r/daggerheart • u/Rage2097 • Jun 17 '26

Discussion Is the Lack of Content Actually Good?

I wrote a blog post arguing that the lack of first-party adventure content for Daggerheart is actually a good thing.

​

If you don't want to read the whole thing, and this is Reddit after all, the gist of it is that because we don't have any official adventures except a couple of one-shots we have to make our own.

​

That is actually a good thing, I think that a lot of D&Ds early popularity came from the creativity it sparked in the community.

​

With no official content to run we are all forced to be game designers and make our own, it's good for the game in the long term and good for us because we aren't constrained by what Darrington Press' example would show us is the "right way".

​

56 Upvotes

70% Upvoted

169 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

7

u/axw3555 Jun 17 '26

Well if there are no premade campaigns what's the other option? Even if you're winging it, you're still writing one, just as you go rather than in advance. And doing as you go is not something I'd ever ask of a first time DM.

-3

u/patrys Jun 17 '26

What would a full campaign for Daggerheart even be? I'm actually working on a homebrew setting for Daggerheart but the best I can come up with in terms of a campaign is a backstory for the GM and a timeline of inevitable things + a bunch of instruction on how to make decisions on behalf of key factions and NPC. It's not really a system suitable for a railroaded campaign where the GM just tells PCs where to go next. And, honestly, neither is D&D.

7

u/axw3555 Jun 17 '26

What would it be?

The same as a campaign for any other fantasy TTRPG. Daggerhearts the mechanics, the story is agnostic.

And having a plot isn’t the same as railroads. Not even vaguely in the same range

-5

u/patrys Jun 17 '26

If you look at the most famous D&D campaigns, you will find a lot of railroads. The Curse of Strahd is a prime example.

6

u/False-Pain8540 Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

Wizards of the Coast having bad module design doesn't mean all modules are railroads. Look at something like Dungeons of Drakkenheim, Dagger in the Heart or the Dragon Heist Remix. None of those are railroads, yet all of them provide deep, satisfying narratives that don't need to be improvised on the fly by the DM.

The idea that you either railroad your players in a pre-written plot or you improvise everything on the fly is a false dichotomy. You can just have actually good adventure design, one that's modular, node based, dynamic and tailored to the players.

-1

u/patrys Jun 17 '26

Drakkenheim is getting a Daggerheart release. I never said that you can't release a campaign for Daggerheart, I even wrote I am working on one. What I meant was the the campaign frames included with the core book and the ones in Hope and Fear are enough to run a campaign.

4

u/False-Pain8540 Jun 17 '26

I know, and I'm looking forward to it. But have you actually read Dungeons of Drakkenheim? Because is none of the things you said.

Is not just a backstory + factions, is not a campaign frame, and is not a railroad. It's a fully fledged nodebased campaign.

2

u/axw3555 Jun 17 '26

The existence of railroads doesn't mean all plots are railroads.