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When it comes toDaggerheart, there are a ton of ancestries and even more options for how to customize them to your liking. Ancestries determine your character’s appearance, and they also come with two ancestry features that’ll affect how your character plays. Some ancestries have features tied to their anatomy, granting them elemental breath or flight among other things.
Choosing an ancestry can help complement your chosen class if you’re interested in maximizing your character to its fullest potential. If you don’t know which ancestry to choose, though, or how to go about fulfilling their best options, you have several ways to determine which ancestry is best.
All Ancestry Features
The first thing you’ll want to do when choosing an ancestry is to determinewhat features your character will benefit fromthe most. Because Daggerheart insists that youchoose your class before your ancestry, your class will give youFoundation, Specialization, and Mastery features.
These features lay out the way your class works and give you several benefits. While it’s not exactly a complete match, there areancestry features that can work best with certain class features.
Here is every ancestry feature in Daggerheart for you to consider when choosing which ancestry you want to play as.
Simiah
When choosing an ancestry, you’ll notice that some have static increases at character creation while others allow you to play with Hope and Fear. While static increases are great in the long run, you want to ensure you pick an ancestry that revolves around your playstyle.
Which Ancestry Should You Choose?
Ancestries can fall into a few categories based on their features. To simplify which you should use, we’ve separated them into different categories based on how you want to play your character in Daggerheart.
Fighting/Action Style
These ancestries are perfect for players looking to capitalize on classes and opportunities revolving around dealing damage orcontrolling the battlefield. Dealing extra damage, surviving, increasing your thresholds, andgaining resistances, these ancestries are great options for class combinations that want to do the same. Perfect for players who want to jump into the action of Daggerheart and use their physical features to their advantage.
Buffing Yourself/Party and Playing Support
For players who want tosupport the party or tend to choose more supporting roles at the table, these ancestry features fit well.Balanced play, the ability toreroll Hope die, or even switch Fear die for Hope Die rolls,making the enemy Vulnerable, orgiving Hope to everyonein the party, these ancestries aregreat for support-style players. This also works for ancesties that have abilities that can help them survive or help the party such as intimidating other enemies.
Roleplay
These ancestries are great if you just want to roleplay. They don’t require much else and can work with any class combination. Theyutilize their features specifically for their physical attributeswell and can enjoyusing them creatively during roleplay.These ancestries mostly don’t use features that support the party or deal extra damage, but are great for getting their features worked into the campaign in a way thathelps with your Experiences.
Creating A Mixed Ancestry
If none of the ancestries appeal to you, you can easily create a character of mixed ancestry. To do this, you cancombine two of the available ancestry optionsfrom the Core Rulebook.
However, you canonly choose the first feature from one ancestry and the second from another. You may not choose two of the first ancestry features for your mixed ancestry character.
This means an Elf Faerie cannot take both Quick Reactions and Luckbender, as they are both the first feature for each ancestry. They can, however, take Luckbender and Celestial Trance or Quick Reactions and Wings.
You can adjust ancestry features or replace them as needed for the type of character you want to play. Work with your GM, as Daggerheart is very lenient with creating the perfect character your way as long as you keep them balanced.
You can make an ancestry that’s more than two ancestries combined. However, you can only choose two features from two of the involved ancestries. You can represent the third or extra ancestries in other ways, such as appearance, or specific backstory, and Experience interactions.
