Reviewing Graphic Design For Dummies

I've been reading and reviewing (here, here, here, and here) books about graphic design.

For book number fourteen, I picked something different. It's produced for a very different teaching style, and was published just last year.

Graphic design for dummies. 2025. Ben Hannam.

I haven't more than flicked through any of the For Dummies books before. I was curious how simple they could actually make the topic.

I ended up having a lot to say about this book, hence a dedicated review post. Not until we get to Meggs' history of graphic design (spoilers) will we see a book with such a contrast of highs and lows!

Writing style and repetitiveness

Graphic design for dummies is extremely readable, in a way that suggests there's a manual of style for this series. The vocabulary is basic and the sentences themselves are seldom complex.

The author often repeats the same thought twice in a row, sometimes with minimal rewording. On page 154, two paragraphs in a row recommend picking a palette of two to five colours. On page 156, the idea that even subtle textures can reinforce design concepts is written two different ways within a paragraph.

Sometimes author Ben Hannam repeats short phrases within a sentence. On page 71, one paragraph states twice that some creatives may feel "threatened" by generative AI; the same paragraph contains the sentence "There are legitimate concerns about copyright and authorship, the quality and uniqueness of the work, and other legitimate concerns" (emphasis added). Page 177 says: "In Figure 8-9, the concept of position hierarchy has been illustrated to help show the concept of position hierarchy." The pinnacle is page 221:

That one is clearly a mistake, but there are so many instances of repetition that I'm not sure it's all errors or filler. It might be Hannam's personal style, or something required by the For Dummies series. Or it might be an artifact of LLM generation — not a possibility I like to bring up, but this is a recent book and the author is deeply pro-AI, as we shall see.

A lot of the repetitiveness serves to reassure. About half of the book's first eight pages of text is just reiterated reassurances for a novice. This returns several times, e.g., on page 75, and I expect it is a feature of the For Dummies series.

Hannam's writing is accessible and clearly-written, with high explanatory power. However, there are a number of awkward phrasings along the lines of "especially if you're first starting out or at the beginning of your journey" (page 2) which align with both the text's repetitiveness and, yes, its grammatical problems.

Errors

What is the state of modern publishing? Usually I reduce it to a few lines of complaints, but this time I'll list the errors that jumped out at me (and then only when I had my notepad nearby).

• "to communication" for "to communicate" (page 41)
• "you may in interested in sharing" (page 53)
• "creating" for "creative" (page 57)
• A cost is itself described as being "pricy" (page 65)
• Page 72 says 360 KB is 180% of 20 KB
• "likes" for "like" (page 74)
• Stray commas (pages 80, 141, 193)
• Wrong product names (page 86)
• "hone in on" (page 96)
• "This may be the first time the client has worked with a graphic designer before" (page 108)
• "ready to go until needed" (page 116)
• Mistaken insertion of "what" (page 131)
• "place" for "placing" (page 134)
• A sentence that's just a collection of verb phrases (page 138) 
• "holes" for "wholes" (page 144)
• "more [...] rather than" for "more [...] than" (page 147)
• "but it can" for "but can" (page 149)
• "a disconnect between [single thing]" (page 151)
• An unnecessary "for you" (page 151)
• "when done so" for "when done" (page 160)
• "ration" for "ratio" (page 164) 
• "land" for "land on" (page 193)
• "technically be" for "be technically" (page 176) 
• "Repetition movement to move to help move your audience's eyes" (page 172)
• Missing "that of" results in comparing a binding method to a book (page 182)
• it/they confusion (page 184)
• "horizontal likes" for "horizontal lines" (page 186)
• "software [...] has already begun to adapt AI tools into their software" (page 241)
• A list of verbs ends with a noun (page 242)
• "of" for "from" and "make" for "take" (page 244)
• Missing "that" (page 197)
• "not to" for "to not" (page 198)
• Missing capital (page 199)
• "in" for "is" (page 206) 
• "and" for "with" (page 220)
• "Chapter 1" for "Bonus Chapter 1" (page 222) 
• Accidental sentence break (page 236)

This was far from a close reading. I doubt these were even a quarter of the errors in the book. There might be a mistake per page on average.

...But no typos that a spellchecker would have picked up. That's the best I can say about it. Anyway, my heart goes out to the book's credited proofreader Debbye, who must have either been under an impossible time crunch or been given a truly nightmarish manuscript if this many errors made it into the final work!

Maybe this is just the new normal. I've gone on about the textual problems in other teaching design books. I've seen elementary typos on official communications from my bank. And at the meta level, even some of the real-world design examples shown in Graphic design for dummies are full of errors, e.g., you can see typos in the barely-visible text in the Raskal packaging and brand guidelines infographic (page 136).

The book's style

Graphic design for dummies spends less ink on real-world examples than the first dozen design books I read. At the same time, it's more pedagogical, and it has a good number of simple illustrative examples. There's a greater focus on presenting and then applying its lessons.

Also unlike those other books, Graphic design for dummies is clearly not laid out spread by spread. Over and over again it breaks examples across spreads, has explanations begin on the spread before the diagrams they refer to, asks you to compare two figures requiring a page turn, and so on. This is more irritating than it sounds, and really drives home the value of designing spreads instead of just flowing the text.

Other parts of the design are good, and it's all teaching-oriented. I like the simple structure, the chapter summaries, and the consistency of chapter layout.

The book's content

Graphic design for dummies covers all the topics I've been reading about for months, and then some. If this was the first text I'd picked up, I think I would have been completely riveted. Even so, I found it engaging and useful.

Ben Hannam has an interesting view of creativity as an additive, expansive process, to be followed (iteratively) by what he calls logical thinking as a process of evaluation and narrowing down. I think 'logic' is the wrong word but see what he's gesturing at. "The goal of logical thinking is to identify the best or right solution. Often, logical thinking is a selective process where constraints dictate certain outcomes". I reflected a lot on how this opening-up / narrowing-down process might relate to game design.

Graphic design for dummies also lays out a seven-part design process which is cyclical and iterative:

1. Project brief and goals

2. Research and planning

3. Brainstorm concepts

4. Sketching and refining ideas

5. Design development

6. Feedback and revision

7. Finalisation and execution

This is reinforced by some incredibly actionable advice given for each phase. This is exactly what I've wanted more of from the design books. For example, phase 4 is about sketching ideas, combining and refining them, and has a really thorough worked example. The book's downloadable bonus chapters (more on them later) continue in this vein.

This is the high point of the book, and it's really strong. I wrote down a lot of notes. Hannam talks about iterating ideas early and often, and brainstorming widely, and I was struck by the sheer extent he recommends. For example, he has his design students make 150 thumbnail sketches for a project, and says he's observed a sketch ratio of 100 likely dead ends : 45 not particularly inspired/exciting/unique : 5 with great potential. I'd really like to take this and run with it as an exercise for both visual design and other creative activities.

Hannam gives solid advice on actually making decisions during the design process. He discusses ways of actually establishing hierarchy in Chapter 9 on layouts, and ways to actually pick a palette (with useful guidance on accessibility) in Chapter 10 on colour. Along the way he scatters in links to online tools, and the book is published recently enough that they work.

If only that was all. 

Design-by-numbers

Generative AI is mentioned throughout, beginning on page 26. Hannam makes his position clear: it is "impressive", "powerful", "extremely easy", etc, and tasks like "editing images [...] can be automated with powerful AI tools."

He uses Adobe Illustrator text-to-vector once for demonstrative purposes (page 71), but then wouldn't you know it, a couple more slip through unlabelled. For example, specimens on page 174 are likely made with the same text-to-vector, because they're grotesque. Graphic design for dummies features characters wearing skin-tone belts and one-and-a-half hats, with misshapen hands, ankles that extend behind instead of into their (mismatched) shoes, and so on.

The book closes with a brief tacked-on chapter on generative AI. Here, Hannam sets out to annoy me with:

• Relentless enthusiasm tempered with a tiny dash of mealy-mouthed both-sides-ing
• Referring to generative AI just as "AI", an acronym he defines then neglects to use
• Remarks about [generative] AI being able to "understand" things

This chapter makes a lot of claims that are, frankly, false.

• "AI can help deliver the content that users need more quickly and accurately than you could by using a set of static variables [in a traditional web storefront]."
• AI will "increase accuracy" and "can analyse data [...] more accurately than humans".
• AI can be used to reduce bias in things like "broad representation of different groups".
• AI can be used to "simulate" user interactions and A/B testing, i.e., fake data instead of gathering it.

This is nonsense, of course. Generative AI increases accuracy? It reduces bias? It's faster than serving static content? Anyone who understands the technology is shaking their head. Hannam loses the last of his credibility in this area by urging you to use [presumably generative] AI to track file changes, do file management, organise assets, and manage versioning. I would uhhhh. Advise against it.

Finally, there's a ton of pandering "will be able to" and "one might imagine" and "are likely to become" which I'm just sick of by now. There's a whole subsection on "AI-Powered Design Assistants" which the author admits is essentially fanfiction! Why on earth did the book get implausible, depressing, futurist fanfiction when a bunch of actual content got delegated to downloadable bonus chapters?

It's a good thing I'm not in the habit of giving numeric scores in reviews, because this chapter completely depleted my goodwill. It's hard to imagine a sourer note to end on... except wait, we're not done. Let's quickly download those bonus chapters.

Oh wait oh no

You thought the AI chapter was a bad look? Check this out.

This book was published less than a year ago. It promises in multiple places, including boldly on the back cover, that you can get six bonus chapters online at dummies.com. Nope! Actually you can't. You can go there and (a) buy this book, or (b) "engage with this book", i.e., type text into a chatbot. There is no way to (c) get the bonus chapters it promised.

Now, Graphic design for dummies provides two publisher links, so I checked those just in case. The first one is for support, booksupport.wiley.com, and it's a dead link! Again, this book was published last year! The other link also doesn't have the bonus chapters. You can send the publishers a message there... but only if you subscribe to them. WTF.

So I looked up author Ben Hannam's website to ask him about it. He has a message box, which formats your message in all caps like you're shouting. Then the Send Message button just throws an error.

 

At this point you just have to laugh. 

I was all set to compare this book to the Ambrose-Harris Vortex, in terms of the density of mistakes and parts of it being fundamentally broken. But ended up going back to the publisher's website on a whim and after some more digging I did find the bonus chapters. Notably not at the dummies.com domain which is where they're meant to be, and where several other For Dummies books have bonus chapters.

The bonus chapters, finally 

There's six bonus chapters, all very consistent with the rest of the book, full of grammatical errors but with some pretty useful content.

Chapter one: Walking through the process of designing a logo and a business card. I really liked these hands-on, in-depth examples. There's a funny typo in the quote on Hannam's mocked-up business card (Figure 9) but it does get fixed in the final result in Figure 10.

And it is so on the nose that it beggars belief that the personal logo Hannam ends up with at the end of his design process appears to read more like the acronym "AI" in lowercase than it does his initials "BH" which it's meant to be:

Chapter two: Strategies for success. Hannam repeats at length the old canard about "Roman war chariots" having led to railway track gauge and thence constrained the design of the Space Shuttle. This is false. Repeating it undermines his point about design constraints and makes the reader wonder what else he's got wrong.

Aside: Ten minutes of proper research puts the myth to rest. But maybe not if you "fact check" it with generative AI. I looked at Google's "search" "results" out of morbid curiosity, and the chatbot both-sides'ed it.

This chapter also has a section called "Escape the pitfall of repeating yourself", which is hilarious in the context of a book which repeats itself so often.

Chapter three: About avoiding common mistakes. It covers aspect ratios, working with images, file management, compression, colours, rich black, and going to press. Nothing new for me personally, but all good simple solid advice.

Chapter four: Exercises to test a new design student's skills. Also really good! I think the intended audience would find it exceptionally useful. I wish it had been included in the physical book instead of hidden away where most readers will never see it.

Chapters five and six: On receiving and giving critique. Mostly in the vein of career advice for a university student.

Hannam wraps up the bonus chapters with a protectiveness about graphic design students being exploited. It helped get me back in his corner a bit after the AI rubbish.

In summary 

What a rollercoaster. Graphic design for dummies has some of the most high-quality practical and focused advice, given in plain language and without talking down to the reader. It's probably the best graphic design teaching text I've read so far, and also stands up okay as an illustrative text. It doesn't really set out to be an inspirational text. And then of course it's error-riddled and full of AI slopaganda, and trying to find the bonus chapters was deeply frustrating.

Despite such deep flaws, I have to say that on the whole, I can recommend this book. But I'm still hoping to find something better.

Twentieth Century art and design: Three book reviews

Let's take a trip back in time. 

This year on the blog I've been reviewing books about graphic design (here, here) and books of graphic design (here). Today I have a few more in that category, exploring the graphic design of the twentieth century.

Read on for 'art through precision' by M. C. Escher, vintage typography reclaimed, and a hundred years of science fiction illustrations.

Book 1

 

The graphic work of M C Escher. 1975. Maurits Escher. Translator John E. Brigham.

I was interested in M. C. Escher's work as a child, but haven't thought much about it (beyond one Escher print on my wall) between then and reading this book now. This is a reprint of his 1961 book.

Escher selected and arranged the contents, and wrote the book's introduction (the entirety of its text). In translation, Escher sounds like an old-timey wizard. This isn't helped by him name-dropping his dark arts:

 

Extract from book. "This was in 1946 when I first made the acquaintance of the old and highly respectable black art technique of the mezzotint".

(Copy Editor Brain never turns off; even in five scant pages of text I noticed the weird paragraph breaks, 'lightening' for 'lightning', etc.)

A remarkable commentary 

I want to start with Escher's own explanation of this book.

"Apart from prints 1 to 7 inclusive, all the numbered reproductions in this book were made with a view to communicating a specific line of thought. The ideas that are basic to them often bear witness to my amazement and wonder at the laws of nature which operate in the world around us."

Escher makes it very clear that his artworks are deliberate visual expressions of specific ideas (these come across as mathematical ideas to the modern viewer/reader, but he shies away from the word). He takes pains to describe how and why each piece develops the idea. So when, for example, he talks about infinity, it's not in a vacuous or emotive way, but in very specific and grounded terms, of nadir and horizon and reduction and proportion and geometry and limits. I've actually never seen art explained so clearly before, and I found it very endearing.

The process of artistry

Escher says he finds as a mature artist that an artwork comes about in two phases. First there is a lengthy, difficult visualisation and numerous attempts to get a detailed concept sketch right. "After this, to my great relief, there dawns the second phase, that is the making of the graphic print; for now the spirit can take its rest while the work is taken over by the hands."

Manual skill has been sublimated and the toughest work that remains is deciding on its application. 

It's slightly melancholy to read Escher casually mentioning the secrets of what might as well be lost arts for most people – specifics of woodcut printing, hand-etching mezzoprints, etc – in a way he clearly expects his reader will be familiar with.

 

 

So yes this book is absolutely fascinating, for reading as much as viewing.

The commentary also achieved its goal, in helping me understand some Escher works I've seen before but not comprehended (or perhaps only appreciated the artistry without realising there was something to comprehend). For example:

This print explores the use of 2D artworks to denote 3D objects and the fact that there's no true way to experience 2D in our 3D world. Escher depicts three shapes. The first is a sphere. It rests atop the second, a reinterpretation as a 2D form giving the illusion of a sphere, made paper-thin and folded in half to reveal the deception. One of its edges rests (as if it really were the lower half of a sphere) atop the third, another reinterpretation as a 2D image shown in perspective resting on a flat surface.

In summary

A really enjoyable book. I got far more out of it than I expected to.

Also there's a vein of TTRPG inspirations here, e.g.:

 

When Escher's work enters the public domain in ~2043, it's going to be a huge boon to indie RPG and art zine scenes.

 

Book 2

 

 

Vintage typography & signage. 2018. Frank H. Atkinson, Charles J. Strong, & L. S. Strong.

I've used these reviews to vent about textual errors before. Finally, an exception: this book is completely without typo. How does it accomplish this? It has only a single paragraph of text.

The remaining 120 pages are all dedicated to recreations of various signs, illustrations, and typefaces from the early 1900s.

The original sources are two books, Frank H. Atkinson's Sign Painting (1900) and Strong's Book of Designs (1917). I don't understand why this information isn't given up front in the aforementioned single paragraph of text. The book just says "two rare, early-twentieth-century sources" and relegates the titles to the tiny legal text in the front matter. It feels faintly distasteful. On the other hand, only the three twentieth-century artists are credited (L. S. [Lawrence Stuart] Strong is Charles Strong's son; their Book of Designs is a collaboration).

Most of the examples are in black and white, with a few decorative initials and full page illustrations rendered in colour. Stylistically, the examples are all either 19th-century traditional signwriting or distinctly Art Nouveau.

It was pretty easy to chase down the source texts for comparison: Sign Painting and Strong's Book of Designs are both archived.

In summary

I wonder what the process of cleaning up the originals for republication was like. On the one hand, they certainly appear to be in a smooth modern format. Are they vectorised, manually or with an automatic tool? Or is the publisher having access to the original printing plates sufficient to produce nice crisp copies that you can't get from archives of old original print copies?

I find it notable that no additional artist or author involved in publishing this modern edition is credited. I'd hesitate to call it a cash grab, but this isn't a high-effort book. It's a good resource for works from the specific era. Some of the examples were interesting enough that I've downloaded copies of the original sources from archive.org for inspiration or use.

Book 3

 

100 years of science fiction illustration. 1975. Anthony Frewin.

The photo above is my battered old copy of this book, often flicked through but never read cover-to-cover. It covers the 1840-1940 period. The writing is quite editorial in tone, with a Britishness that occasionally comes through when cross-examining twentieth century American writings about the state of the art in science fiction.

 

Amazing Stories

 

Tracing the origination of science fiction

There's no hard line to be drawn at the start of the SF era, and author Anthony Frewin's choice to begin with the work of Grandville in the 1840s is in a sense arbitrary, especially since the book follows it with a 40-year gap before including the works of Robida.

When tracing the genre's roots and trying to establish when it really became an entire new category, Frewin credits John W. Campbell as having "moulded" all of SF to come. Magazine editor Hugo Gernsback takes some knocks in the process:

"Gernsback (1884-1967) may not have been the 'Father of Science Fiction' as so often has been claimed, but that he made a substantial contribution to the development of the genre no one could deny. To say that he gave SF an almost universal popularity at the cost of castrating its literacy is not far from the truth."

Frewin calls Gernsback's prose "bereft of sensitivity, devoid of humour, pedestrian in the extreme, and evincing enthusiasm for nothing more than the most abject of gadgets".

From the sample included I have to agree Gernsback's writing was unimpressive. It also taught me that in the 1920s we almost settled on the term "scientifiction" instead of "science fiction":

 

Regarding science fiction artistry specifically, Frewin notes that the work of Frank R. Paul as a magazine cover artist would come to characterise all SF work for "forty years" [1927-1946].

Trends, critiques, and content

Frewin traces the rise of science fiction chronologically, era by era and artist by artist, with an understandable focus on the magazine industry where most of it was happening. He generally doesn't withhold criticism – "The turtle-men are ill-executed and of little consequence" is a great line, doubly so out of context.

He has a number of other bangers, such as referring to 1938 as the year SF technology stops looking like "the inside of a radio set". And on changes in SF and publishing trends: "Today's format is tomorrow's doormat".

For my purposes though, the text was a bit judgey without always having strong explanatory power; I would have preferred more focus on why Frewin thinks some work or other is "insipid". 

100 years of science fiction illustration was published in 1975, of course. The editorial tone could have been a lot worse. Instead, Frewin comports himself well, calling out xenophobia, the depredations of war, and narrowness of writers' assumptions.

The book reproduces tons of neat images. There's lot of technical proficiency on display, all with that instantly recognisable twentieth century science fiction feel.

Errors

100 years of science fiction illustration feels a little amateurish in production, perhaps appropriately given so much of its subject matter is about grasping blindly at new concepts. The book layout is odd. The paragraphs have neither indents nor spaces, making it hard to tell where they start. Many paragraphs end in ellipses, for all that the text lightly mocks this practise several times.

The choice of a typeface with fine lines means that when printed white-on-black, commas turn into full stops. For example:

And there are lots of outright mistakes in the copy. Entire repeated lines. Misspellings, often consistent ("canon" and "apocolyptic" throughout). Missing spaces. An arbitrary mixture of italics and quotes for titles, and at least one mis-titled story.

In summary

 

This book delivers just what you would expect from the premise. I'm not at all well-versed in science fiction history, so it's possible it has omissions, but the text felt comprehensive and thoughtful and the illustrations were very engaging.

 

Relevance to my 'learn about graphic design' goals

I'm enjoying expanding my art analysis palette. It's good to take a closer, deeper, and more systematic look at types of artwork that feel familiar but only from having seen instances in passing.

Tune in next time for a study in highs and lows when I look at Graphic Design for Dummies!

The implied metaphysics of Daggerheart

Roleplaying games have implied settings. Daggerheart's is deliberately kept as sparse as possible, as it offers a plethora of game settings (“campaign frames”) and advice on using them or creating new ones to structure play. The pros and cons of the approach are obvious: maximal flexibility, minimal fallback.

That said, “Daggerheart has established ancestries, communities, classes, abilities, and spells – so some worldbuilding aspects will exist similarly across every campaign” (page 11). I'm setting my sights on what these imply about Daggerheart's metaphysics. What's stated? What can be inferred?

By metaphysics I mean cosmological, structural, and supernatural elements of the game world(s).

 

 

What can we learn?

I'm looking only at the Daggerheart core rulebook here. The “World Overview” in Chapter 1 is particularly informative. I'll give page references in other cases.

The Core Realms

The Mortal Realm is a plane, in the many-dimensions sense, and is where “the majority of material beings and objects” as well as the Faint Divinities are. Allegedly but not definitively, the Mortal Realm was created by the Forgotten Gods during the Earliest Age.

The Hallows Above is another core realm. It formerly belonged to the Forgotten Gods, and is now home to the New Gods.

The Circles Below are also called the “lower realms”. Many of the Forgotten Gods are banished there, becoming Fallen Gods. Allegedly but not definitively (a) “places of corruption, destruction, and violence”, and (b) the home to some of the most dangerous creatures in the core realms.

The Realms Beyond: The book is laid out as if these are the fourth of the core realms. However, the text implies that the Mortal Realm, Hallows Above, and Circles Below are the core realms, and that the Realms Beyond are some of the “many realms” of the overall cosmos.

The Realms Beyond include “the Elemental Lands, the Astral Realm, the Valley of Death, and countless others”. The “Chaos Realm” (page 250), an “otherworldly space where the laws of reality are unstable” is “alien to the Mortal Realm” and likely a Realm Beyond. It features impossible architecture and glimpses of other worlds. 

Gods and such

→ The Earliest Age was a time when immortals from the Hallows Above intermingled with mortals. Of nonspecific duration and distance other than “millennia” ago (pages 11, 235).

→ The Forgotten Gods were the first known gods. No mention of what they were called when they were in control – certainly not “Forgotten Gods”. They fought the New Gods and lost, and “many of” them were imprisoned either in the Mortal Realm or the Circles Below. Presumably the others were killed, but the ones “who fought most passionately” were the ones banished to the Circles Below, so there's room for interpretation that some of the losers were rehabilitated as New Gods.

→ The Fallen Gods are simply those of the Forgotten Gods banished to the Circles Below. Unlike in e.g. Christian mythology, nothing is implied to have changed about them in the process. Fallen Gods are designated (but are not objectively stated to be) “evil practitioners of tainted magic”, and their banished Faint Divinity allies (and their descendants) “demons”; Infernis descend in turn from demons. Temples to the Fallen Gods still exist (page 102), and it is possible to have a “direct channel” to them (page 106). Fallen Gods might also be encountered as an adversary (page 235); interestingly only at the same level of threat as “really muscular zombie” (page 239).

→ The New Gods turned up after the Forgotten Gods as a distinct set of entities, but it's unclear whether or not the war began immediately. They seized and colonised the Hallows Above. They still exist and can intervene in the world in set ways.

→ The Faint Divinities are “lesser deities created by both the Forgotten and the New Gods to oversee the Mortal Realm.” They have narrower spheres of influence but “can greatly influence the lives of mortals.” The main text does not actually say so, but many of the campaign frames place the Faint Divinities as being physically present in the Mortal Realm.

The gods' reach includes (page 44) the ability to “appoint” seraphs who are “imbued with sacred purpose” but whose ethos are only “traditionally” in alignment with their god's domain or goals. Some seraphs (page 236) are tasked with enforcing their god's will. Deities who appoint seraphs are those who exist “within the realms” [plural], which implies that seraphs can serve a Forgotten or Fallen God, or possibly even a Faint Divinity.

Interestingly, Daggerheart definitively has gods but does not seem to have an afterlife. The gods have specific observable qualities, and can be communicated with. There is no mention in the text of a heaven, hell, reincarnation, paradise, judgment, or such.

Aside: Resurrecting a dead character is merely “often” (i.e., not always) difficult and costly (page 106). Page 182 contradicts this, calling death “more permanent in Daggerheart than in other games of the same genre” and the Risk It All roll being “final unless you provide another means of resurrection in your story”; it also contradicts the wording of the Resurrection spell by claiming it can only be used once.

There's a definite impression that the Hallows Above and Circles Below are just places where gods happen to live, and not afterlives. Getting there takes specialist knowledge and an enormous investment while, crucially, being alive. The gods are more like super powerful alien beings than anything that maps well onto the belief patterns we have on Earth, but this is generally true for most fantasy TTRPGs.

Not much is set in stone about Daggerheart's gods, their powers, their domain, or the extent of the human-like qualities (agendas and personality traits) which the text hints at.

We do know that the gods are mortal – confusingly, given that they are several times called ‘immortal’ and juxtaposed to mortals. It is possible (page 250) to “breach the gates” of the Hallows Above or “break the barrier” between it and the Mortal Realm, slay one or more gods, and usurp their powers. The mortality of the gods is emphasised several times by the campaign frames (e.g., page 255).

Planar travel

Communication: The Hallows Above are “closely connected with most other realms” (page 11), and according to the text it's because of that cosmological feature (i.e., not because of some godly power or designed property) that “the gods residing here can see and speak with the creatures of the Mortal Realm without leaving their domain”. Communication with the gods may be obfuscated, although it's unclear if this is an interplanar limitation or a feature of the gods themselves.

Travel: There are specific methods by which the New Gods “can leave the Hallows Above to occupy other realms, but in the current age they must always sacrifice something of personal importance to do so.” According to rumour (not definitively), this was a deliberate choice to help protect the Hallows if the Forgotten Gods return.

There's an implied symmetry for entering the Hallows Above, and the requisite sacrifices have caused “some of the great calamities that have befallen the Mortal Realm in recent millennia.”

Accessing and traversing the Realms Beyond from the Mortal Realm “requires specialised knowledge and hard-learned skills”, possessed by some beings in the core realms.

Security: Other planes typically have “safeguards against Fallen [Gods?] who wish to cross from the Circles Below. Within the Mortal Realm, the use of arcane magic in acts of great evil is said to open a temporary rift between the two planes, allowing Fallen [Gods?] to pass through.”

 

Details of the magic system

Magic is “very powerful and incredibly dangerous” (page 12). It permeates the environment, and there is specifically a “magic of the wilderness” (page 30).

Magic can manifest within people (page 12). Some magic is innate and heritable (page 46). This kind of magic can be cultivated and there's a skill component to using it.

Magical power can be acquired and developed through learning, tool use, and taking supplements (page 50). Having knowledge of magic leads to, or correlates with, being able to use it. Secrets can be inherently powerful.

...Other than that, magic is largely left as a mystery. Daggerheart doesn't make commitments about its origin, ground rules, systematisation, relationship to divine powers, etc.

There's not much to glean from the domain cards. Many game powers labelled ‘ability’ rather than ‘spell’ seem nevertheless supernatural. Magic can be used to break the rules in all the classic ways (slow time, transmit information from the future, negate gravity, break space, directly change reality, create and destroy matter, etc). This ‘canonical’ collection of spells is constrained in various ways that would be visible in-world, e.g., in magnitude and locality, which is obviously a TTRPG design consideration.

Notes from the bestiary

Fantastical creatures, undead, and things like “waygates” and “incarnations of fate” exist without any specific metaphysical underpinnings. “Outer Realms” monsters are likely from Realms Beyond. There are also nature spirits that are mentioned repeatedly (pages 183, 230, 283, 338, 339).

Sapients

Where did people come from? According to “stories” the gods created the world (page 12), but that has little epistemic weight. It seems unlikely that people evolved biologically, given that there are eighteen subgroups of people that (a) have enormously varying physical biology (e.g. dragon breath, flight, drastically varying lifespan and size, being made of metal or fungus), (b) are all capable of having children together, and (c) have such similar brains that there is no variance between subgroups in mental characteristics or personality traits.

Aside: There is one exception to the latter. Humans specifically (page 65) “incorporate [sic] both magical and mechanical tools, accessories, and items that assist their daily life and tasks”, and “often dress to clearly display social status, wealth, personal faith, or aesthetics”. These traits are necessarily rare amongst the other seventeen kinds of people, otherwise they would not have been ascribed to humans in particular. Daggerheart separates culture and community from ancestry, so these are inborn traits of humans, not ones developed amongst insular human-dominated societies.

Daggerheart is otherwise very careful about this sort of thing (“individuals from all lineages possess unique characteristics and cultures, as well as personhood”) and notes that all people's minds work indistinguishably, i.e., in a fundamentally human way. I think we should therefore regard these notes on human ancestry as an outright error.

Either way, the ability of e.g. infernis, fungrils, and clanks to mix ancestries seems to preclude a model of biology similar to that of our reality. Of course, Daggerheart has deeply pervasive magic, so although the book doesn't state it, all such cases could be magically induced. This might anyway be a case of “game design considerations” rather than actual metaphysics of the setting.

Campaign frames

Chapter 5 doesn't really talk about modifying the metaphysics for a campaign frame (outside of mentioning unique setting distinctions and special mechanics).

Looking at the details of the cosmos mentioned in the book's campaign frames, we quickly find that (of those that get into it) they are built firmly on the implied metaphysics above, with little deviation.

The Age of Umbra (as laid out on pages 281, 284, 287, 288) and Colossus of the Drylands (as described as “myths” on pages 308–310) for example are each fundamentally compatible with Daggerheart's underlying metaphysics, but develop those basics in different directions.

The Witherwild

This frame reinforces the mortality of the gods, featuring a successful deicide (Shun’Aush) and giving a physicality to their powers (the bodily dust of a dead god gives rise to a plague; the god Nikta's two eyes are individually responsible for ripening and ruination; maiming a god changes their powers).

The Witherwild frame develops the Faint Divinities: “Gods in this land [...] wander the land as incarnate beings, residing in both the natural world as well as within homes and small villages. [...] Many communities, and some larger families, even have their own small god or tutelary spirit who watches over them. […] there is a constant push and pull between the goals of people and their deific neighbors. The gods must curry worship from mortals, often by performing small miracles [...]” Note that this is the only mention in the book of gods having any interest in being worshipped!

The Witherwild frame names six Faint Divinities (Fulg, Hyacynis, Ikla, Oove, Qui’Gar, Rohkin) and says there are hundreds or thousands more. Gods are person-like, with allies, alignments, and special interests. Interestingly, a god's domain is described not as a source of power or set of powers but somewhere that effort is required (Qui’Gar presides over deaths near brambles and the current magical verdancy has “made her job harder”).

 

Motherboard

This is the only canon campaign frame that arguably departs from the base metaphysics. In Motherboard, magic is ancient technology. There's a lot of reskinning necessary, with somewhat vague guidance: “Consider how these would manifest in a world where magic comes from technology, then adapt the flavour of each feature accordingly.”

Faint Divinities are ghosts in the machine. Regarding divine power, players “should determine why their character relates to technology on a spiritual level, rather than simply employing it. They should also consider if and how they offer their devotion to the Motherboard or Faint Divinities.”

The text falls short of saying that gods (and the Hallows Above, etc) don't literally exist in the Motherboard frame. But that's the more plausible and parsimonious reading: the Motherboard is a “master program” left behind by ancient technomancers, whose indistinguishable-from-magic advanced technology gives rise to all supernatural phenomena.

In conclusion

Daggerheart has magic, and lots of it. But it has no deep underlying rules for a GM to fall back on in rulings (or viewed the other way, no constraints that the GM has to work within). 

In Daggerheart, gods exist but at times seem curiously divorced from serving a religious purpose. There are only a few mentions of them being worshipped (e.g. page 313), and this isn't strictly required even for the chosen champions who channel their powers. There's no mention of an afterlife, moral judgment, or belief in gods other than the ones that literally exist. There's also no mention of god-oppositional philosophies, even though the Faint Divinities affect people's lives.

(As I wrote in “Put Flourishes, Fairy Tales, and Folk Beliefs in Your Fantasy World”, these are the kind of details you are definitely going to want to expand upon in your campaign frames.)

The four core realms are “the basis for the worldbuilding elements inherent to many of Daggerheart's mechanics” (page 12). The obvious question to ask now is: do Daggerheart's implied metaphysics constrain campaign frames?

Arguably. The book's frames are all built on those basics or agnostic to them. The game provides very little guidance for tinkering with the metaphysics, even as it weighs in on other analogous matters for creating your own world (in Chapters 3–4 and especially 5). On the other hand, there's lots of customise-it, revise-it, collaborate-on-it, reskin-it, make-it-work-for-your-group sentiment throughout Daggerheart, which could be extended to imply permission.