The campaign frame: a beautifully simple way to do a campaign setting that doesn’t require hours of reading. No shade to those amazingly in-depth settings from other games! I love detailed worldbuilding. But sometimes my players want a fantasy western for a one-shot this weekend, and I need an aesthetic with accompanying stat blocks ASAP. Enter Colossus of the Drylands.
Yet while the official Daggerheart campaign frames cover a solid range of fantasy worlds and gameplay styles, the concept begs for community creations. And the community has provided. If you’re looking for inspiration for your next Daggerheart campaign, take a gander at some of the best Daggerheart campaign frames from indie creators.
Bastion Of Hope
One of the best sellers on creator marketplace Heart of Daggers, and for good reason. The Bastion of Hope campaign frame gets stellar reviews for its evocative artwork and intriguing setting. It also helps that veteran creator Mike Underwood added extra mechanics in the form of divine boons. The premise sees players rebelling against an all-powerful ruling class of dragons and mages with magitech thrown in for good measure.
Beach Party Summer
Take a break from fantasy, overthrowing evil empires, and all that high stakes stuff with a beach episode! Or even a beach mini-campaign. This frame from Steve Mayne hearkens back to classic surf movies complete with random daily surf contests. There are even simple mechanics to determine weather and the ferocity of the waves.
Cursed Sands
GMs who love creating their own items and dungeons will dig Cursed Sands. The pitch is that ancient tombs seal the weapons of gods, and you must claim their power before they are unsealed. There’s material for tomb raiding action in the vein of The Mummy, or epic mythological battles a la God of War. Creator Jackrabbit Press also created rules for making your own cursed relics and bastions, so you can go wild with making Cursed Sands your own.
Lost Lands
Dinosaurs! Need I say more? The Lost Lands comes from Ettin Entertainment, who have something of a series available on Heart of Daggers. The Lost Lands frame takes you to a newly-discovered land teeming with big jungle plants and even bigger reptiles. Yet fortune seekers are looking to capitalize on the discovery, bringing steel to hack into this exotic nature. Nature fights back, and Ettin Entertainment puts a big focus on cooking up tough Adversary stat blocks for dinos of all shapes and sizes.
Starbreaker
Everyone loves free stuff, right? Aside from the appealing price, though, Starbreaker delivers the sci-fi space setting many Daggerheart players are looking for. Inspiration is taken from stories of corpo-run space such as Alien, Andor, and Helldivers 2. Campaigns can run the gambit of company intrigue to blasting monsters with customized high-tech weapons. Users praise the clean layout and easy-to-run space combat rules.
Bureau Of Chronological Affairs
If you’re looking for a Daggerheart game in the style of Control or the Disney+ oki series, the Bureau Of Chronological Affairs is hiring. This content-rich 62-page frame puts players in fluorescent-lit halls of a time agency, tasked with resolving paradoxes. There’s a new death move that allows characters to essentially reset their personal time loop, making way for a roguelike video game feel. The creator even put in a theme-appropriate new class called Agent. BCA is a very unique, complete package.
Demonheart
This one technically goes beyond the realm of campaign frame and into a full-fledged setting. However, it also represents a huge milestone for Daggerheart by being a whole product line built for the game. This isn’t just Dungeons & Dragons 5E content also built for Daggerheart; Demonheart is an adventure, 66 subclasses, seven new domains, and more. The creators insist that their version of Hell is classic and universal, so you could use Demonheart with any frame you like. But the story is definitely that of doomed souls risking temptation to escape a fiery fate, so you still know exactly what kind of game you’re getting.
Ameraldi Coast
A tough thing to nail in creating a campaign setting is a good map. Some of us are skilled with Inkarnate, can actually draw, or have professional connections. The rest of us, though, rely on what we can find or buy. Thankfully, the creator of Ameraldi Coast thought to include plenty of maps for their pirate campaign frame. There’s variants with/without text, ones marked with treasure locations, unlabeled maps for players, and even a ghost world. The actual campaign frame includes special rules for deep sea horrors and a bounty system.
And that’s just a taste of what people out there are creating! The community on the Daggerheart subreddit and Heart of Daggers are always adding new ideas, and you should definitely be checking them out. No doubt future Daggerheart expansions will inspire even more campaign frames. And the professional Game Masters here on Startplaying are creating new stories every day, so come play Daggerheart like you’ve never seen it before!
