Daggerheart is the new hotness in the RPG world. Not only is it backed by the ever-popular Critical Role crew – based on the feedback so far, it seems to be a genuinely well-designed game. According to some, it does D&D better than D&D. So, despite my own advice, I decided to check it out.
I’ll write more about the game itself in the near future but for now, I’d like to focus on one aspect of Daggerheart that really piqued my interest: its approach to fantasy races.
Race is a touchy subject, both in real life and in RPGs, to the point that the traditional term itself is now frowned upon. D&D 2024 renamed them as species, and Daggerheart uses the term ancestries. If you’re reading this, you surely already know it but let me spell it out all the same: we are talking about the various sapient beings inhabiting the game world, such as humans, elves or dwarves.
I like the term ancestry better than species. It is more non-committal, avoiding the biological definition of species in terms of fertile offspring. If half-elves are a thing, and they can have children of their own, then elves and humans are biologically the same species. Ancestry seems to be the cleaner term.
Daggerheart has a dizzying array of playable ancestries. Certainly not at the level of the assorted options for character species from across D&D source books but eighteen ancestries in the core book is a lot. Especially once you realize they are all assumed to coexist within one world. Even more when you also realize that more options are in the works. As of this writing, there are 24 ancestries to choose from.
I’ll admit I grew immediately suspicious when I saw this. In real life, several human species once coexisted – but not for long. We (modern humans) interbred with them and then drove them to extinction. Biology teaches us that two species competing for the same niche are not a stable situation. Either one species will dominate or the other will evolve to exploit a different niche.
In traditional fantasy, the second option (niche separation) is accentuated. Dwarves live in the mountains where humans can’t function. Elves live in forests inhospitable to humans or dwarves. And so on1. Such a situation is plausible, and gives a logical explanation for multiple intelligent species.
In modern D&D play culture, though, people act as if they cannot see race (or species or ancestry, take your pick). You go to a random village and you find a dwarven innkeeper serving his human, tiefling and elven clientele – and they all live together in peace. Daggerheart seems to have grown from the same tradition.
In real world, humans are all one species. And yet racism, prejudice, and all that goes with it – up to and including genocide – is something we grapple with from the dawn of time. But we are supposed to believe that completely different species would live together in peace and blithely ignore their differences? I don’t think so2.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand the rule-of-cool approach that drives this. Joe wants to play a mighty orc and Rebecca wants to be a sexy elf (or vice versa). Who are we to deny them their fun for the sake of stupid realism? For some folks, this is also a form of therapy (or escapism – or both): grappling with racial prejudice in daily life, it can be liberating to escape to a world where that problem just doesn’t exist for a couple of hours. If this is your jam, feel free to ignore my nit picking. Personally, it takes away from my fun if I find glaring lapses of logic in the game world.
Let’s ignore the problem of prejudice for the moment. We still have to face the more basic problem of biology. Are humans, elves, etc. the same species? Can they have offspring together? Would their offspring be fertile? If yes, how long before they hopelessly intermingle into a homogenous, more-or-less half-elven average? If not, we have a different issue.
Most fantasy settings model premodern times with lower population densities. Most people live in villages or small towns. In such a situation, you don’t have too many options when it comes to seeking a mate. Now, imagine that your village is 50% humans and 50% pixies. Suddenly, your chances of passing on your genes dropped by half. And if you get 5 or 10 or 20 species living together in a village or in a small town? How long before everybody would simply die off for lack of children?
What a quagmire. There is a reason I typically gravitate towards human-only worlds (in the vein of sword-and-sorcery stories).
Daggerheart, radical and unapologetic in its approach, doesn’t care about any of that. We have around 20 ancestries living together, and the game straight up states that all of them can procreate without restriction, and player characters can have any number of them in their family tree. Through its use of cards, it also gently pushes the players towards picking a different ancestry each.
For some reason, such blatant disregard for all of the problems I have just stated creates a world I find more palatable, not less. Daggerheart brute-forces the issue, inviting me to embrace its magical roots. How else would you explain an orc-faun hybrid having children with a ribbet: an egg-laying intelligent amphibian? And then their children falling in love with sentient fungi and getting it on?
Daggerheart assumes a magic-first world. Out of all available character classes, only two are not spellcasters. It invites us to turn my back on the mundane and enter its world of wonder. It makes me a little uncomfortable. But it also makes me curious. It gets my gears spinning.
Perhaps this is the most sensible way to do it? After all, aren’t typical fantasy stories filled with bizarre ecologies, monstrous animal hybrids, etc.? Daggerheart treats its world as one big magical cauldron. And it’s starting to grow on me.
Hobbits in Tolkien’s work are less realistic, though: they sit on prime arable land, and for mysterious reasons, humans let them be despite being way larger and stronger.
For a taste of a more realistic vision read the Witcher books by Andrzej Sapkowski where elves integrated into the human society suffer from prejudiced and racist treatment.