From Obscurity: An Introduction to Daggerheart One-Shot

About the adventure

From Obscurity is a one-shot designed to have players improvise their character details as they play. The session introduces key Daggerheart mechanics while offering players opportunities to present, elaborate on, and collaborate with their fellow players on the foundational elements of their character concepts. Introduction: Your pulse throbs a terrible cadence behind your eyes as discordant notes resonate through your skull. You attempt to sit up; the world lurches before disappearing behind a veil of white that narrows to a pinhole. Bile rises in your throat. You clutch your mouth and suppress the urge to evict a meal you can’t recall consuming. Fragments of memories flicker forth, drawn from the darkest corners of your mind, but as you grasp for them, desperate for anything to anchor you in this moment, they defuse like ethereal whisps that would sooner be dispelled than arrested. Slowly, the haze across your vision dissipates, taking with it the pain, nausea, and noise. In the clarity that follows, you squint in the dim light of the chamber and realize you're not alone. Stained finery, vagabond cloaks, re-soled boots, and faded emblems of office hint at identities, perhaps as forgotten as your own. The visages of anger, confusion, fear, and resolve returning your gaze are familiar to you. However, before you can address one another, there is movement at the far end of the room. An entity seems to materialize from the very metal and stone of the walls. Your mind struggles to assign definite edges and angles as its mercurial structure shifts and twists, eventually settling on something vaguely humanoid. It regards you silently, with a face of alchemical glass and a torso adorned with radiant sigils. Your eyes scan over the sigils, and although you cannot read them, you comprehend their meaning, as if the knowledge to interpret the enigmatic text is innately carried in its form. It’s a name. Your name. And while you’ve understood little since awakening in this strange place; of this, at least, you are certain. The others around you appear to have grasped this same understanding and now begin to rise on unsteady feet to approach the construct. The sigils shift once more, communicating a simple message, “Confront your past. Secure your future.” before flaring so brightly that you must shield your eyes. The luminance halts abruptly, pitching the room back into darkness. The afterimages of prismatic lines linger in your vision while your eyes adjust to the chamber's meager light once more. The construct has long since departed, fusing back into the walls of the chamber, leaving you to find a means of egress for yourself. It is now that you turn your attention back to the others present with you. As your eyes meet, the vague sense of recognition should be unnerving, but it is instead reassurance that you feel. Certainty that you are each other's best hope to reclaim your stolen memories and escape this place before you are lost to obscurity.