New Daggerheart-compatible classes - teasers and WIP (Patreon)

One of the parts of creating new material for use with the Daggerheart rules I'm especially excited about is class design. I've seen people making new classes and posting them on r/daggerheart and elsewhere, and it's fun to see what approaches people take.

I've got some ideas of my own, which I'll be sharing here as WIPs with the hope that you'll try them out in your own games and let me know how they work for you. I love what Darrington Press is doing with the Void, and I know that my own playtesting for these classes will be on a much smaller scale due to being an individual creator.

To get the ball rolling, here's a preview of some of my ideas for new Daggerheart-compatible classes, with one more fleshed-out WIP at the end, including a mockup of one of the subclasses using the card creator.

Warden
Domains: Sage & Valor
Durable combatants that draw upon the power of nature itself to protect what they love. Often accompanying Druids and Rangers, Wardens are renowned for their ability to hold ground and draw the attention of their foes.

Champion
Domains: Blade & Splendor
Champions are holy warriors bound by oaths to a greater power, fueled by righteousness and charged with striking down the power’s greatest enemies. Their divine might manifests in a powerful battle aura that bolsters their blows and those of allies.

Cursed
Domains: Midnight and Valor
Cursed heroes are rare. Afflicted with a powerful magical curse, their fears and faults have been literalized into a Monstrous form that lays their flaws bare. But those that can maintain self-control gain incredible power to devastate their foes and take punishment for their allies.

Sigilist
Domains: Arcana & Splendor
Sigilists study the runic language of creation and carve those powerful words into objects to imbue them with incredible power. Sigilists are highly sought-after for their ability to magnify the power of their allies’ gear as well as for their versatile spellcasting.

And last but not least, here's a WIP version of what might be my favorite idea for a new class:

Adept
Domains: Arcana & Bone
Adepts pursue excellence by focusing their magical power inward to enhance their physical and mental capabilities. Adepts are often hard to identify until they suddenly manifest superhuman feats of strength, speed, or cunning.

Starting Evasion
12

Starting HP
6

Class Item
Magical tattoos or a philosophy manual

Hope Feature
Brilliance: Spend 3 Hope to gain add advantage to all rolls with trait of your choice until you fail a roll using that trait or your next rest.

Class Feature
Internalized Power: At the end of a Long Rest, you can choose imbue one of your domain cards, flipping it face-down and choosing a trait (write the trait in the space below). Place a number of tokens on the card equal to its tier and gain a bonus to all rolls with the selected trait equal to the number of tokens on the imbued card.

While imbued, this card cannot be used or vaulted until your next long rest, at which point all imbued cards flip face-up. You may only have one card imbued at a time.

Subclasses
Choose either the Boundless or Prodigy subclasses.

Boundless
Play the Boundless if you want to maximize your internalized power to reach mythic potential.

Spellcast Trait: Agility

Foundation Features
Limitless: Once per rest, you may spend 2 Hope to replace your Hope die with a d20 for a single roll.

Freedom of Movement: While you have a card imbued, you gain advantage on Agility rolls in dangerous situations to move beyond Close distance as part of an action or when moving is your entire action.

Specialization Features
Eruption: Make a Spellcast Roll against any number of targets within Close. On a success against at least one target, you may clear imbued on a card to unleash a magical blast dealing d20 magic damage to all targets you succeed against with a number of dice equal to the tier of the imbued card.

Versatility: You may imbue a domain card at the end of any rest.

Mastery Feature
Superior Internalization: You may have up to two cards imbued at once and imbue two cards at the same time. Any given trait can only gain a bonus from one imbued card at a time.

Prodigy
Play the Prodigy if you want to channel power into your experiences to face any challenge.

Spellcast Trait: Instinct

Foundation Features
Quick Study: When you gain a new experience, it begins at +3. If you take this subclass at level 1, your starting experiences begin at +3.

Certainty of Expertise: Once per rest, after you make an action roll, you may spend a Hope to utilize an experience and apply its bonus.

Specialization Features
Unconscious Competence: When you would roll a result with Fear on an action roll that utilized one of your experiences, you can mark a Stress to turn it into a result with Hope.

Omnicompetence: When you select the level advancement “Permanently add +1 to two of your experiences”, you may add +1 to three of your experiences instead.

Mastery Feature
Arcane Contingency: You may clear imbued from a card to exchange that card with a card of equal or lower level from the Arcana or Bone domains until the end of the session.

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Design commentary - The Adept is my attempt to carve out some new design space using the physicality of domain cards and keeping in mind the design principles of "Make the Game Tactile" and "Limit Cognitive Load" as seen in the Homebrew Kit. The idea of flipping the domain card face down and trading its use for a bonus draws from my extensive (and expensive, lol) experience with collectible/trading card games. More generally, the Adept is a class that trades breadth for depth, sacrificing one of the powerful domain card abilities or spells in order to enhance their core traits. The Adept is partially inspired by the Physical Adepts from Shadowrun and by the character of Lune from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and how that game makes magic physical by having characters inscribe pictos (more or less spells) on their skin in sigils and tattoos.

I'm already playing a fair bit of Daggerheart, so getting another game up and running to playtest these classes would be a bit of a stretch, especially since we're playing in Demiplane, which does not yet support homebrew. But if you're interested in playtesting the Adept or any of my forthcoming new classes for the Daggerheart rules set, let me know!

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This product includes materials from the Daggerheart System Reference Document 1.0, © Critical Role, LLC. under the terms of the Darrington Press Community Gaming (DPCGL) License. More information can be found at https://www.daggerheart.com. There are no previous modifications by others.