Just around one year ago, Critical Role (through their Darrington Press publishing company) announced that they were working on their own tabletop roleplaying game. Since Critical Role first started streaming their adventures they have been linked firmly with Dungeons and Dragons so, naturally, many were surprised to see them working on a competitor system. Surprised or not, everyone will be able to get hands-on with Daggerheart come March 12th.
Daggerheart is designed to be a game of heroics within a vibrant world that is built together with your gaming group. The system has been designed to make creating a shared story with an adventuring party, especially in a long-term campaign, easier than ever. When it’s time for the game mechanics to control fate, players roll one HOPE die and one FEAR die (both 12-sided dice), which will decide the outcome for your characters. This duality between the forces of hope and fear on every character is what drives the unique character-focused narratives in Daggerheart.
Daggerheart also uses a card system to make it easy to get started and to grow your abilities by bringing your characters’ backgrounds and capabilities to your fingertips. The cards mean that you won’t be rifling through countless rulebooks to create and control your character; a huge win. Ancestry and Community cards describe where you come from and how your experience shapes your customs and values. Meanwhile, your Subclass and Domain cards explain your character’s abilities.
If that sounds at all interesting to you, and it certainly does to me, Daggerheart will be having an Open Beta Playtest launching globally on Tuesday 12th March! Anyone (over the age of 18 they say) can help make Daggerheart as wonderful as possible by, and this is a direct quote from Darrington Press, “helping us break the game”. They admit that the game is not finished or polished yet, which is why it’s critical (pun intended) to gather lots of actual players’ feedback ahead of Daggerheart’s public release in 2025.
When the Daggerheart Open Beta launches, you’ll be able to find everything you need to know about the playtest on the Daggerheart site. There will be a couple of different ways to play during the Open Beta too. On the Daggerheart website, you’ll find PDF materials for you to use, which can be printed in case you prefer tangible materials. You’ll also be able to find resources on Demiplane (character creator and Nexus) and DriveThruRPG (playtest material PDFs).
After playtesting, players can help the development of Daggerheart by completing surveys on the Daggerheart website, allowing the development team to efficiently collate the info and turn it into something useful. Darrington Press is also encouraging players to review, stream, and share content from the open beta playtest as long as they adhere to the Darrington Press Community Gaming License and link back to daggerheart.com. Pretty reasonable for such a huge Open Beta.
Throughout the Beta launch day on March 12th, the Daggerheart developers will be sharing a few videos to help players create their own character and better understand the basics of playing Daggerheart. You’ll be able to find them on the Critical Role YouTube channel.
As you might have expected, to celebrate the launch of the open beta playtest, the cast of Critical Role will livestream a special Daggerheart one-shot on Tuesday 12th March at 7pm Pacific on their Twitch and YouTube channels. VOD will be available the following day on YouTube and the audio will be available through your favorite podcasting services the following day as well.
This openness and enthusiasm paints a very positive picture of the Daggerheart system going forward
This openness and enthusiasm paints a very positive picture of the Daggerheart system going forward. I am very excited to see whether the tabletop roleplaying community will feel the same come March 12th and the Open Beta launch.
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