This is the first Daggerheart homebrew I made. Funnily enough, it was inspired by a Ginny Di video where she was talking about Daggerheart classes and pleaded with Darrington Press to make a necromancer. I've always liked necromancers conceptually and I was really intrigued by the Daggerheart system and the relative ease of homebrew so I thought I'd give it a try!

I browsed some reddit posts to see what people were doing to make a necromancer within the core rules and the most popular answer was to use the Beastbound ranger and reskin the Companion as an undead creature. This became the basis of the Undead Servant, the core feature of my Necromancer. I wanted it to function similarly but have a very different tone. Where the Companion is an ally and partner, the Undead Servant is a tool, to be discarded and remade as necessary. Mechanically, this differentiation is represented by the fact that the Undead Servant has Hit Points rather than Stress, is destroyed utterly when it marks its last one, and you can use any corpse to make a new one.

For me, raising the dead is an inseparable part of the fiction of the necromancer. I wanted to create a class that could slay their enemies and then raise them in undead servitude to accomplish their goals. In creating subclasses, I wanted to make each break the rules of the Undead Servant in different ways. For the Undead Commander, this was obvious: raise more than one at a time! For the Death Diviner (a name I took from a song title from my favorite Swedish melodic death metal band) I decided to look up what a real-life historical necromancer was all about. What I found was that practitioners tried to communicate with the dead mainly for knowledge and predicting the future. Hence, this subclass's distinction was they could speak with their Undead Servants, even questioning them about their former lives.

I originally planned on using the Codex and Midnight domains. However, when reading the domain descriptions, I saw that Splendor said "followers gain the ability to heal and, to an extent, control death" and that they have the "ability to both give and end life." This really resonated with me. This was the type of necromancer I wanted to make: one who controls the entire cycle of life and death and could subvert it with undeath. That, coupled with the fact that Splendor had access to some classic necromancy abilities like speaking to the dead (Final Words), made me decide that I needed Splendor as one of my domains. The problem was, Codex and Splendor were already the wizard's domains, plus, reading through the Codex cards, most of them didn't really feel like necromancy to me (I'm sure many could be re-flavored to better resemble necromancy but on a surface reading most didn't feel like necromancer spells). So I dropped Codex. Midnight was fine but it was around this time that the Void released the Dread domain and this felt waaaaay more in line with the vibe I wanted. So, the domains became Splendor and Dread.

After posting my first draft on reddit, nearly every feature underwent significant changes thanks to feedback from redditors and some playtesting I did on the class. I'm pretty happy with where it is now but I always appreciate feedback. If you have feedback, the best place to post it is in the comments of the Reddit link below.

The class is more complex than most Daggerheart classes, particularly the Undead Commander, who can control up to 5 Undead Servants at once. This is partly due to my ttrpg experience, which is primarily Pathfinder 1e, but I think it is also the nature of the necromancer. In my opinion, raising the dead is inevitably going to be somewhat mechanically complex in order to be satisfying. I wanted undead that I could command to do other things besides attack my enemies. I wanted to get creative! So, that's what this class is about. How many different problems can you solve by throwing undead minions at it? Is there any you CAN"T solve?

Some notes: the cover art is public domain (The Shade of Samuel Invoked by Saul by Nikiforovich Dmitry Martynov). The price of this product is free because this is also all available for free on the r/daggerbrew subreddit. Link is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/daggerbrew/comments/1nun2b7/homebrew_class_dread_and_splendor_necromancer_v12/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Thanks for reading!

Update log:

Nov 11, 2025 - update 1.4

1. changed Thanatological Scholar (expanded advantage to identifying as well as learning about undead creatures. Removed bonus d4 damage)
2. updated wording of Summon Specter to improve clarity and fixed typo
3. changed Cadaver Collector to 1+tier instead of just tier
4. updated wording of Undead Horde to improve clarity
5. added photos to subclass cards (public domain: Vojtech Klimkovič and Fanny Schertzer)
6. added updated character sheets (two boxes on Quick level-up option were missing)

Jan 22, 2026 - update 1.5

1. Updated Undead Servant Experiences for ease of choice, balance between subclasses, and streamlining (Servants now have one Experience shared by all and one that is unique to them). Updated wording on "Determine their Experiences" and "Leveling Up" sections.
2. Removed last line from Speak with the Dead. The caveat about multiple attempts to ask the same question not yielding new results was a carry-over from before I put a limit on how many questions you could ask. I don't believe it is needed. Plus, this saves space on the card.
3. The Specter now gets an additional Experience at a +3 bonus, representing who it was in life. This is to increase the utility of the Specter and bring the classes more in line with each other in amount of available unique Experiences.
4. Removed Advanced Reanimator. The Specter is, in and of itself, more than an additional level-up option. This felt unneeded and took up too much space on the card.
5. Removed Hope cost from Foresight. You already have to sacrifice your Undead Servant for a reroll, which is not a guaranteed success. With the Hope cost, this felt too expensive for not enough benefit.
6. Changed the "Experiences" section of the character sheet to reflect the changes.
7. Huge shout-out to Reddit user u/Old-Ad6753 for the feedback that brought about these changes.