February Platform Updates

Hey everyone 👋🏼 Matt here from Heart of Daggers

We’re back with our February platform update! Alongside a bunch of Character Creator changes and a lot of polish + QoL work, we’ve just finished a major new Encounter Manager feature. We’ve also included a massive collection of Images + Icons for homebrew usage. Many of these changes were inspired by our awesome Discord community – thank you to our almost 900 members.

Ok… here we go…

1) Encounter Stages (new!)

Stages let you build multiple rooms or phases inside a single encounter. Instead of creating and bouncing between separate encounters for a location, you can now keep everything contained and move through it step by step.

Each stage has its own adversaries and environments
You can name stages so it’s clear what’s in each “room”
Stages can be rearranged
Battle points are calculated per stage, so you can quickly check balance as move

The goal here was to make longer scenes, dungeons, hexcrawls, and multi-room areas easier to run without juggling tabs or duplicating encounters. We think this one’s going to change how a lot of your sessions flow.

2) Our Character Creator gets so much better

Our Character Creator has passed 3,500 character creations in just over a month, and we’ve continued refining the experience.

We’ve also commissioned 200+ character portraits for the Character Creator, covering every Ancestry + Class combination – and more. Some of these are already available to select for free!

Character Creator UI overhaul. Looks much more… Daggerhearty.
Campaign frame support was added to Character Creator for Motherboard, Colossus of the Drylands, Beast Feast, The Age of Umbra, and The Witherwild. More on these later.
Death Moves and Scars now trigger automatically when you mark your final HP, including scar tracking and hope loss.
Characters can be saved as premades after creation.
Trackers were updated to properly support per-session and per-rest usage.
New Visual Mode! View class, subclass, heritage, and domain cards in a beautiful Daggerheart-style layout. You can even add custom cards… We love this mode, and can see this being used for deep roleplay moments.
Domain Ability cards now include roll to hit, roll for damage, and trackers to make dealing damage and tracking expenses easier.
New portraits: 20 custom commissioned character portraits are now available during creation (with 170+ more in production to cover every ancestry + class combination). We also have all 9 Class artworks being delivered soon, too.
New inventory system lets you add weapons, armor, items, and consumables directly from the SRD.
Weapons and armor can be equipped directly from inventory, with stats updating instantly and no refreshes.
Consumables can be consumed (makes sense, right?) from inventory and automatically roll and apply their effects.
Armor and weapon UI was redesigned for smoother management and searching.
200 weapon icons and 35 armor icon sets (with tiered variations) have been maticulously mapped to each core Daggerheart item.
Item and consumables icons: 160+ item and consumable icons were added so every item and consumable has an icon. So pretty… oOOooo… AAaaaAAaa…

3) Campaign & Encounter improvements

Campaigns now have a global Fear tracker that stays synchronized across all linked encounters.
Players can roll directly inside encounters and still see all of their character details at a glance.
GMs can now see additional character stats during encounters.
Dice rolls are fully synchronized between players and GMs, so everyone sees the same results.
Dice feedback was redesigned to show totals and roll breakdowns instantly.
You can now roll multiple dice together! Super smooth.
Characters can now be removed from encounters when needed.
GMs can send SRD or Homebrew Vault items directly to player inventories
Campaign rolls are now synchronized from character sheets. Players can roll directly from their sheet and the results will appear for the GM (and everyone else) in the campaign page.

Upscaling Improvements: we’re now upscaling using a mix of the Core Rule Book guidance and Chris Davidson’s Making Custom Adversaries approach. The upscaled results are now based on the adversary type.

4) Homebrew Vault

The Homebrew Vault received major UI and UX updates.
NEW Colossus Builder is now available when creating an adversary. Add segments, their features, and what they’re connected to.
Homebrew creations can be tagged to campaign frames for easier filtering. This will allow you to find the perfect homebrew items for your current frames.
SRD Lookup search results are now more accurate (Command/Control + K).
Icons, icons, icons: Homebrew Vault now includes 2000+ (!!!) custom handcrafted icons across adversaries, weapons, armor, items, consumables, and domains.
Domain card art: domains now have their own icon gallery, and you can attach art to each domain card using a new Image Selector with 400+ images designed just for domains.
Extend Core Domains: You can select a core domain to attach cards to, letting you expand the base Daggerheart domains even further.

5) Campaign Frame Support (new!)

A bunch of new frame-specific tools and systems are now live in the Character Creator:

Motherboard: build your own Ikonis weapons, with 25+ weapon icons, naming, crafting, augment attachment, scrap management, plus icons for each augment and scrap category. (we got a bit carried away, but it’s really thematic and fun to use!)
The Witherwild: mark withered tokens on your character with a corrupted Withered tracker.
Colossus of the Drylands: create and manage your mount, including name and description.
Beast Feast: ingredient collector with 100+ beast and bloom icons, a complete ingredient tracker, and a recipe creator (name, ingredients, method, outcome). Sharing recipes with players (and the GM) is coming soon. This was so super fun to make… the ingredient icons look delicious (try not to lick your screen).
The Age of Umbra: deal additional damage for each scar your character has accumulated.
More support on the way, especially for Campaigns.

6) Daggerheart Artist Guild (new!)

We’ve also launched the Daggerheart Artist Guild.

It’s a living directory where artists can be discovered by style and portfolio, and where creators can quickly find the right fit for homebrew projects. Artists get a dedicated profile with their gallery and links, and we’ll be spotlighting featured artists in outreach emails to our subscribers.

As always, our marketplace remains strictly AI-free and focused on supporting real creators. If you’re an artist – or know a really great one – applications are now open: https://heartofdaggers.com/artist-guild/

7) We are growing…

Over $23k generated for homebrew creators since August! This is crazy…
3500+ Homebrew Vault creations (1,200+ public).
700+ campaigns, 3500+ characters, 200+ adventures, and 3,000+ encounters created.
We consumed way too much coffee last month. You’re really keeping us on our toes…

Encounter Stages are something we’re especially keen to see people use, and we’ll be iterating on it heavily based on feedback.

I know update posts are never the most exciting read, so thanks for making it to the bottom 🙂 If you want to share thoughts, give feedback, or connect with other Daggerheart creators, GMs, and players, you can join us here: https://discord.gg/xnJJ6epx8v