Daggerheart Environments Seek To Supply GMs With Easy To Insert Challenges And Locations (Exclusive)

Daggerheart is now less than a month from it's release on the 20th of May. Published by Darrington Press, the Tabletop Gaming arm of Critical Role - known for games such as Queen By Midnight, Uk'otoa, and the Horror TTRPG Candela Obscura - Daggerheart seeks to be a vessel for long-form TTRPG campaigns with an emphasis on roleplay among fast-paced gameplay.

TechRaptor was given an exclusive sneak peek at four of the Environments that will be available in the full rulebook when it releases physically and digitally at the end of the month. We also had a chance to talk about Environments (among other things that will be saved for a later date) with Lead Designers Spenser Starke and Rowan Hall.

Environments Help A GM Consider The World

Environments are locations that a GM can put in play that will not only affect the story by posing potential challenges for the players to overcome, but also offer unique mechanical obstacles to engage in.

The four Environments that TechRaptor can exclusively reveal are the Cliffside Ascent, Local Tavern, Outpost Town, and Raging River. Each is a Tier 1 event, which means it's intended for a party of level 2-4. Set for a lower level of play we're able to see how each of these are able to impact the party, and how these can be scaled up.

Each Environment is comprises of the following features:

• Name: The name of the Environment
• Tier and Style of Environment: Here we see both Traversal and Social giving you fast information for where you might want to include it
• Impulses: Describing the way that you could provoke your players with the Environment to help them more readily engage
• Difficulty: This indicates the average difficulty check that the area would have, the GM can then further scale this up or down based on the relative safety or danger of the character's actions
• Potential Adversaries: A list of creatures or monsters that a party might find while exploring that area
• Features: Key gameplay elements tied to the Environment, these can be related to social interactions, rules for how to overcome an obstacle, but also can be related to ways things like combat may change

"We like Environments because they allow you to create a stat block, but for a place" - Spenser Starke

Getting to talk with Starke and Hall they explained they wanted to create a way that you could have stats about a location, that were available for you next to Adversaries. In Daggerheart, as play moves back to the GM it's important that you're able to understand all of the moves you can make.

How Environments Enhance Daggerheart Combat

Hall gave an example of how an Environment could be used "say you're taking your players to a graveyard, you know there's a big bad evil Necromancer raising a bunch of zombies, you've got maybe a horde statted up, but you also want to have hands reach up from graves and grab your players and restrain them. It could be a lot of work to stat up a bunch of zombies, but if you have an Environment you can make an Environment Action where on a certain trigger hands restrain your players"

In Daggerheart, the combat isn't linear in that every character and adversary has a turn in order before it all resets. There's a player's turn and a GM's turn. For the players, this promotes playing collaboratively to strike together, for the GM, that means when it's your turn, any of the Adversaries at your command can go at any time. So many abilities at any point in time can be difficult to track, letting an Environment clearly be part of your list of actions is simply helping the GM have less to manage.

"Being able to pair down and streamline [combat], we're always looking for ways to give GMs all of the support that they need and also open enough doors that they might expand with their own narrative, their own choices, and have flexibility" - Rowan Hall

Starke did highlight that Environments shouldn't be used everywhere "but if there's a place where you're like 'I can see how this environment itself really impacts the narrative, let me write down what this place is really about."

An Environment Doesn't Have To Be A Place

While the four that TechRaptor has been able to reveal were specifically places, Starke expanded that there were also Environments that it may not be "a particular place, it isn't like, an outpost but it is an Ambush. That can be placed anywhere, but it can give you the framing of what mechanically an Ambush might look like in Daggerheart for a scene you're interested in running."

When I asked what kinds of GM tools would be available for crafting their own Environments Hall paused for a moment before saying "One of my favorite parts of the book is a section where we go through how we build different adversary types and why we make the choices we do."

Describing it as 'popping open the hood' Hall continued to explain "We hope it's a conversation with the designers, the goal there was to make it as approachable as possible with as many examples as possible to people can refer to it almost like a recipe book. We have all different ways that people can approach that."

It's these kinds of behind the scenes looks and conversational understandings about why things are designed the way that they are that Starke and Hall are hoping it will make GMs crafting their own Environments possible.