Gather 'round, everyone! I'm 100 percent writing this review because the spirit of God has moved me, and not because I will win the bragging rights of finishing Bingo in Hard Mode for the third year in a row, or so help me. (Who am I bragging to, you ask? What a foolish question, don't worry about it.) I shall strive to make this at least vaguely entertaining, though. Onwards, onto the breach!

For the uninitiated, what is Daggerheart? Daggerheart is a TTRPG produced by the team behind the extremely popular D&D actual play show Critical Role, mostly in response to proposed changes in to D&D's copyright policy. Critical Role then went on to demonstrate full faith in their product by switching over to Daggerheart in their latest seas- oh wait. No. No they did not do that. A move that did not fill me with confidence over the quality of Daggerheart, but I kept an open mind (and I was right to, because spoilers: Daggerheart is actually pretty good).

For the very uninitiated, what is a TTRPG? It's a game where you sit around a table with your friends and you all make up a story together, using dice (or cards, or jenga, or, idk, small animal bones if you want to justify the satanic panic) to determine the outcome of events. Kind of like the playing pretend we did as kids, but with rules and without pelting each other with tennis balls (that one would be Larping). One of you gets designed as unpaid professional cat wrangler (also known as a Game Master or GM) who has to keep everyone on task and also play as the antagonists. The real aim of the game is to make the GM cry as much as you can.

Now that we're all caught up, let's get into the review! I'm the resident cat wrangler in my group of friends, so I will be looking at this from a GM perspective. Daggerheart also very much frames itself as a D&D alternative (though, I was pleasantly surprised to find, it is not a D&D clone), so I will be comparing it to D&D quite a bit.

Part 1: Campaign Frames

Unlike D&D, which does have different worlds but keeps the rules and mechanics relatively constant across the board, Daggerheart is built in to allow a lot of flexibility and unique mechanics for different worlds. The Core Rulebook comes with 6 "Campaign Frames", essentially short world-building documents that contain information on the history, unique magic system and game mechanics of different worlds in which you can set your Daggerheart game.

I liked these. They were very creative as well as very different from each other, ranging from cozy fantasy to grimdark passing through sci-fi and weird west, so there's definitely something in there for everyone.

They also purposefully leave some aspects of the worldbuilding blank for the players to fill in, advising groups to meet in advance of the actual game to complete the world-building, design maps etc. I was skeptical about this, but it turned out to be a hit with my group. My players got really into the world-building and having participated in it also led them to be extremely invested in the world from the minute go once we actually started playing, to the point that I plan to incorporate this into my future D&D games.

Part 2: Character Creation

Character creation in Daggerheart works largely the same as character creation in D&D: players pick out a class (wizard, druid...), a race (elf, dwarf...) and a broad background (noble, scholar...), and then make more detailed choices on backstory and specific abilities within their class.

The classes in Daggerheart were very similar to D&D classes (with 6 of the 9 classes even having the same name as D&D classes), but offered a lot less choice and flexibility about abilities once a class is chosen. Moreover, many of the abilities are shared between classes. This was a bit of a let-down, and I think will make it difficult to make different characters of the same class feel distinct from each other in terms of abilities.

The races options, here called Ancestries, were instead very good. There were many unique and creative Ancestries, such as the Fungrils, very long-lived sentient mushroom people who can communicate with each other over long distances, and the standard fantasy races were also given some fun spins. For instance dwarves have "skin and nails [containing] a high amount of keratin, making them naturally resilient", which also allows them to embed gems into their skin for decoration.

Part 3: hazards and monsters

The monsters were easy to use, and had cool aesthetics and abilities that made them feel very distinct to one another. The fights were very easy for me to run, did require much prep-work, and felt very cinematic. However, there were relatively few of them, and GMs running longer games might need to make up their own enemies before long to keep things fresh.

One thing I really appreciated was the inclusion of "Environments", such as a raging river or a mountain pass, with clear rules and mechanics for what hazards and opportunities they present. I felt it really cut down on my prep-time and it helped make the exploration of the world like a fundamental part of the gameplay, rather than something incidental with no mechanical implications.

Conclusions

Do I recommend Daggerheart to TTRPG fans? Definitely! Do I recommend it to beginners/over D&D? Maybe! It's easier to learn than D&D, but it requires you to jump in feet-first when it comes to creativity (incl. participating in the world-building) in a way D&D doesn't, and in my experience beginner players are a little more shy. It also only comes with a very short introductory adventure that is written out for you. Beyond that, it's completely up to the GM to come up with a story and obstacles for the players, and not everyone wants to do that (or has the time/energy to do that). The short introductory adventure is free to play on the Daggerheart website, which is nice, but it eschews the very fun and diverse worlds of the Core Rulebook for a very vanilla fantasy one, which I think is a bad move and makes it feel like more of a D&D clone that it actually is.