WELCOME TO DAGGERHEART! 

We are so excited to have you with us.

You can now officially join our Daggerheart Open Beta Playtest! You’ll find everything you need to set out on your own wondrous adventures. Print off the materials to run games with a group, build characters solo, or even gather your party virtually with the Daggerheart Nexus on Demiplane. However you play, it’s most important that each of you test the limits - have fun, tell an epic story, min/max to your heart's content, find gaps, and help shape the game by telling us all about it in an official survey. We can’t wait to see what you think! 

For the uninitiated, please read on before you set off and craft your tales. We’re happy to explain more about what you can expect.

What is Daggerheart?

Daggerheart is a collaborative tabletop roleplaying game set in a vibrant fantasy world. Create a shared story with your adventuring party, and shape your world through rich character progression and long-term campaign play.

Daggerheart’s core mechanic is based on Duality Dice – two 12-sided dice where one designates HOPE and the other FEAR. These Duality Dice are rolled whenever your Game Master determines that an outcome is uncertain and it’s up to the dice to control fate. This duality between the forces of hope and fear on every hero drives the unique character-focused narratives in Daggerheart.

What is included in the Open Beta Playtest?

As part of our open beta playtest you’ll receive the following:

• A special quickstart adventure - developed to get you started with minimum setup and character creation time, in case you’d like to bypass the core rulebook. This guide also includes five pre-generated characters and a five-act adventure: The Sablewood Messengers. It even includes standees for characters, environment elements, and adversaries to cut out and use if you’d like.
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• All of the character sheets, multiclass sheets, equipment sheets, and guide sheets
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• Ancestry, Community, Subclass, and Domain card sheets - which you can print out and cut if you’d like!
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• An action tracker card
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• Three fully interchangeable maps - meaning you can align any of the edges to extend the map in whichever direction your party chooses.
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• Surveys, the absolute best way to give us feedback on Daggerheart. Please play often and tell us what you think! We’d love your feedback after every playtest session that you have (if possible) and expect surveys to take around 15 minutes.

All of these materials can be accessed via PDF HERE.

What can I do with these Playtest Materials?

You are welcome to write about, stream, and share your experience during the Daggerheart Open Beta Playtest with your own friends, audiences, and communities. We encourage sharing your perspective far and wide! We only ask that you make it clear that your project is using the Daggerheart Open BetaPlaytest, as the game’s mechanics will continue to evolve and we don’t want confusion when the final game comes out. You can always refer to the full Darrington Press Community Gaming License for more information.

Where & How can I play?

You are welcome to write about, stream, and share your experience during the Daggerheart Open Beta Playtest with your own friends, audiences, and communities. We encourage sharing your perspective far and wide! We only ask that you make it clear that your project is using the Daggerheart Open BetaPlaytest, as the game’s mechanics will continue to evolve and we don’t want confusion when the final game comes out. You can always refer to the full Darrington Press Community Gaming License for more information.

We’d also love for you to share your adventures with us on socials! Please use the hashtag #Daggerheart for general chatter or #DaggerheartArt if you’d like to share your artwork with the community. You can also follow Darrington Press on Instagram and Twitter for the latest and greatest updates!

What is a playtest and why is it important?

Playtest simply means that the game is still in active development. So for you as players, you’ll be playing with unfinished materials and for us as developers, we’ll get to examine how the game plays (what works and what doesn’t) in the hands of actual players! The way we can most accurately track your feedback and take action to improve the game is through our surveys, so please fill them out as often as you can.

This also means that as the Open Beta Playtest goes on, we’ll be continuously updating materials. To make sure you’re playing with the most up-to-date information, be sure to keep an eye on our change log.

Need Additional Help?

We’ll be actively updating our FAQ page, so if you have any additional questions you can always find more information there or darringtonpress.com.

If you’re more of a visual learner, check out the Daggerheart 101 and Character Creation videos right now on the Critical Role YouTube channel to help get you started! 

At 10am Pacific, you can watch the Critical Role cast’s Session Zero video on YouTube ahead of their LIVE playtest one-shot! Tune in to the live one-shot TONIGHT at 7pm Pacific on Twitch and YouTube.

We can’t wait to see the kinds of characters you make and hear how your first playtest sessions go! Thank you so much for taking this journey with us and stay tuned right here on daggerheart.com for future playtest packet releases.

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