Critical Role’s New RPG ‘Daggerheart’ Launches Open Beta Playtest Today!
Critical Role‘s new RPG, Daggerheart launches its open beta playtest today. Now’s your chance to shape the future of the game!
As of today, the gates of Daggerheart, Critical Role‘s new fantasy RPG, are officially open. As Darrington Press, Critical Role‘s publishing imprint, begins work on the final stages of the game, they invite players to take it for a long test drive. You can download the rules, play some sessions, and most importantly, answer the surveys. Your feedback will help steer the game through the murky waters of the beta test.
So if you want your voice to be heard, now’s the time to see what all the fuss is about. At 3,000 feet, Daggerheart is “fantasy adventure” as defined by D&D. There are Bards, Druids, Rangers, Rogues, Sorcerers, Fighters, Warriors, and Wizards, with two new classes, the Seraph and Guardian mixed in to shake things up.
But as you get closer to the system, you start to see where the mechanics diverge from D&D’s, even if the overall themes and archetypes are pretty close to territory well explored by generations of wizards down by the coast.
Daggerheart Open Beta
Daggerheart is a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game of brave heroics and vibrant worlds that are built together with your gaming group. Create a shared story with your adventuring party, and shape your world through rich, long-term campaign play.
When it’s time for the game mechanics to control fate, players roll one HOPE die and one FEAR die (both 12-sided dice), which will ultimately impact the outcome for your characters. This duality between the forces of hope and fear on every hero drives the unique character-focused narratives in Daggerheart.
In addition to dice, Daggerheart’s card system makes it easy to get started and satisfying to grow your abilities by bringing your characters’ background and capabilities to your fingertips. Ancestry and Community cards describe where you come from and how your experience shapes your customs and values. Meanwhile, your Subclass and Domain cards grant your character plenty of tantalizing abilities to choose from as your character evolves. Craft your unique character through the cards you choose and the story you tell, and become the hero you want to be!
Campaign play is indeed the goal of Daggerheart. As you build your character, you’ll gain two Domains with different powers you assemble into a loadout of cards that give you different abilities you can bring on your adventure. These cards represent many things, from passive abilities to spells to damage. But you can only ever have five of them at a time.
Daggerheart is all about building your character. Your level-ups tie into specific advancements like you might find in a Forged-in-the-Dark game, where you select from a menu of things like “+1 to two unmarked traits” or “add an extra hit point slot” which lets you build out your character within the different choices afforded to your class.
Want to see it in action? The videos linked above showcase character creation and the game mechanics, but the best way to get a feel for it is to play it. With that in mind…
Download the Daggerheart Open Beta Playtest Today
Time to make a hundred different characters—all of them Ribbets.
