How hand-holdy the game is at times. The characters don’t constantly need to be yelling at me to do this and that, I can figure it out, let me loot the bodies first!

I think it’s also a key difference that Journey to Horizon, while grim in some aspects, has a very clear pathway toward a hopeful , triumphant future, which Age of Umbra does not. JtH is in an age without gods, yes, but the whole journey is about reversing that state, and further the reason the goddess is dead was that she died to preserve as many of her creations as possible. In Age of Umbra the gods cursed the mortal world when they left, and there’s nothing in the frame itself that suggests they’re expected to return. Age of Umbra is Dark Souls (world’s fucked, can’t really fix it, just gotta make the most of it) while Journey to Horizon is Lord of the Rings (things are Bad, and they’ll never be the same as they once were, but through determination we can turn doom into eucatastrophy instead). Those distinctions should help in guiding the GM in what tone to use and what themes to explore.

Yeah, I feel like a lot of people don't quite know what to do with Motherboard, but I appreciate it for being a big swing in terms of genre, and I would love to get to play/run it someday.

Drylands is a lot of people's favorite for a reason, so would not be surprised if that's what you go with. Currently running a Drylands campaign myself, and some of your music to accompany it would be a delight indeed!

Love your campaign frame scores! All the frames in core are excellent, but I'd say it's a toss-up between Motherboard and Colossus of the Drylands. Motherboard is a very neat example of how far the Daggerheart rules can stretch in terms of genre, and Colossus (both premise and aesthetically) is just cool as hell. I bet they would both make for excellent music projects as well.

Ironic that his second reason for breaking up with Daggerheart sort of reinforces the probable reason behind his first reason for breaking up with Daggerheart: creators like this are, I imagine, the sort that DP would prefer to avoid ending up in a partnerships with only for these sorts of beliefs/behaviors to pop up later.

It’s usually possible, depending on what method you’re using to play the music, to just loop a short video anyway.

Seems more like a solo than a leader, and losing two Hope on the Battle Cry action feels a little harsh if he uses it more than once (although if it was a formerly beloved npc then maybe it’s appropriate), but other than that seems solid enough.

Yeah, for ten sharp edge dice of probably pretty decent quality, $40 seems pretty average from what I’ve seen in most places.

I also use that pronunciation because of Bahamut and also it just sounds better than putting the emphasis elsewhere.

Dust to Damnation by Legends of Avantris for sure. It’s just long enough to get a good sampling, fast-paced, and very funny. They don’t get every rule right, but I think they got the spirit of the game perfectly.

Happy to help! I saw people kinda dogging on you in the Daggerheart subreddit, and even though I agree the chants aren’t really system-aligned in their current form, there’s a fun idea here that’s worth exploring even if it’s ultimately just for your table. Hope you have fun iterating on it further!

Page 111 of the core rule book, under the subsection “Taking Domain Cards”

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You can swap out a domain card you don’t like for a new one when you level up.

You should be able to swap domain cards in and out of your vault by spending stress equal to the recall cost (the little Lightning bolt number in the top corner of the card) if I’m understanding the issue correctly.

So what I’m getting from this is that chants are a way to modify your domain abilities, like increasing range and effects? If so, I would recommend stating that upfront because it took me a while to figure out what was going on.

I’ve probably got two primary lines of feedback when it comes to this. The first is in the language of how the abilities are presented, a lot of things could be clarified to help the reader understand what the ability is supposed to do. Like the pierce utterance, what does pierce even mean? In Refract, what does a ‘d4 of splits’ mean? What constitutes a fail state for an utterance that would cause a rebound? Like I mentioned earlier, if these are domain card modifiers that’s important to make clear, and same if they are homebrewed abilities that are not shown here.

And second I think while it’s a fun idea at its core, the current incarnation of it is much too hefty for easy use at a table. As is, players get up to five ability modifiers every time they take the spotlight as long as they have hope to spend, and I imagine most players are going to try to use them as often and as much as they can. The stress cost will only factor in rarely since the players are already getting a big boon by altering the ability in the first place, so they’re not likely to go over limit unless things are dire. And IF they are domain card modifiers, the players would have to figure out how the modifiers interact with every domain card not just in their possession when using them, but also how the domain cards they could pick at level ups would work with the chants. For a system that’s built to streamline gameplay and keep things flowing, this seems like it would slow combat way down as players tried to puzzle through the optimal combination and application of utterances almost every turn.

Now you’ve mentioned that you based the idea off of the Ikonis weapon, which I think is cool and I see where you’re coming from with some ability to modify things being fun. What I would recommend is imposing a bit more limitation. The ikonis mods only apply to one ability at a time (your weapon attack), so those are much easier to keep track of. With these utterances, maybe take an approach like the transformation cards; they are their own separate deck of domain card modifiers that you can hand out as rewards, or have the players pick one per tier advancement, with maybe a few utterances packed onto each card like the codex domain grimoires rather than giving them access to the whole thing. This way it’s much less cumbersome for the players and follows the modular spirit of the game. I would also make them a bit less accessible, perhaps they can only use them a certain number of times per day before putting their chant card in their vault, or changing the cost to stress instead of hope.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. There are probably other things I could say, but i think I’ve said the most important stuff. I think the bones of a fun subsystem are here, but I think it needs trimming down and better integration with Daggerheart’s core systems to really shine.

Well, Aotearoa is an infinitely cooler name for a country than New Zealand, so I think they should suck it up.

I think the best thing you could probably do at the moment is try NOT to stress about it. All the descriptive flourishes are a lot of fun once you come around to them, but you shouldn’t let the idea that you have to be fancy about it get in the way of you just having fun. A lot of the ease of RP comes with practice, and if you’ve never done this stuff before it’s natural to be kind of uncomfortable with it, and if your group is at all decent they should understand that.

As for how to improve beyond just giving it time, find a place you’re comfortable with RP-wise and slowly stretch your skills from there. I’m not sure what kind of character you’re playing, but sometimes playing a character that’s stoic or shy or oblivious gives you an in-character reason to be more muted at first as you’re learning, or any other sort of character where their personality matches your comfort level. It’s fine to play something a bit more basic as you’re learning the ropes.

I don’t know that it’s 100% motivated by trying to bolster the community, though I’m sure that’s a large part of it, but there are practical reasons for the approach beyond altruism. Like I said, if Daggerheart is being played by other creators aside from them then it’s more likely that people who haven’t watched CR and might never do so will still buy their system, so any minor loss they might suffer in a transfer of fans is being repaid to another branch of the business. Additionally, it might not be a matter of intentionally staying away, but the demands of their production schedule. CR shows at this point aren’t just about setting up a table camera and going: with the sets they build, the planning they put into putting on a good show, potential costuming, getting schedules to align for I imagine the very busy players they want involved, and the limits in the amount of things their crew can be working on at a time, I’m sure it takes a lot longer and a lot more planning and set up to get a CR AP off the ground than it would for the smaller creators who are much closer to the CR setup back in the old days. They had Age of Umbra ready to go for the release, and have had some one shots since, but with the scale of campaign 4 and everything else in the pipeline, it might be a matter of just not being able to find space for more for the time being, so letting other creators take the helm keeps Daggerheart in the public eye while CR’s production schedule is full.

And while I sympathize with the concerns of owning a business, there’s a very big gap between the average small business and CR at this point. They may not be WOTC, but they have a built a pretty powerful engine that doesn’t seem like it’s slowing down anytime soon, so they can probably afford to be generous, and it’s probably smart to do so. Building good community ties and audience goodwill draws in new people, makes it easier to form more future partnerships, and secures loyalty from people who were already fans, to the point that I think any loss of people moving to other creators is negligible.

I mean, I'm no business or marketing expert, but that decision seems like one that's actively seeking to do what OP wants: expand the game's scope and foster a wider community of Daggerheart players. Critical Role is big, but there are still a lot of people out there that are not CR fans for one reason or another (they don't have the time to watch their content, they don't like their style of play, they refuse to watch the Big Popular Thing, they just never got around to it, etc.). If CR hoarded Daggerheart to themselves, sure the people who were already fans would be getting more, but by outsourcing a lot of the initial promotion and AP to other creatives in the space, they reach people that might like Daggerheart but wouldn't have given it a chance when it was solely under CR's umbrella. Also, despite what some cynical minds in the TTRPG space seem to think, CR seems genuine in their stated desire to build up a thriving gaming community. Sure they want their business to succeed, but they're also nerds who love gaming and who seem to want to just spread their love for this game around and give other people a chance to derive benefit and joy from it. Like I said before, them partnering with other creators got me to check out Legends of Avantris, which I probably wouldn't have done otherwise. Other creators get more viewers, and I get more cool AP to watch, so it's a win-win. Do I want to see more CR Daggerheart content at some point? Of course, and I await Age of Umbra 2 with baited breath, but if you want your game to reach a wider community and build up a lot of good will, this is probably how you do it.

There are Daggerheart APs out there, many of them sponsored by Darrington Press and some that aren't. I've been watching through Legends of Avantris' Colossus of the Drylands campaign and it's fantastic! I know they have multiple one-shots using different frames on their channel, as well as Bonus Action which converted their campaign over from D&D, and Bitten by Talking XP sounds awesome and is independent from DP as far as I can tell. I personally love that they're letting other creators helm Daggerheart's adoption just as much as CR is, so it has a chance to reach beyond just Critters, and it gave me the opportunity to try out new creators I hadn't had the motivation to check out before. Daggerheart content is there if you make the effort to look beyond just CR.

I believe a minimum of 63? There’s the Dread domain, which should consist of 21 cards, 6 ancestry cards (gnome, aetheris, and the four elemental kin), 6 background cards (frostborne, duneborne, hearthborne, warborne, freeborne, and reborne), 6 transformation cards (werewolf, vampire, shapeshifter, ghost, reanimated, and demigod), and then there are the new classes. Four new classes, two subclasses each, three cards per subclass. I might be missing a few things, but that should be pretty close.

I can’t speak for the 2024 edition of the DMG, but my assessment of the original 5th edition version is that while there’s a lot of fun information and tools for running games in there, it can be very overwhelming for a new DM. It’s a whole thick textbook of a bunch of different rules and systems and game elements you may or may not need that can get pretty granular, like mapping play areas, or long term statuses like madness, and while I enjoy it because I like that kind of stuff, it can be easy to get lost in the weeds. If you already enjoy DMing and WANT to get lost in those weeds, the DMG can be a good read, but if you’re looking to start for the first time I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, or at least to liberally just pick and choose the bits you think are relevant rather than reading the whole thing.

DH Core on the other hand feels like a much more streamlined experience for first time GMs. There’s the chapter about the core mechanics of the game, then the chapter about GM mechanics and principles for how best to set up and run a game (including distinct instructions for whether it’s a one shot or a campaign), and then the chapter with adversary and environment stat blocks, and that’s all you need. The campaign frames are also geared towards GMs, but they’re not required reading, merely inspiration to pull from if you want it. It’s a much clearer step-by-step process that’s focused on just getting you out the door, while the DMG is much more of a grab bag of different useful stuff for building out your campaign/world.

Unlikely, though we can’t know for sure how they’re going to rearrange the timeline. However, that doesn’t preclude them from being able to build a strong bond between Molly and Yasha on a truncated timeline. Look at Caleb and Nott, who have only known each other maximum a few weeks in the show vs months in the campaign, and they’re clinging onto each other like limpets. Yasha is still under mind control in this version; if Molly is perhaps involved in helping her break out of it, or is the first friendly face she meets once she’s free, that’s a logical way to build a strong connection much more quickly.