Environments and Session Clocks for the WIN! Posting my in-person Daggerheart games in three different threads here… Please post accordingly so I know which game you’re commenting on. 🙏 One thing I’ve noticed is that emergent/proactive play is pretty streamlined in the Daggerheart system during world-building and character creation. I’m also taking some of my lessons learned from previous campaigns since reading the PARP guide and gauging ahead of time how proactive and goal-oriented the players want the campaign to be. That means these three different campaigns may have varying levels of proactive versus reactive play. Stay tuned!

The frontier fort town of Ashgate is home to 400 souls, each trying to make a life at the eastern end of Woldarm’s Passage in a strange and unfamiliar land of strange beasts, volcanic lakes, and mud pots. Agents of the Black Hand skillfully manipulate the politics of the many interested factions to hold their control and push down challengers to their strange rule. Wolfram’s Passage is an ancient pathway under the Spine of the World that was hidden for centuries under a pyroclastic flow. Since their discovery a hundred years ago, Kigs and Vess have leveraged their Passage to grow a black market trade between the Manyhorn Traders of The Expanse and the Spicers’ Guild of the Azure Coast. Under the watchful eyes of Black Hands Agents, this trade slowly built a small population of hospitality workers and caravan drivers, most of whom found a new home across the Spine to escape something from their past with the anonymity of a new start. Life is cheap in Ashgate, but it is theirs. A year ago, something notable changed in Ashgate. Unknown to most residents, the Black Hand made a compact with the Arcanum to develop the mining of essential minerals depleted across the Azure Coast: minerals that are rich and untouched in the lava fields of the eastern Expanse. The result in Ashgate has been an influx of prospectors and explorers who venture beyond the Fort in search of buried riches. Some of them come back. Fewer know why they are here in the first place.

I pulled together a group of story focused players to try an emergent campaign (collaborative+proactive). I am going to use this thread to share periodic updates on how it is going and what is working. Meetings will be sparse this fall and then weekly after the new year. It is five players from my in-person games who had to move out of town.

So for Christmas I got my first 3D printers, a FDM and a resin one. I've since been printing up a storm. I found the file for the dragon on the right and thought "this is my BBEG!" Then I found the dragon on the left....and now THIS IS MY BBEG!! I'm undecided if the smaller one will be the bigger one's lieutenant or if the smaller one will turn into the bigger one when the crap really hits the fan in my final boss fight. Either way I love how these turned out. 🤩

The latest session of my long term campaign was yesterday. Two of the players were trying to infiltrate the rich side of town and quickly realized they would need to procure a change of clothes sp they would blend in. I had to improvise a merchant NPC on the spot. Being an avid fan of STP and his discworld series, my mind reached for the only character that fit the bill - Cut-me-own-throat Dibbler 😄. I played the character up just as he was in the books. On of the advantages of being older (I'm in my 50's, most of my players are 20s/early 30s) and from another country (I'm from NZ but live in Utah) is that I have been exposed to cultural influences that my players haven't. Not a single one of them has read Discworld, so Cut-me-own-throat Diibbler is completely new to them, and I could shamelessly use (rip off) the character without them knowing. I hope that one day at least one of them reads the books and smiles knowingly.