live and die by personally. Keep sessions snappy. I love a quick session, especially as an adult person that has to organize schedules with other adult people."
'Mine would be 'reframe rather than reject',' said Starke. 'When somebody tries to do something, especially a player who is coming to RPGs new, a lot of times they come in and want to do a really cool thing that's not in the rules. They're like, 'I want to try XYZ' And that isn't an ability that they have or isn't a rule that they can use because their character doesn't have the feature or whatever. And so I think that as a GM slowing down and instead of just saying, 'No, you can't do that,' instead saying, 'it sounds like you want to do this.''
Daggerheart deals in themes of Hope and Fear. Players gain Hope points to activate special abilities and tilt the odds in their favor. GMs use Fear points to make their bad guys stronger and create plot twists for the heroes to overcome.
'One of the ones that I particularly like for pitfalls to avoid is hoarding Fear,' said Hall. "Guiding people not to do that because I think that having Fear or a resource similar to Fear might be something that some GMs have for the first time. It goes hand-in-hand with Hope. It's guidance that I find that we give both the GMs and the players which is Hope and Fear are resources that should, according to the statistics, be coming in your way about half the time."
'One of the pitfalls that I look to avoid in any heroic fantasy game is undermining the heroes,' said Starke. 'which means that when you get a success with Fear or what generally in the storytelling space tends to be called a 'mixed success', it is a success and then there's a consequence but the consequence doesn't undermine what the player character was trying to do. So, if you're sneaking and you roll a success with Fear, you do sneak, you do that, that succeeds, but the room that you sneak into might have more people in it or you might take a stress because you almost get caught, right?"
Daggerheart releases on Tuesday, May 20th, 2025. Fans who wish to see the new game in action can check out Age of Umbra, a new miniseries from Critical Role starting May 29th, 2025.