Daggerheart happens out loud. Familiar writes it down.

What Foundryborne already tracks, and what it was never going to say

Start with how much of this is genuinely handled. A Duality roll is built as one throw and comes back knowing which die won it. The Fear pool has a GM-only tracker that broadcasts to the table or hides entirely, depending on how you like to play it. Countdowns advance themselves on six different triggers and split into short and long term. Domain cards move between a loadout and a vault, and the vault knows when the loadout is full. Adversaries arrive from the packs with tiers, motives and tactics on them, horde behaviour included. Vulnerable applies itself when Stress fills. Rests, downtime moves, level-up and the death moves are all in there.

One wrinkle worth knowing before you install anything: the two settings that let a Duality result move the Hope and Fear counts both ship switched off. Plenty of tables leave them there and move the counts by hand.

What that leaves is an unusual remainder. On most game systems the GM keeps the arithmetic and hopes to have attention left over for the table. Here the arithmetic is already gone, and so is a good deal of what usually keeps a scene moving, so nearly everything still on your side of the screen is performance and record: being four people in a row, and knowing what this table already made true.

What Familiar reads is your own world and nothing besides: the packs the system installed, the journals you wrote, and whatever your table made true last week.

• An Environment described as somewhere the party is standing, rather than read out as a card with a name on it
• The thing a player just invented about their own community, on a journal page in your world before the scene has finished
• That ferryman turning up four sessions later with the same name, the same debt and the same way of speaking

• The prep, read and run loopWhere the writing down actually happens in a session, and what it asks of you at the table.

The bookkeeping this game loses to its own best moments

This game asks a lot of a GM and almost none of it is preparation. Its own guidance would rather you invented situations than scripted scenes, and a session of prep here is closer to a skim than an evening. So nothing below is work to take off you before you sit down. It is all things that go missing during the sitting.

They have a shape in common, and it is the reason this system needed its own page. There is no turn order here. The spotlight moves with the fiction, which means the GM is mid-sentence more or less continuously, and every item on this list is something a GM reported losing precisely because they were doing the talking well.

They do not all land in the same place afterwards, either. Two of them your own system will take off you if you let it, since the Fear counts have settings that move them and countdowns advance on their own. Two are what Familiar is for. And one stays lost, for a reason the limits further down set out.

• Fear that should have gone up on a roll, and did not, because you were busy landing the consequence it arrived with
• A countdown that is out of sight, and a second one beside it that nobody can now tell apart from the first
• The Experience on a character sheet that would have been perfect for this exact moment, three minutes ago
• The question you asked the table about their own world, whose answer you meant to keep and wrote nowhere
• Which of the four identical Adversaries in that group has already been hit

Typed one-handed, in the middle of a scene

The table has just decided something you did not plan. Here is the whole ask, typed while they are still talking over each other. "They have decided the ferryman owes Kettle a favour from before the war. Put that in the journal, then give me the ferryman."

The note lands first, on a page in your own world, in the words the table used rather than a tidied-up version of them. That is the part nobody does at the time, and it is the part that decides whether any of this is still true the next time it comes up.

Then the ferryman arrives with the favour already inside him. He has one voice, he keeps it for as long as the crossing lasts, and he wants something the note now says he wants.

Four sessions later somebody asks what exactly the ferryman agreed to. The answer comes off that page, in the words that were typed that night, rather than out of a conversation that has scrolled a long way since.

The Duality roll, the Fear that comes with it, and the thresholds on whatever the ferryman turns out to be carrying all belong to the Foundryborne system. None of the above touches a die.

A game this new is a game a model only half knows

The vocabulary is the easy part. On a daggerheart world the terms come out right from the first request: Hope and Fear, a Duality roll, domain cards in a loadout and a vault, Adversaries and Environments, Experiences, the spotlight, Vulnerable and Hidden and Restrained. Ask about something in the rules and it looks through the compendium and the journals your world actually has, then leaves the call with you.

The harder part is one none of the older systems on this site have to deal with. Daggerheart is new. A model leaning on its own recollection will hand you a game that is nearly this one and wrong in the places a GM notices first: a turn order that does not exist, a number read the wrong way round, a card that was never printed. Confident and slightly off is the failure mode that costs most at a table running on trust.

So the thing that matters here is not what a model knows, it is where it is told to look. The starter below opens on the vocabulary, and the last of its standing instructions is the discipline: pull names and past scenes out of this world's journals rather than memory, and say plainly when something was never written down. The second of those is doing more work than the first.

One line in that starter is worth reading twice, because it looks like the opposite of what it is. It says to ask the players about their world and make their answers true. That is not an instruction to invent your setting. It is an instruction to treat the humans at the table as the authority on it, which is exactly the direction a model left alone would not go.

The Setting line in the starter is left open on purpose, and on this game that slot usually holds something your table made rather than something you bought. That is the normal case here, and it is the case the whole page is written for.

Where the rules engine stops

On Daggerheart, Familiar runs everything around the rules, and the rules are the one thing it does not touch.

Refereeing the rules is D&D 5e (2024) only. In combat the tracker, the turns, and the tokens still work; the rulings stay yours.

One setting to change: turn the combat auto-pilot off in Familiar's settings. It drives NPC turns through the 5e engine, so it does not know your system; the monsters' turns stay yours to run. Playing solo, that is the part you will feel.

This table is read from Daggerheart's own data model and Familiar's shipped code. It has not yet been run at a live Daggerheart table, so nothing here is described as observed.

The starter your table begins from

Familiar carries a Table Rules field per world, under Settings, System Rules. Whatever you put there is appended to every request, and it reaches your MCP client too.

Daggerheart has its own starter, offered first when Familiar sees your world. It is a starting point rather than a ruleset: the terms, the table culture, and slots for your setting, your tone, and your house rules. Paste it, then cut what does not match your table.

We play Daggerheart. Use this game's terms: Duality Dice, Hope and Fear, Experiences, domain cards, Stress, and Adversaries. Look up rules, cards, and stats in this world's compendium and journals.
Let the system roll the Duality Dice and resolve Hope and Fear, and defer all rules calls to the GM.
Standing guidance:
- Call for a roll only when a moment is risky and both outcomes would be interesting.
- Pass the spotlight with the fiction rather than a fixed turn order, and let each Adversary act on its own want.
- Turn a miss or a Fear result into a fresh cost or complication, never a dead stop.
- Spend Fear openly, so a hard turn reads as the game's cost and never a grudge.
- Ask the players about their world and make their answers true; let a strong idea become canon.
- Notice when a character's Experience or Connection fits the moment and invite them to lean on it.
- Recall names and past scenes from this world's journals, not memory, and admit what was never written down.
Setting: [your world or campaign name].
Tone: [fiction-first and collaborative, cinematic and character-driven].
House rules:
- [rule]
Never speak or decide for the player characters.

One number here means the opposite of what it looks like

The first of these is not a gap. It is a number this system uses backwards, and a tool reading it the obvious way would be confidently wrong about the thing that matters most in a fight.

• This game fills a track rather than draining one, so a full track means a character is down. Read it the ordinary way and you get told the person lying on the floor is fine. Wrong in both directions, and reassuring in the wrong one. So nothing on this system comes back as a tracked number at all. The sheet still travels when you ask about a character, so the model can discuss what is written there; the lighter party and scene listings carry neither.
• The Fear pool stays entirely with your system, and it is the one piece of GM bookkeeping here that Familiar leaves alone on purpose. The starter tells it to spend Fear openly, which is guidance about how it narrates a hard turn, not a hand on your tracker. Spending it where the table can see is part of how a hard turn reads, so that count belongs on your screen rather than behind a chat message.
• Initiative is declined, and here that costs you nothing, because there is no order to produce in the first place. The spotlight moves with the fiction, and Foundryborne takes requests for it rather than sorting a list. Ask anyway and the refusal itself will still talk about rolling initiative somewhere else, since that is the wording the tool uses on every world it turns down; on yours it means the spotlight tracker.

A tool that declines to guess is worth more here than one that always has a number for you. The single score this game keeps flips its meaning at the top, and there is no version of getting that wrong that would have been harmless.

What the system ships, and what Familiar never will

Foundryborne ships the game: classes and subclasses, ancestries and communities, domain cards, weapons and armor, adversaries and environments, all as compendium packs in your world. That is where a card or a statblock comes from at your table, and it is the system's to provide. Familiar carries none of this game's content and is not going to start. It reads what your world already has.

That split is usually a licensing footnote. Here it is the reason the page works, because most Daggerheart tables are not running something they bought. The map from session zero, the community a player invented on the spot, the frame you took apart and rebuilt: all of it becomes readable material the moment it is a journal page, and none of it needs to have a publisher.

It is also why the honest answer stays honest. Where your pages are silent, the starter tells Familiar to say so rather than close the gap for you. A model that fills silence is the one this hobby is right to be wary of, and it is the behaviour that standing instruction exists to prevent.

• Getting your own material onto the pageWhat a journal entry needs on it before any of the above can be read back to you.

The parts that are the same everywhere

Connecting an AI, choosing a model, and what it costs do not change with your game system.

• Everything Familiar can doThe full tool reference. Everything outside combat refereeing runs on your system too.
• Connect Claude, ChatGPT, or GeminiThe connection steps, identical on every game system.
• Choosing an AI modelWhich model, and how much thinking headroom a hard scene needs.
• AI voices for your NPCsTTS setup and voice pinning, the same on every game system.
• Campaign memoryThe record and the recall, unchanged by your game system.