Greetings adventurer! I recently ran the Daggerheart quickstart adventure a few times and had some thoughts on the accessibility for online play on Roll20 and Demiplane. I've started offering it professionally as a learn-to-play and have come up with some resources that I will share for you to use as well if you are so inclined to run the adventure. You can find everything here in a google drive, and I've edited some of the wording in the adventure below, but first some notes on how to set up.
Setting up your Roll20 and Demiplane
You do not necessarily need a pro Roll20 or Demiplane account to run or play this adventure. A free account will give you access to the adventure on Demiplane and ability to run on the VTT. You can connect your Roll20 account to your Demiplane account in the Demiplane account settings under "Sync Accounts". You can have up to six characters for free on Demiplane which is enough for the pregens. Once you created the pregens in Demiplane you can port them over in the journal tab (drop-down on +Character > Link Demiplane Character). Once you've ported them you can assign them to players or players can import their own sheets.
Unfortunately, you cannot roll from the adversary stat-block on Demiplane, I saw somewhere that it is in the works, along with porting adversaries into Roll20, but not at the time of writing this. So you have to create the statblocks in the generic NPC sheets. For the attributes on NPCs I used HP, Stress and the Thresholds for the Token bars. For the PCs I used, Evasion, stress and HP. You count up for HP and stress, so it set to zero out of the max. I made a separate NPC sheet and token for Fear with a red bar of X/12 for fear that I made visible to everyone. I used this guide by fellow ProGM DM_Sphinx to make the token actions for easy rolling.
The Sablewood Messengers Remastered
I changed some of the wording to better fit the experience for the VTT rather than in-person play, and some other things that bugged me.
The Sablewood Messengers
“King Emeris of the lands Coruga, has tasked you to carry an important package to Hush, a small village within the ancient forest of Sablewood. The crate is large, heavy and sealed with magic, addressed to the Whitefire Arcanist. You’ve been given a map and a carriage, and the promise of reward upon your arrival.”
Marlowe Fairwind
"She is an apprentice mage in King Emeris’ court and is responsible for bringing this group together. She appears calm, until she isn’t."
I am not sure why there is this "main character" and has-to-be-there vibe for Marlowe but it is unnecessary for a learn-to-play adventure, in my opinion. Also, how is she the King's high mage at level 1? Odd, there is barely any reference to that later on, unlike the Fabula Ultima press start adventure where different things can happen in various scenes based on which of the characters are present.
Mechanical Overview
The physical sheets and sidecars are not useful here if you are playing with Demiplane sheets, so I’ve adjusted the text below accordingly:
“We’re going to quickly cover the basics of what you need to know to start playing. First off, Daggerheart is a collaborative, narrative-focused roleplaying game. That means we'll all be working together to tell a story using the mechanics of the game as our foundation. You will each make choices for your characters during the adventure, and I will describe the rest of the world reacting around them. Sometimes I might ask you a question—what your character knows about a place or has heard about a person. I'll do my best to integrate your answers into the story we're telling, so that we're building this world together!
Okay, open your Character Sheet on Demiplane or on Roll20 by going to the journal tab and clicking on your character. Click the ‘i - show hints button’ to find information on what the various sections represent. On Roll20, you might want to pop out your character sheet window by pressing the arrow button on top and then expanding to reveal the how hints button. You might also want to show it as a tab instead of a separate window.”
Take a screenshot of Marlowe’s Demiplane sheet and use it as a Roll20 scene. It's best if the GM reads instead of going around the table, as suggested, as they can point and pull the camera viewpoint as they go.
Action Rolls
“Now that we’ve looked at our character sheets, let’s talk about how we roll the dice in Daggerheart. I’ll give you the basics, and we’ll learn more as we go! Every action roll you make usually includes 2 d12s; on Demiplane, the yellow dice represents hope and the blue dice represents fear.
When you have your character do something in the story that is dangerous or could result in consequences, I'll probably ask you to make an action roll. You’ll roll both of those d12 dice, and add the applicable character trait to the result. I’ll usually tell you which one it is, but sometimes I might ask you what you think.
Let’s say you are making an Agility roll and you have a +2 in that trait— For example, if you rolled a 6 on the Hope die and a 10 on the Fear die, that would be 16, plus the 2, bringing it to a total of 18. Because the Fear die rolled higher, you would tell me that you got an "18 with Fear."
Hover over the number beneath your agility score on the Demiplane sheet, for Marlowe it's a +0, 2 dice, and a + sign will appear, click on the number and a dialogue box will appear on the bottom right of the window. Then hit roll in the dialogue box to roll the check; ignore the other buttons for now.
If you roll with Hope, you mark a Hope on your sheet. If you roll with Fear, I gain a Fear and can make a GM move. This means I get to impact the flow of the narrative, usually to add some kind of complication to the scene. I start the game with a number of Fear equal to the number of players.”
To help track fear, create a character in Roll20 called fear, and upload a picture of your liking for it. In its Attributes and Abilities tab, create an attribute called fear, set the max to 12 and the current to the number of players. Hit the edit button and then edit token properties. Make Bar 3, i.e. the red bar, the Fear attribute, click on the three dots and click player permissions, check “See” and select “visible to everyone” in the text overlay. Then drop the token on the scene to show everyone.
The next box text is fine to read as is. The “How Dice Rolls Affect the Story” and “Combat” sections are also mostly fine as is, but you can change “I'll put a map of some kind on the table to show where everybody is” to “I’ll bring you to a Battlemap scene to show where everybody is”. The rest of the text is just mostly narrative stuff, so likely doesn't need changing.
You, of course, won’t be using standees and terrain but tokens and maps. You can use this tutorial to help build adversaries in Roll20 https://youtu.be/nreo4xyZQE4?si=yulFwEBleJAIB7RO .
I have created scenes and battlemaps in Dungeon Alchemist and generated artwork for the various characters using the Alias artist model in Mythweaver, the ethical TTRPG AI image generator. If you are not into that then I suggest using the original black-and-white artwork with differently coloured backgrounds and stamp some tokens from them with at https://rolladvantage.com/tokenstamp/. Alternatively there is an artist that has created some custom artwork for the adventure over at https://ko-fi.com/juaninart/shop. There was also a user on Reddit (Appropriate_Eye1183) that coloured-in the artwork for the pregens for tokens here: https://www.reddit.com/r/daggerheart/comments/1ljvzgv/made_some_tokens_for_the_quickstarter_oneshot/.
Other notes:
As mentioned above I removed the Marlowe being the main character thing
The adventure doesn’t give a name for the Whitefire Arcanist so I named her “Aruna Whitefire”
The is unofficial fan content permitted under the Darrington Press CGL https://darringtonpress.com/license/
