Ben M | Periapt Games

2. There's magic, but no underlying rules / constraints for the GM to fall back on / remember when making rulings.
3. Daggerheart doesn't say whether its implied metaphysics are meant to constrain campaign frames. Gives no guidance, but has lots of customise/collaborate/reskin sentiment throughout.

My 3 main takeaways:
1. Daggerheart's gods are mortal and aren't very tied to religion. There are only a few mentions of worship (e.g. p. 313), and this isn't necessary even for their chosen champions. If there's belief in gods other than the ones that literally exist, the frames don't go into it.

The text falls short of saying that other gods (and planes) don't literally exist, but it's presented as plausible that it's all indistinguishable-from-magic advanced technology giving rise to some god-like phenomena. Motherboard is a "master program" left behind by ancient technomancers, etc.

Only one campaign frame even arguably departs from the base metaphysics. In Motherboard, magic is ancient technology, and everything is reskinned accordingly.

The Motherboard is worshipped as a New God analogue.

Faint Divinities are ghosts in the machine.

This is the only mention in the book of gods being interested in worship, let alone needing it!

Gods are person-like, with allies, alignments, & interests. Surprisingly, a domain is a day job: Qui’Gar presides over deaths amongst brambles, and the current magical verdancy has "made her job harder".

The Faint Divinities "wander the land as incarnate beings, residing in both the natural world as well as within homes and small villages. [...] there is a constant push and pull between the goals of people and their deific neighbors. The gods must curry worship from mortals [...]"

This frame reinforces the mortality of the gods, featuring a successful deicide (Shun’Aush) and a physicality to their powers (the bodily dust of a dead god gives rise to a plague; the god Nikta’s two eyes are individually responsible for ripening and ruination; maiming a god changes their powers).

like this, fundamentally compatible with Daggerheart’s underlying metaphysics, but deeply additive. So is Colossus of the Drylands (especially if we take the "myths" on pages 308–310 to be true).

There's a particular wealth of details in The Witherwild campaign frame.

That's all the fundamental facts about the cosmos implied by Daggerheart's core rulebook. Let's finally take a peek at the campaign frames to see what happens.

We quickly find that these commit to the same ideas, but often expand them. The Age of Umbra (as laid out on pages 281, 284, 287, 288) is

huge physical differences between groups and their ability to have children together even when e.g. made of metal or fungus. But the ground truth isn't stated.

According to "stories" the gods created the world (page 12) and so likely people as well, but this doesn't carry much epistemic weight.

Various fantastical creatures exist but only through mention in the text: undead, "Outer Realms" monsters, etc. "Nature spirits" are mentioned on pages 183, 230, 283, 338, and 339.

Daggerheart's people seem unlikely to have evolved biologically and ancestries don't work genetically, given the

No canonical word on magic's origin, ground rules, systematisation, relationship to divine powers, etc.

The collection of spells in the domain cards implies various fundamental constraints (about e.g. magnitude) that would be visible in-world, the same as in any TTRPG, but these aren't called out.

There's not much to glean about the underpinnings of magic. It's
→ very powerful
→ very dangerous
→ environmentally ambient
→ innate and heritable in some cases (p. 46)
→ possible to cultivate with a skill component

It can be acquired and developed with study, tools, and taking supplements (p. 50).

If they want to leave they have to make a great sacrifice, and there's an implied symmetry for entering the Hallows Above. In general, accessing and traversing the Realms Beyond from the Mortal Realm needs "specialised knowledge and hard-learned skills", which some beings in the core realms have.

It's an intrinsic property of the Hallows Above that they are "closely connected with most other realms" (page 11), and because of that the gods "can see and speak with the creatures of the Mortal Realm without leaving their domain". This is presented as a strict limitation.

And as I mentioned, not immortal. From page 250 of the core rules, a person might "breach the gates" of the Hallows Above, and slay one or more gods to take their power. The mortality of the gods is emphasised several times by the campaign frames (e.g., page 255).

Daggerheart also has little to say about worship or organised religion. Even seraphs don't need to share their god's ethos(!)

The reluctance to commit to making any particular detail true by default within the fiction makes the gods feel like alien superpowers, just sort of there.

Daggerheart presents the gods as literally existing, but makes no mention of any afterlife. There’s a definite impression that the Hallows Above and Circles Below are just places where gods happen to live.

Faint Divinities are lesser deities created by both the Forgotten and New Gods "to oversee the Mortal Realm." They have narrow spheres of influence. Some campaign frames have the Faint Divinities physically present in the Mortal Realm.

New Gods can also appoint seraphs "imbued with sacred purpose".

Forgotten Gods banished to the Circles Below become Fallen Gods. Temples to the Fallen Gods still exist (page 102), and it is possible to have a “direct channel” to them (page 106) or encounter them as adversaries (page 235). Most other information about them is presented as "stories" or "rumours".

who fought and defeated them. Many Forgotten Gods were imprisoned in the Mortal Realm or the Circles Below. Other parts of the text state that gods can be slain despite calling them "immortals", so presumably that's what happened to the others (but there's room for some to have joined the New Gods).

➡️ There are "countless" Realms Beyond in the cosmos. The Chaos Realm (page 250), an "otherworldly space where the laws of reality are unstable", may be one.

Gods from the Hallows Above intermingled with mortals in The Earliest Age, "millennia" ago. First came the Forgotten Gods, then the New Gods

➡️ The Hallows Above formerly belonged to the Forgotten Gods and is now home to the New Gods.

➡️ The Circles Below are where many of the Forgotten Gods are banished, becoming Fallen Gods.

part of the rules, and which the core book's campaign frames all respect.

What's stated? What can be inferred?

Most information of course comes from the “World Overview” in Chapter 1.

➡️ The Mortal Realm is a plane, home to “the majority of material beings and objects” and the Faint Divinities.

As I familiarise myself with #Daggerheart I've been keeping notes on the implied metaphysics.

The text makes a solid attempt at being setting-free fantasy, with all that entails for the minimalism of the implied setting. We can nevertheless glean some metaphysical elements that are systemically

Text saying "You've read your last free article."

Jacked action hero with goon in headlock, in raspy yet firm voice:

If LLM boosters were so confident in their tools. they wouldn't be ashamed to put "made with AI" on their stuff. They would consider it a badge of excellence.

The simple fact that they try to hide it tells you everything you need to know.

Speedrun that incidentally proves P ≠ NP

Dangling charger cable

'Cos lettuce' is short for cosine lettuce