For the majority of their history, tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons were predominantly made for and by a single demographic: cisgender, heterosexual white men. While marginalized people have always been a part of tabletop culture, the last decade has seen actual play shows like Critical Role (where actors play tabletop games for an audience) introduce the hobby to new, more diverse generations than ever before. This larger cultural awareness has highlighted Dungeons & Dragons’ long, problematic history of bigotry and exclusion that it’s only just begun to reckon with. Paired with a series of industry scandals from D&D’s publisher Wizards of the Coast, this desire to engage tabletop games in a way that reflects our experiences and desires has led to a crop of “D&D Killers” rising to take its place. One such game, the newly released Daggerheart, is attempting to hold onto what makes D&D special while explicitly centering queer and disabled people.
“Tabletop games are a really powerful medium for storytelling as a genre, for escapism, for community building,” says Daggerheart’s senior producer Elise Rezendes. “A tabletop game allows players to explore different identities or explore different relationships, different environments beyond the one that they have in their own corporeal experience.”
Daggerheart is the most recent project of Darrington Press, Critical Role’s publishing arm that has printed other games like the eldritch horror Candela Obscura and the conversational card game about toxic power dynamics, For The Queen. In a lot of ways, Daggerheart looks like D&D. However, it’s D&D the way Critical Role plays it — or in other words, it’s D&D for theater kids. With a diverse, powerhouse team of designers, editors, artists, and producers, Daggerheart takes pieces from some of the best independent tabletop games of the last two decades and blends them into something new that is familiar to the most seasoned hobbyists and welcoming to those who’ve never rolled a d20 before.
“I am hoping that Daggerheart is the kind of game that people can learn over the course of two hours with their friends and loved ones at the table,” says Rezendes. “The nuance and the mastery can come later, but we wanted to build a system where onboarding was fun, supported, and fast.”
The game cites over 18 games as inspirations for its design — many of which have queer themes and designers — including the heist-centric Blades in the Dark, the world-saving monster RPG Apocalypse Keys, the angsty teen superhero game Masks: A New Generation, and the portal-hopping skater game Slugblaster. “For Daggerheart, we’ve tried to learn lessons from several approaches and synthesize them,” says Mike Underwood, a nonbinary designer and author who worked as one of the primary writers for the game. “Daggerheart is designed for explicit inclusion and metaphorical representation from the top to the bottom with a focus on collaboration and empowering players to make space and take up space for themselves and their own creativity. To create worlds and stories that reflect who they are and what they want to see in their rpg stories.”
Like D&D, Daggerheart builds on traditional fantasy aesthetics, with familiar classes like wizards, rogues, and bards. Players take on the roles of heroes, with a game master who takes on the role of everything else. Instead of the traditional fantasy “races” (a term that comes with decades of baggage), Daggerheart offers multiple ancestries for player characters, ranging from traditional elves, goblins, and dwarves, to anthropomorphic turtles, frogs, fungi, and more. Each player also comes from a community, which informs their skills and how they move through the world. Mechanically, there are stats like strength and knowledge, and you roll dice to determine if you succeed or fail (though the main die is a d12 instead of the standard d20). However, unlike D&D, Daggerheart doesn’t focus on long, drawn out combat; instead it puts narrative front and center. Rather than taking hours to crunch numbers like it would in D&D, character creation focuses on asking questions about who your character is, what their dramatic backstory might be, and how they came to be a part of this band of travelling adventurers.
“Narrative is not something that is divorced from tabletop games,” says Rezendes. “In tabletop games, you are the story. You’re actively collaborating with your other players, finding what makes you heroic by being set up against different circumstances, seeing who you are in those moments, and then growing. And that doesn’t happen outside of the lens of self identity, but it also allows you to put on different kinds of spectacles. What does the world look like through this tint of a rogue’s sunglasses? It just allows you to play in life in a fun and new way together with people that you love and admire.”
While focusing on narrative and minimizing math is one element of Daggerheart’s attempt to be more accessible, the efforts towards a more welcoming type of tabletop game are present in both the world of the game and how the designers chose to present it. The character art throughout the game book casually depicts a diverse world, showing a range of ancestries, genders, body types, abilities, and sexualities. A tense, sapphic moment is the splash page of the second chapter, a broad-chested man with top surgery scars is on the page describing damage rolls, and characters with mobility aids are included throughout the book. An entire section in character creation is dedicated to essays for players on how to respectfully and intentionally depict disabled characters, written by disabled designers. These elements aren’t unique to Daggerheart, but their presence and intentionality stands as a beacon of hope as marginalized people are facing discrimination and erasure from governments around the globe.
“One of the great joys of working on Daggerheart was the notion of starting from an open slate,” says Rue Dickey, a trans disabled designer who organizes the annual Trans Rights TTRPG bundle, which has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for trans organizations across the United States. “I wasn’t brought on to ‘add’ diverse bodies and expressions, but rather to help shape the ones that were already in the game. There were already concepts for magical and technological prosthetics, different forms of mobility aids, and other access devices like hearing aids. There were already trans bodies, fat bodies, people with scars and limb differences and all manner of tattoos. The team came into Daggerheart wanting to bring a wide variety of fantasy people into the world, so that real people can see ourselves in the stories we tell! It was wonderful to work with a team that was always willing to make adjustments and improvements, and could turn an idea jam into dozens of concept sketches that made me vibrate with joy at how lived in the world of Daggerheart is.”
Rezendes says this dedication to visual diversity was “first and foremost” for the production team. A secondary goal for Rezendes as a producer was to “reset the default of what a protagonist looks like depicted in tabletop game arcs.” To do that, Rezendes kept an intricate spreadsheet. “We tracked in every single art piece, gender representation, age, ability, body type, ethnicity, Ancestry, Community, Heritage, which is a blend of both real world demographics and Daggerheart‘s demographics specifically. We had it from every intersectional mathematical possibility. Because queer people are also disabled. They also are POC. They also are elderly. Inclusivity is all inclusive. You can’t divorce it from one another. Being depicted in the art felt like you belong on this page, you belong in this piece, you belong in this game, you belong at this table, that’s what we wanted to do. That’s what we worked so hard to try to do.”
In making this game, Rezendes — who has designed introductory RPG games like The Session Zero System through her own company Mythic Grove Productions — says the most important aspect of this game has been ensuring “that people who have not been centered are centered and they’re centered by people in their own community. I wanted to be able to put art on a page that would have made me feel safe telling the kind of stories I wanted to when I was younger and was dipping my toes in this world. We consulted with a ton of folks to be able to make sure that in our attempt, we were doing that with kindness. We were doing it powerfully. And we were doing it with the biggest invitation that we possibly could. Like, come and play. Come and play.”
