Darrington Press had a big hit with the launch of Daggerheart last year. The game has picked up traction quickly and has outpaced Darrington Press’s own initial expectations. It is a great game that I have run with my friends and family a few times and will be running a campaign at some point down the road.
Daggerheart’s first expansion book, Hope & Fear, launches today and brings with it a treasure trove of new goodies. I preordered Hope & Fear as soon as it was announced and it arrived at my doorstep a few weeks ago. I have read the book and am happy with what Darrington Press has accomplished with it.
(Full disclosure: I have read Hope & Fear but have not yet played in or run a Daggerheart game with the content in the book.)
The book itself is full of beautiful artwork from cover-to-cover in a brisk 196 pages. Daggerheart’s Core Book has some fantastic art and that quality continues with Hope & Fear. It strikes a good balance of vibrant, inviting tones while staying true to the darker themes present in this book. This is a fun book to leaf through casually but is just as engrossing when you want to get lost in it (which I do often).
We get four new classes in Hope & Fear. The Assassin makes its debut and brings a style of play that makes for a precision killer. If you want to lace your daggers with poison, this is the class for you! We also get the Brawler, which offers paths for a hard-hitting juggernaut or a diverse martial artist. As someone who played a Monk class in D&D for several years, I was excited to see the Brawler class. The martial artist subclass has some complexity that I suspect takes some practice but comes with a lot of reward.
Dipping into the darker side, Hope & Fear introduces the new Dread domain, the path of nightmares and fear. Dread makes the new Warlock and Witch classes possible with abilities and spells that spawn horrific creatures, transferring trauma on to adversaries, and cause adversaries to flee in terror. Warlocks have a pact with a patron to give them powers while Witches rely on their attunement with nature or other worldly forces.
Each of these classes could have their own post and maybe I will do that as I explore them more fully in play. Stay tuned. I think these classes are all solid additions to the game. There’s no weak link here.
We get new ancestries including the angelic Aetheris, Elemental kin including Earthkin, Emberkin, Skykin, and Tidekin, and the fantasy staple Gnome. These are all good additions that I think can appeal to a wide group of players and can slot in to many locales in your campaign. Rounding out the character backgrounds are new communities including Duneborne, Freeborne, Frostborne, Hearthborne, Reborne, and Warborne. Much like the ancestries, this is a good selection of new communities that give players more options in their character building toolbox.
Sticking with the darker horror themes of Hope & Fear, Daggerheart now has Transformations. Transformations allow characters to take on afflictions like vampirism and lycanthropy, coming back from the dead as a ghost or reanimated, and opportunities to be a demigod or shapeshifter. Transformations bring new abilities to characters but also have some drawbacks. I like Darrington Press’s work on this balance. A character gets some powerful abilities in their transformation but it never lets them forget they are cursed.
Plenty of new loot! Weapons, armor, magical items, there’s more of everything to add to what was provided in the core book. If you always dreamed of using an Arcane Rifle while wearing a Spidersilk Tunic, Hope & Fear has you armed and covered.
I like how Daggerheart’s core book contains everything you need to run games for years but if there was one part of the book I wanted more of it was the adversaries. We didn’t get a monster manual sized update but Hope & Fear does come with over 130 new adversaries, both familiar and new. There is plenty to work with here from abominations, fey creatures, beasts, demons, undead, and more. We have a Beholder now (see Gobstalker)! I have found several adversaries that sparked my imagination as well as fill in some gaps where I felt the core book was lacking. I’m going to give bonus points to Darrington Press for giving us a certain adversary that has nasty, big, pointy teeth. I’ll let you discover that one on your own.
Environments is a Daggerheart feature that I overlooked for a while but recently came to love. An environment takes a scene and turns it into challenge (I hesitate to compare them to adversaries but there are similarities). This is a powerful tool for Game Masters and Hope & Fear brings nearly 30 new Environments to your toolkit. There are Environments for traversing dangerous landscapes like mines and deserts, exploring a classic witch hut, investigating ruins, and handling social situations like a masquerade ball or casino. One that caught my eye was “Beach Day” and is a downtime activity for the players to give their characters a little R&R. This was a good reminder that Environments need not only be dangerous situations.
Finally, Hope & Fear comes with four new campaign frames. I love the concept of campaign frames because they provide the foundation of a world to explore and a premise to start from but leaves the finer details in the hands of the GM and players to make the campaign their own. These are not a true replacement for campaign setting books but is an appropriate system to include in a collaborative fiction game like Daggerheart.
The first one is Castle High, which is a modern setting that sets the heroes as students at a school of magic that is floating in the sky. It is lighter in tone than other campaign frames and should appeal to a younger crowd though I think anyone could find something to like in Castle High.
Reign of the Weredragon takes heroes on a quest to defeat a sorceress-turned-weredragon and save the realm. This campaign frame has a dark fairy tale tone reminiscent of some Disney films of yore and is going to attract a lot of people. Weredragon looks like a straightforward adventure to run and is jammed full of easy to follow game mechanics and tables for creating villains. I want to run this, but...
Dark Heart of Andaluria is a campaign frame that was written for me. It is a gothic horror setting inspired by Castlevania, The Witcher, World of Darkness, Vampire Hunter D, and plenty more. Monsters roam the night in an otherwise idyllic land but when the nights grow unnaturally long monster hunters need to step in. This is a perfect campaign frame to play with the new Transformation system. Imagine the horror of fighting a vampire only to become one in the aftermath! Andaluria also includes guidance for GMs to build monster hunt investigations. I already have monster hunts and storylines planned for my players and cannot wait to run this for them.
The final campaign frame is Journey to Horizon, a campaign epic in size taking players across a dangerous, broken world to resurrect a goddess. Horizon introduces hexcrawling systems to Daggerheart. The map is divided into a grid of hexes and the players encounter something new as they travel from one hex to the next. I love the concept of this adventure as a big world full of danger and discovery though I think players and GM should prepare to give this one time to breathe at the table.
Daggerheart Hope & Fear packs a lot of goodies into its pages and I can wholeheartedly recommend it to players and GMs alike. The new character options are welcome, adversaries and encounters are plentiful and creative, and each new campaign frame can appeal to any game group. I keep picking the book up and finding something new to appreciate each time. It is more than I hoped for from Darrington Press’s first expansion to Daggerheart.
Daggerheart: Hope & Fear is available now.
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