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.

Reviewn June 9: Realistic Gold And Silver

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

Today I’m looking at Realistic Gold And Silver, by Worshipful Satan. It’s a 21-page “guide to bringing the realistic value of gold and silver into fantasy role-playing, based on medieval England.” Arguably more about world-building than roleplaying, it aims to give “a realistic representation of the medieval value of gold and silver”, which although not “necessary or desirable in every fantasy setting, [...] should be an option available to you.”

It's a bit niche. Few games are set in medieval [implied:] Western Europe, or even in a fantasy alt-history version thereof. I don’t think there’s any reason for other Earth-like planets to necessarily have similar quantities of silver and gold ores deposited in their crusts near the surface, let alone wherever the technology to mine them has been developed. And that’s even if said planets are formed by mundane processes rather than fantastic ones.

But all of that said, I am a fan of grounding fiction in real information. The real world is full of details that the first pass of the imagination often fails to create. And for those who want a historicalesque feeling to their gameplay, getting things like coinage right is a must.

Most of this text’s content was matter I’m already familiar with, but I’m a wonk when it comes to this specific intersection of history and economics and gaming, so I think other readers might get a lot more out of it. Realistic Gold And Silver is a good primer. I'm going to look at it on its own terms: it’s a plaintext document exported to PDF, not a polished thesis.

‘Realistic’ gold and silver values

The text admits that its initial premise is something of a canard, that the wide range of places and times and specific contexts means “that we must arbitrarily choose prices for gold and silver which fit our gameplay needs.” I don't think many people approaching a read like this are going to be surprised by that.

I think that working out all coin values by weight of metal is actually a very elegant approach to the TTRPG nightmare of trying to provide a plausibly wide variety of different denomination coins as the adventurers rampage across the landscape, looting archaeological sites. I like it a lot!

• The mechanism boils down to “Large purchases are made by measuring the weight of coins rather than by counting a specific number of coins”.
• It means that you can have the PCs find a big bag of Somewherian silver florins and half-florins and pour them into their sack of local groats and Elsewheric ‘new pence’ and imperial sestertii and you don’t need to consider either number or face value of coins, only the weight of the silver.
• It even works alongside bullion bars and hacksilver, and, as the author points out, works with the damaged, cut, underweight, and clipped coins that you would realistically get in any system without the technology and state power to prevent that.
• Note that this does require that all coins of a particular metal have similar levels of purity. That abstraction may be a stretch for some people who are really into this idea, but they could easily add in e.g. one lower level of purity and track those lesser-quality coins separately.
• Personally, unless I was leaning into the pseudo-historical aesthetic, I would pick a name other than ‘pence’ for the unit of measure/account if I was actually using ‘pennies’ as coins.

It’s interesting that the text recommends this for silver and then treats gold coins as special, counted individually rather than being weighed out. I think this against depends on whether you need that pseudo-historical feeling, but also the degree to which your campaign ramps up. If the PCs are meant to be finding hoards at tenth level that are worth thousands of times what they were getting at first level, then you might start out counting coins and face value variations for each kind of coinage, and transition to measuring each one in turn by weight as (e.g.) silver, electrum, gold, then platinum become commonplace.

I think the text’s attempt to approximate an equivalent modern-day value for medieval coins might give people some wrong ideas. The economic realities were so fundamentally different, states worked differently and their economies were less monetised, most people were growing most of their own food, and so on. People were spending proportionally much more on food because yields were lower and harder to produce at the same time as other costs were proportionally cheaper (e.g. housing could be made quickly by non-experts from cheap materials without regulation and overheads).

Instead, just let the prices speak for themselves. Which the author does:

Equipment and prices

The plausible price list for equipment is nice. It covers a fair amount of ground, mostly matching early D&D equipment lists. The author is clearly aware that you can’t really put together a reliable price list for even a relatively well-attested historical setting, and hedges appropriately (I would appreciate distinguishing in the text which prices are historically supported and which are just guesses, but again, I'm an outlier, most people aren't going to care).

• I like the authorial commentary on little bits of the equipment list, giving context on things like the German zweihänder, the price and usage of caltrops, and disparaging the typical ahistorically high-lux fantasy oil lamps. The text includes a scattering of fantasy gear for specific purposes. I also like spices as loot.
• I think the author overstates the case for not having gemstone faceting. But I have often thought that intaglio should be a much more common kind of treasure!
• Amethyst was a precious stone comparable to diamond and ruby up until the 1700s. The author doesn't mention this, but I suspect had this fact in mind, as the text prices amethyst alongside the other cardinal gemstones (albeit assigning it the lowest value of them).
• The text makes the good but oft-made point that any remotely dragonworthy hoard of gold is simply too much for verisimilitude. The author just advises against having them. My own opinion is that fantasy problems demand fantasy solutions. I can think of a few ways to set up the cosmology and world so that dragons can still have huge valuable (but not completely society-altering valuable) hoards. You do have to abandon attempts at a medieval feel, and consider the knock-on effects, though.

The classic explanation for D&D prices as gold-rush-induced-wealth-disparity has also been done to death, but the author lays it out elegantly. I would have eagerly read any extra material on these speculative fantasy parts, with guidelines for setting ‘true’ prices vs inflated ‘dungeon rush’ prices for equipment and staples, how buying vs selling are differently effected, considerations about prices of dungeon treasure based on proximity to the rush, etc.

Minor text quibbles:

• This is a plaintext document, not fancied up. Design simplicity can be strength! In this case, though, the ragged right edge justification is hard to read.
• The text also would benefit from an editing pass. There’s various typos, some grammar problems, and not much conclusion. Even some of the fundamentals are missing: the reader has to work backwards from disparate numbers to calculate that the author has chosen to value gold at 15× silver by weight.
• A few intersections with game terms (rounds, xp per coin) are highly D&D-specific, but the text doesn't acknowledge this.

My favourite bit:

The last couple of pages provide very important context and commentary, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. They provide a primer on certain game-relevant aspects of pre-modern “adventure economics”. These extrapolations and speculations about fantasy economics are the kind of thing I love reading.

Where to get it:

On itch at: https://worshipful-satan.itch.io/realistic-gold-and-silver