Vol 11: Backlots & Backstories
New GM tools, '90s neon, and ditching rather than pitching your backstory. We unpack travel, manage a Colossal fight, and bow to a Seraph/Druid built to beat the baddies. PLUS: a Pratchett-inspired campaign, advice on selling your stories, and a free map.
SPOTLIGHT
UPDATES
A Different World
Matt and Ashely Johnson were joined by five ‘90s TV stars for TGIT, a Daggerheart one-shot set on a Hollywood backlot that saw, among other things, Full House’s Jodie Sweetin using a Counting Crows CD to deflect enemy laser beams, and Johnson drop a deviously morbid joke about Princess Diana onto the table. Daggerheart has it all—even 90s irony and snark.
Show of Characters
In Daggerheart-adjacent news, the teaser trailer for C4 went upfeaturing a deep throated narration by Brennan Lee Mulligan. CR also released campaign character artwork illustrated by Loren Hontanilla. Handily, Todd Kenreck used it to piece together who’s playing what and confirmed that, among other things, Laura Bailey’s Rogue is—despite faerie wings—a “stone-cold killer,” and Liam O’Brien’s character appears romantically linked to someone at one of the other two tables. Hot goss!
iGM
The iOS and Mac-based campaign toolkit app Daggerforge soft-launched this week, offering an Obsidian-meets-DH brewing feature set to GMs who might prefer an iPad at their table. The app includes adventure management (notes, statblocks, etc), encounter tracking (HP, Stress, conditions), and a searchable compendium of adversaries, items, and environments. (I’ll note, having downloaded and used it, that the UI is quite polished for a v1.)
Life of the Party
The digital character sheet app Daggerapp now supports campaigns, giving players a bird’s eye view of party resources like HP, Stress, Hope, and armor. New this time around is a character editor, dynamic status effects, charge tracking, Ranger companion improvements, errata updates—even Combat Wheelchair weapons. More tools are on the way with the Discord as the best place to follow along.
Split Screen
Another YouTuber has split their channel to focus on Daggerheart, this time Ghost Light. Go subscribe.
Roll with Hope
Dice maker Ebonwood is running a dice giveaway on Reddit to promote their new Daggerheart 9-pc dice set, Deathmire. To enter, just comment on the post before October 1.
DISCUSSIONS
When No Backstory Is the Best Story
A non-trivial amount of Daggerheart advice—in the CRB and from GMs—is to give your characters a rich, interconnected backstory before you start playing. After all, the more you know about the characters, the more you can fashion adversaries or a BBEG that are thematically oppositional to the party’s core belief. But in a GM discussion about how one-shots often become unplanned gateways to a full campaign, u/neoPie made this observation that fans of Second City might appreciate:
“The less the characters are defined before the first session, [the more] you can get better improvised storytelling and connections between them. When everyone fully creates a character before, it’s always the danger of them feeling artificial and thrown together, like everyone is a hero from their own story and they just happen to be together.”
Naturally, “improvised” is the key word here, and it circles back to a central tension: GMs who love worldbuilding and detailed plans often do so not just because they love story, but because planning ahead actively reduces the amount of improv they might face during gameplay. Improv lays you bare with your players. You say dumb things, sound stupid—and show everyone you clearly don’t have a plan.
The benefit of those failures—indeed, the whole point of them—is to free your mind from the paralyzing effort to be “in control” and give it the chance to truly play. Free of expectations, you’re able to invent and draw intuitive connections among ideas rather than plotting them mechanically beforehand.
Letting go is exhilarating. Three billion people can’t be wrong.
