Written September 2026. Daggerheart Compatible.
Daggerheart has already run half your session zero, and the half it leaves you is not the half a D&D checklist prepares you for. The book gives you a framing procedure for the campaign, questions for the table, and a character creation step that ends with the party pointing at each other rather than at their own backstories. A GM arriving from 5e tends to prepare the wrong things: a ruling on character death that is not theirs to make, a policy on sourcebooks that has nothing to attach to, and house rules for procedures this system does not run.
What is left after the frame has done its part is worth doing carefully, because it is the part no book can do for your table: the boundaries, the tone inside them, the logistics, and two conversations about how characters end that are much better had in the quiet than in the moment.
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A good default: read the campaign frame before you prepare anything, then prepare only what it did not decide.
Three things arrive built in, and each one removes a chunk of the preparation a 5e GM would do by hand.
A framing procedure for the campaign. You pick the kind of campaign you are running and the book walks you and the table through what that implies: the tone it sets, the kinds of trouble that turn up, and often the questions worth asking before anyone plays. This is the part that surprises GMs coming from a system where the premise conversation is entirely yours to invent.
Questions the table answers together. They are in the procedure rather than in your notes, which changes who is doing the talking. A table that answers the premise questions itself owns the answer in a way it does not when the GM reads a pitch at them.
Characters built pointing at each other. Creation ends with players answering questions that tie their characters to the others at the table. This is the single biggest difference from a 5e session zero, where connecting six independently written backstories is a job the GM usually does afterwards, alone, badly.
None of that decides your table's boundaries, your tone, or what happens when someone misses three weeks in a row. That is what the rest of this page is for.
What tends to work: one page of your own, covering only the gaps the frame left.
A good default: the two conversations about how characters end are worth more than everything else on this list, and they take ten minutes.
What tends to work: raising both while nothing is at stake, so the first time either one matters, nobody is learning the rules and making the choice at once.
These get their own section because they are the two a GM coming from 5e is most likely to skip, and skipping them costs the most.
The last moment belongs to the player. When a character runs out of room to absorb what is happening to them, what happens next is a choice, made by that player, from a small set of very different options: an ending that is final and spectacular, survival bought at a permanent price, or a gamble that might go either way. A player meeting that menu for the first time while the table waits will pick the safe one, or the dramatic one, for reasons that have nothing to do with their character. Say at session zero that the choice will be theirs and roughly what shape the options take. You are not spoiling anything. You are giving them the months before it happens to decide who their character is when it does.
Surviving is not always free. Coming through the worst of it can leave a permanent mark, and marks like that carry forward instead of clearing at the next rest. A table that has not heard this treats the first one as scenery. A table that has heard it reads it as the campaign showing them where this character is heading.
Neither conversation needs the mechanics read out. Both need the shape said once, plainly, by you, before it matters.
Pick Daggerheart when you create the campaign and the app runs on Daggerheart's own terms: Difficulty rather than DC, Hope and Fear, adversaries and the spotlight, Ancestry and Community. Characters carry their traits, Evasion, damage thresholds, Experiences and domain cards, and import from a public Demiplane link or a photo of the sheet.
A recorded session zero becomes a Prologue chapter rather than a numbered session, and the world material your table invents while talking can be pulled into the campaign's codex, with anything that should stay hidden staged for a later reveal. A boundaries list agreed out loud can be drafted from that recording into the GM's notebook, where it stays pinned for the rest of the campaign.
Backstory a player wants kept between the two of you can be sealed to the GM and that player alone, which is the mechanism behind the "somewhere private" item above.
A good default: if an item names a 5e procedure, it is not a Daggerheart item with the word swapped, it is an item with nothing to attach to.
A generic session zero checklist mostly transfers. These four do not, and the last one does real damage.
The pattern underneath them: a 5e session zero spends a lot of its time settling which rules the table is running, because 5e has many optional ones and a large publication surface. That conversation is mostly absent here, which is why a Daggerheart session zero can spend its time on the table instead.
What tends to work: writing it down within a day, while you still remember what was agreed rather than what you meant.
The boundaries list is the one worth revisiting on a date rather than when something goes wrong. Tables change, and a list agreed in month one stops matching the table by month six unless someone reopens it.
The meeting before the campaign starts, where the table settles the campaign frame, boundaries, tone, logistics, and characters before anyone plays for real. Daggerheart builds a fair amount of this into character creation already, so a session zero here is mostly about the things the book leaves to your table.
The frame does a lot of the work a 5e GM would otherwise do by hand, which makes the session shorter, not unnecessary. The frame cannot tell you this table's boundaries, this table's tone, or what happens when someone misses three weeks running.
Most of it transfers and a few items actively mislead. The character-building block (stat generation, allowed sources, multiclassing) has nothing to attach to, the house rules block names procedures that do not exist here, and "how character death works at this table" is a GM ruling in 5e and the player's choice in Daggerheart. The section below lists what to drop.
One sitting works for a table that already knows each other. A table meeting for the first time often does better splitting it: the conversation and the frame first, then character creation and the connection questions once people have slept on their concepts.
They replace the blank page, which is the part most players struggle with. A character who starts out already owing someone at the table something has a reason to be in the first scene, which a page of solo history often does not provide.
No. The boundaries conversation and the death-move conversation are the two worth having late, and both work fine as a twenty-minute conversation at the top of a session. The frame and the connection questions are harder to retrofit, but a table can still answer the connection questions about the relationships play has actually produced.
More: running countdowns · Threadfall for Daggerheart · safety tools, lines and veils · the D&D session zero checklist · what makes a good session recap · all Threadfall guides
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