Made-to-Measure AKA Archetype adventure design for Daggerheart (Patreon)

EDIT: I've added the current term of "Archetype" design to the title to make it easier for people to find my writing on the approach!
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Last week at PAXU, I got to experience the strong groundswell of excitement for Daggerheart at the con, bolstered by the reveal of the game's standard and deluxe edition covers as well as both a Friday afternoon panel revealing one of the game's campaign frames (Beast Feast, designed by Banana Chan, Rowan Hall, and Spenser Starke), which included a short actual play focused on fighting monsters to gather the materials to make a fantasy Philly Cheesesteak. It was great, go watch it here. You can hear me whooping and cheering from the audience at a couple of points. And of course, there was the Critmas Special where the Critical Role cast played a Christmas-themed one-shot using the final version of the Daggerheart rules.

So I've had Daggerheart on the mind again in a big way. And looking forward to the game's release and opening the floodgates to creators to make their own Daggerheart material, I got to thinking about designing adventures for Daggerheart.

Note: the following is a bunch of early thoughts that I'm getting out of my head. This is not Official Darrington Press Doctrine or Instructions From the Design Team or anything like that.

Measure Seven Times, Cut Once:
Made-to-Measure adventure design for Daggerheart

Most fantasy adventure game module writing is done such that a GM can run them for any number of combinations of different player characters. Especially those that are truly modular, meant to be one part of a larger campaign, dropped in when they’re level-appropriate as one segment in a chain of adventures or as a way to bridge between big arcs in a campaign.

These adventures are the off-the-rack clothing of module design – mass-produced to be a good-enough fit for a wide audience. It’s economical for both creators and players, and with some work, a party can make it work for their table. But it requires a goodly bit of additional work for the GM to tailor it to the party – they have to go in and make their own alterations without much assistance from the designers.

Some bigger campaign books (like the Dungeon Dudes’ Dungeons of Drakkenheim) and adventure series (like Paizo’s adventure paths) go a step beyond in providing a players’ guide that gives guidance on what kinds of PCs will best fit the adventure. This helps groups avoid the famous “I made a pirate character and we’re never going near a river, let alone an ocean” problem. This is like the clothing manufacturer giving detailed information about the garment's composition and using real sizing rather than vanity sizing. The adventure is more up-front about what it is and who it will fit.

And many tables eschew adventure modules entirely. Instead, the GM crafts a bespoke campaign every time, made to fit the party and the players and adjusted over time after several fittings (sessions).

Daggerheart is a game designed with the expectation that the campaign is about the player characters in a big way. The GM is encouraged to take the answers to the player characters’ background and connection questions as building blocks for creating the campaign. This allows for a story that focuses on the PCs and their story rather than a metaplot that would happen without them if they weren’t around.

So what do we do for the groups that don’t want to or don’t have the time for bespoke campaign construction?

Here’s how I think we can bridge the gap between current standards in adventure design and what works best for Daggerheart. While many Daggerheart tables will do bespoke campaign design and some will use the game’s campaign frames system (whether they’re playing official or third-party frames), there are going to be people that want a published adventure they can use for their group.

And if we (the game designer/adventure writer ‘we’) want to design in order to help those groups get the most out of Daggerheart as a game, I propose we think about a made-to-measure approach to adventure design.

What is Made-to-Measure design?

Made-to-measure adventure , for this essay’s purposes, is when you take the measurement of the roles the PCs can play in the adventure to be central to the story in the way that Daggerheart intends and provide clear information to the group of what is expected of those characters so that the players can pick the roles they want to play in the adventure.

Sidebar: the textiles metaphor here isn’t perfect, but this is a work-in-progress. And it’s a bit snappier of a title than ‘Adventures where you have player-made PCs but you make them to fit pre-written roles within the adventure that leave room for customization’. Other names I’ve considered for this are “Archetype Casting” and “Dramatis Persona”.

These are adventures where the roles for key players in the adventure are designed to be occupied by PCs, but come with some established details and identity so that the adventure can hold its shape. So that the adventure can be ABOUT the party, not just because they’re the people that answered the call, but because the players, GM, and adventure writer are able to collaborate on a fundamental level and that was the plan from the beginning.

Example: if your adventure has a major role for a Scion, the last of a noble line, needing to be involved to activate the Stygian Blade, a relic bound to that bloodline. But rather than have this be a quest-giver NPC, we have one of the PCs BE that Scion so that they're bought in and central to the story and so the other PCs are that much more closely tied to the story of the module. Especially when the module also has roles for some if not all of the other PCs to fit into.

Using this approach, the adventure writers can just reference the Scion by archetype/role rather than saying ‘The noble PC’ or ‘If you have a PC with a noble background’.

Made-to-Measure adventure design requires a lot of collaboration, both between the players and the GM and between the group and the adventure itself. In 99% of cases, the designers cannot be there with you at the table to make alterations (ala bespoke design), but they’re doing what they can to make the adventure flexible enough so that your table can make all the necessary adjustments to get the most out of the campaign.

To make this style work, players need to be okay with fitting their characters into the adventure on a fundamental level but also gives them a great deal of ownership over elements of the setting and the story. But the payoff is an adventure that feels like it was made FOR your PCs, because it was. You’re just meeting it halfway by making characters that fit how the adventure is designed.

What Daggerheart Already Does
The existing official Daggerheart adventures "The Sablewood Messengers" and "Marauders of Windfall" are both built with pre-gens in mind for ease of use, with Sablewood being purpose-built as a quickstart adventure and Marauders was the GenCon 2024 demo adventure (note: I worked on both of these and was the lead designer of "Marauders of Windfall").

Both adventures provide some options for customizing the pregen characters and making them your own, but "Marauders of Windfall" provides some additional prompts for how you might engage non-pregen PCs in a way that helps them feel like they’re part of the world (p. 23 – Act One, Part Two, under the ‘A Short Rest’ section).

So I’ll say thanks to Past Mike for creating this technique for stitching together the party and the adventure in a way that we can build on to develop a bigger adventure design framework. This will allow for original PCs AND ensure that they’re integrated into the world of the story while providing narrative agency to the players in how they create the characters and add details about the world.

Making it Work
The types of questions for personalization of these archetypes is already in the game. We can draw inspiration from the background and connection questions as well as the question prompts in campaign frames and can then write several prompts/questions that will let a player detail how they fit the role.

Returning to our example of the Scion, we might have prompts like:

• “How old were you when the rest of your family was taken from you? What joyful memories do you hold on to from before the house’s fall?”

• “What was your family’s territory known for? What was your crest?”

• “What rumors did you hear about the Stygian Blade and what reason did your family give for why it must be kept secret?”

Some of these archetypes may fit neatly with certain classes or communities, but ideally, they’re flexible enough to accommodate a variety of approaches. Your Noble Scion might have lost their family in youth, survived in a Slyborne community, and become a Rogue. Or they might be Highborne and lost their family in a battle during their youth, starting the campaign as a seasoned Warrior with the great loss some years in the past.

If and when I have more time, I want to flesh this idea out and write an example as a proof of concept. The Daggerheart creator license has not been published yet, so all of this development work will be free for the public, until that happens. I may eventually take this work and polish it to become a for-sale offering. Subscribers here will get whatever that version is if/when it comes (probably everyone at the $3 level and up).