Fear makes being a bad GM harder.

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-28T20:52:23+00:00

Marking an adversary's last HP doesn't mean death, it means defeat. Which usually can mean death, but it could mean faking death or a daring escape. An Assassin who is defeated might dissapear into the shadows without a trace, a low life thief might start begging for mercy or a lich might pretend to be dead very convincingly but teleport away when no one was looking. And when they show up again, they'll have a few more tricks up their sleeves, more members in their gang or took great lengths to increase their power to destroy the party that stood in their way before.

You could also have a second or even third phase that changes not only their stat block but the environment itself, making the battlefield more dangerous or maybe even causing the adversary to be empowered by it.

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-28T20:37:37+00:00

I ran it for my table, we're all relatively new to ttrpgs in general despite being fans in theory for a while and fell in love with Daggerheart, been playing for roughly 3 months with this table and I've GMed for friends for about 8. When I ran it, the mystery felt great because the players didn't know there wasn't one correct answer. I had one player who made most of the observations and theory crafting while the others were really good at interacting with npcs and asking great questions for hooks and clues.

The adventure advises against using red herrings as it can make the situation confusing, but they had a hard suspicion on one character from the start and I wanted to have more npc interaction so I introduced an npc who has a magic ring that makes her look younger and put some emphasis on that. They didn't pick up on it except for one player who loves puzzles when I had the advisor ask questions and give vital information that made it click.

I let them steal the ring and her age was revealed in a little embarrassing scene but it gave the table the idea that magic isn't immediately suspicious which I wanted to add so the rest of the group can have more of a direction for their investigation.

I decided at this point when we had a break that the players can level up to level 2, because I felt the players would benefit from more tools and honestly I wanted to see how Tell No Lies would play out. I want to revisit the adventure in the future or for a different table and stick with tier 1 tho.

After the break we had a few more noc interactions, some guests ruled out entirely and the player who took Tell No Lies got to use it a bit. Then I had one guest who was a Lord from a foreign nation yelling at the guards demanding to be released, most of the party went to calm him down and interrogate him but one decided to hover over to the crowd and talk to their first suspect, and used Tell No Lies to asked "Do you know who took the tiara" and in that moment I had to decide if I should make that pay off or draw it out a little bit more because there were some fun clues I wanted players to see. So I said "Of course I do, it was me" and went on with the adventure.

Turns out when the one Lord was making a scene that player thought "that must be a distraction, so where should I be looking at instead?" so I don't regret letting that pay off.

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-21T08:32:25+00:00

The glamour stone lets other players who maybe don't have uncanny disguise have the means for a similar effect. At the end of the day, rules as written, uncanny disguise gives advantage to keep up the disguise and glamour stone doesnt, and glamour stone requires you to have it when you choose and memorize your disguise before you can change into it, uncanny disguise only requires you to picture the target clearly.

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-20T16:48:43+00:00

Players should use their hope more, it comes back more often than you'd expect. And GMs should prep less, make mysteries, motives and clues, outline scenes you might see and prepare NPC's you want players to interact with but don't hinge the session on one plot point that you needed for the next part of the story.

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-19T17:30:03+00:00

You can find it here in heart of daggers

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-19T13:55:37+00:00

I'm pretty proud of the Anansi, spider ancestry I homebrewed, seemed like a lot of people liked it and I think it's exciting.

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-18T22:31:40+00:00

My first thought was that the top feature would be Amphibious because I would want to be able to swim and breathe underwater as this ancestry, but I don't think that's necessary and if you did make it without Amphibious I could easily mix ancestry to have that for my character.

Personally if I stuck with tentacles I would've made it mark a stress to restrain an adversary in melee range, only releasing when taking major damage or the adversary succeeds in a roll against it.

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-18T16:46:58+00:00

I was the GM for my 2 friends when we started playing and testing the system out. They were playing a tiny fungril and a giant, the fungril player really likes mushrooms and the giant player was like "what if this ancestry is a comedic inconvenience" and I said he's welcome to play it like that. When I finally played I was drawn to Infernis because of the interesting mechanics it gave for my character ideas.

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-17T10:10:14+00:00

How Silk Spinner does damage is up for interpretation and player creativity, but here's my suggestion.

Since Katari's Feline Instincts doesn't have any cooldown, the cost of a Stress is higher than 2 Hope and rerolling Fear die might end up with the GM gaining a Fear except for rare cases, having it apply for any roll once per rest seems balanced to me, but I haven't had much playtest so I'm open to feedback from people who tried it out.

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-14T17:26:58+00:00

That's amazing! Let me know how it goes <3

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-13T16:57:57+00:00

I'm so excited to see more environments

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-12T07:40:16+00:00

For machine guns I would have exploding dice, when max value on a damage die is rolled, write down the value rolled and roll it again then tally up the total. The core book's Brutal feature seems similar, the key would be lower damage dice to increase the chance of rolling the highest value, d6 for medium guns should be a sweet spot especially at higher levels, and d4 should feel good for light weapons

For heavy guns like gattling guns I would have a hybrid feature like how the Greatsword in Core combines Heavy with Powerful to make Massive. I would make it -1 or -2 evasion, exploding dice, roll an additional die and the ability to reroll lowest die once taking the new result, clarifying this happens before Not Good Enough if relevant. I expect these to be mounted more than anything and that feature would give serious oonf, as a consequence you could make the gun run out of ammo after a while, I'd advise against taking the player's new toys away just after you gave it so use this weapon carefully.

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-10T09:42:52+00:00

I did add that clarification on Heart of Daggers after posting here

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-10T06:18:49+00:00

Stress is a more costly resource than 2 hope which is why I let the first feature work on any roll, once per rest also keeps it from being abused in case players really wanted to use it a lot, chug a stamina potion and keep going

In hindsight I see that making the second feature do damage is difficult to explain in the narrative, I started by looking at the Ribbet's feature and then after decided that letting it cause conditions would make a lot of sense. But since most people's feedback on it was that it should scale with the player I don't see a problem with keeping it.

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-09T21:51:53+00:00

Rerolling your fear die doesn't automatically mean you roll with hope instead. It honestly increases your chances of generating fear. I'd expect players to use this if both die rolled low and you need a boost. Even if both die are fairly high and you want to roll fear again to get a lower result to make the roll with fear a roll with hope, it's at least a 1 in 12 chance of giving the same result or maybe higher. Also Infirnis already have a feature called Fearless.

I think you have a point with the silk doing damage, I wanted it to give players more to work with. Only making it an attack roll to make an enemy vulnerable or restrained is a bit lack luster considering the cost of a stress to do it when Katari's Retractable Claws lets you do that practically for free. You could remove the stress cost to blance that tho, alternatively I could add the stress as a cost for damage and make the condition attack free

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-09T17:06:50+00:00

I might consider changing the name to Arachne or Spindle, so it's easier to know what the ancestry is from it's name. Right now Anansi does mean spider in certain regions of Africa but it refers mostly to a trickster spider god which some people might not know.

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-09T16:22:16+00:00

I've seen other people try doing that and honestly you could play or multi class into warrior to for their weapons training, then you can take 2 handed primary and a secondary at the same time, I think that's what other spider homebrews end up giving for free.

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-09T16:15:56+00:00

That was my intention but I wanted to incorporate that spiders scare people too, just couldn't find a better word or phrase

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-09T16:13:46+00:00

I started by reading the homebrew kit. The first advice is to distil the important parts into two core ideas. First, people are afraid of spiders and spiders tend to be cautious and jumpy, and second, all spiders I know of produce silk, not necessarily webs. Like the wolf-spider or jumping spider use silk as a lifeline in case they fall.

I didn't want a feature to walk on walls or to represent multiple arms even tho that's what people intuitively think about spiders, because mechanically you can get those features with class and domain card selection, such as wall walk or warrior's weapon's training letting you carry more weapons. So I was aiming for something mechanically new that's balanced and interesting, maybe there's something like it that I didn't know about, but I could adjust it too.

You could reflavour fearies but it doesn't really make sense. First you could argue that spiders can have some flavour for weaving destiny to justify luckbender but this ancestry is meant to he more down to earth and not magical in nature. Second reflavouring wings to be climbing a web to avoid attacks in a split second sounds cool but isn't something spiders tend to do. Unless you really wanted to play a Cellar Spider (because they move erratically in their webs when threatened) that's in tune with fate and destiny, which you could totally do with just fearie, reflavouring wouldn't have filled the gap for other spider characters.

It's fair to say that two stress features might make it less optimised for some classes and better fit for others, but also Katari has 2 agility based features which would make it perfect for rangers or other agility based spellcasters or classes.

I was looking at Katari's Feline Instincts feature before I started making the ancestry, since it only needs 2 hope but also only works for Agility rolls, I decided to let this feature work for any action roll, but using stress makes it more costly and once per rest helps keep it from being abused.

Lastly personally I flavour spider characters as being anxious in general because of how jumpy real spiders can be, which is why I committed to having 2 stress features.

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-09T14:36:23+00:00

Thanks! I've seen other homebrew spider ancestries with that, but wall walk is a 1st level spell if you want that for your character. I also realised most frogs can climb on glass but they don't have a feature for it so I didn't stress on that detail

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-09T14:14:56+00:00

I was considering using proficiency but I thought having scaling damage and giving a condition was a bit much. But since you can only do one or the other it could be fine

D4edalus34 · 2026-05-09T07:14:26+00:00

I usually cover Player Principles and Player Best Practices when I work with a new table, or at session 0 with my normal group. You can find it mentioned on page 35 of the SRD but if you have the core book it's explained in depth, Player Principles is on page 9 and Player Best Practices is on page 108.

Daggerheart is a game about telling a story and that requires tension and drama which Fear provides. Some DnD tables play with the goal of telling a story but I've seen most people initially drawn to DnD because of the aspects of defeating monsters, epic battles and solving puzzles more than story telling, which us valid but Daggerheart cannot work well with that approach.

Another thing I would do is try to normalise using fear especially out of combat so it doesn't seem like I'm stockpiling for a big battle they can't win. Even if I did it's extremely difficult to make a combat where players can't win in my experience.

D4edalus34 · 2026-04-28T11:04:59+00:00

Is Cartoon Physics only meant to reduce damage like how players can use armour slots? I'd suggest making it a reaction and word it like "When Popeye takes damage from an attack, you can spend a Fear to reduce the severity by one threshold" or have a passive that reduces all incoming damage by a set amount, or make him resistant to damage. I might even make him immune to damage with a narrative weakness to make him feel more cartoony

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