Daggerheart Brewery

A Session page: the Fear rail down the left edge, two Combat tabs, a Battle Points budget, three Gravel Hounds stacked into one stat block beside an Ashen Warden, and a condensed Adversaries list on the right — A Session: Fear rail, Combat tabs, Battle Points

The stacked Gravel Hounds with the second one's actions open: Modify, Kill and Remove, and its own Difficulty, Thresholds and Conditions underneath — A stack: one stat block, a row per Adversary

Mid-drag: an outlined card reading Gravel Hound x3 follows the pointer, with a strip under the board offering to unstack them all — Dragging a stack: an outlined card with its count

The second Combat tab, Chapel Crypt, with a Tidecaller Oracle, a stack of eight Moss Mite Minions shown as pips, and the Drowned Chapel Environment — A second encounter, prepped on its own tab

Lower on the Session page: Minion pips, the Slain tally reading Gravel Hound x2 and Moss Mite x4, Notes tabs named after the Combat tabs, and the Dice Tray showing 1d6 + 1d20 = 24 above the dice — Notes tabs, the Slain tally and the Dice Tray

The Journal panel open from its bubble in the bottom-left corner, listing Campaign notes under Loot and Worldbuilding — The Journal, one click away

Run a live session

One page runs the fight. Fear sits on a rail down the left edge, each encounter is prepped on its own Combat tab with a Battle Points budget, and pulling an Adversary in snapshots it so a GM's overrides never touch the book record. Identical Adversaries stack into a single stat block by dragging one across the others, each keeping its own HP and Stress on a row of its own; Minions collapse to a counted stack of pips. The fallen move to a Slain tally, Notes follow the Combat tab of the same name, and a floating Dice Tray and the Journal are always in reach.

A Campaign page: Sessions in a scrolling column on the left, each with its Fear and number, and the Party on the right with tiles coloured by each Class's two Domains — A Campaign: Sessions on the left, the Party on the right

The Campaigns list: two banners, each with its Party level, description, Party members and Session count — Every Campaign at a glance

Editing a Party member: labelled rows of chips for Class, Subclass, a second Class and Subclass for multiclassing, Ancestry and Community — A Party member: Class, Subclass and Heritage as chips

The app's own confirmation dialog over a dimmed page, asking whether to delete a Session, with Cancel and Delete buttons — Destructive actions ask first, in the app's own dialog

The Music tab: a library overview showing a region's track count and defaults, a region list, and tracks with volume sliders — A per-region music library for the table

Campaigns that carry forward

A Campaign keeps its Sessions and its Party side by side. The Party, the board, Fear and Notes carry from one Session to the next without ever rewriting an earlier one, so Session 3 can change what Session 2 never sees. Party members are a name, a Class and Subclass (two when multiclassed) and a Heritage, on tiles coloured from their Class's Domains. A per-region music library loops a default track for adventuring and another for combat.

The Classes page: a tab per Class, with Bard selected showing its gradient class sheet beside a parchment panel for its Subclasses — Classes: a book-style sheet, Subclasses alongside

The Adversaries & Environments table, the default view: every Adversary as a dense sortable row of Tier, Difficulty, HP, Stress, Type and Experiences, with a search box and Tier/Type filters above — Adversaries & Environments: a dense reference table

The Heritage page's Communities grid: Duneborne, Freeborne, Frostborne and more, each a card with its flavor text and signature feature, with a Cards/Table switch above — Heritage: Communities and Ancestries as flavor-text cards

The Domains page listing Arcana, Blade, Bone and Codex, each with a pennant icon and its card count — Domains, filterable by Class

The Arcana Domain page: four card-shaped tiles with level, type, recall cost and rules text — A Domain's cards, as cards

Author every content type

Classes, Subclasses, Domains and their Cards, Adversaries, Environments, equipment and Heritage are all built with the same validated forms. Adversaries and Environments browse as a dense tile gallery with search and Tier filters, and selecting one opens a parchment stat block modeled on the printed layout, ready to export as a PNG.

Screenshots show a made-up demo campaign: the adversaries, subclasses, heritage and card text are invented for the page, not published book content. Scroll each window sideways for more, and click a screenshot to open it full size.

What it does

Author every content type

Classes, Subclasses, Domains and Domain Cards, Adversaries, Environments, Weapons, Armor, Loot, Ancestries, Communities, and more — each with real validation (a Secondary weapon can't be Two-Handed; a Class's two Domains must differ).

Book-style stat sheets

Adversaries and Environments render as a parchment stat block modeled on the printed layout, and export to a PNG in one click. Browse them as a dense gallery, a spotlight view, or full-size sheets.

Run a live campaign

Campaigns whose party, board, Fear, and notes carry from one session to the next without ever rewriting an earlier session. Adversaries are pulled in as independent live copies with HP/Stress tracked as marked boxes, identical ones stack into a single stat block by dragging, and a loot roller reproduces the rulebook's rarity dice mechanic. A per-region music library loops a default track for adventuring and for combat.

Built to be extended

Feature sections (Passives, Actions, Reactions, Evolutions…) are data-driven: a new rules element is one line in a registry, and a homebrew system can add its own sections straight from the editor.

How it's built

Architecture Local-first, no backend. The app began as Electron plus a Spring Boot/SQLite service and was deliberately re-architected: a single JSON file owned by Electron's main process is the whole database, exposed to the UI over a narrow contextBridge IPC API. Chosen so the same data layer could later back a React Native client, which can't embed a JVM.

UI React 18 + TypeScript with types enforced from the store's shapes through the IPC bridge to the components. Plain CSS with design tokens; light/dark theming is two value sets under the same variable names.

Data layer A makeCollection() factory gives every content type idempotent-by-name create, PATCH-semantics update, and per-type validation. Where the factory doesn't fit (a session can pull the same adversary in twice), the collection is hand-written rather than forced through it. Anything that follows a campaign is stored as per-session versions, not copies, so an edit in session 3 never touches session 2.

Testing 350 Vitest unit tests on the store's CRUD, validation, and carry-forward rules, and 125 Playwright end-to-end tests that drive the real Electron app against throwaway data directories, so nothing ever touches a user's real data.

Packaging electron-builder produces a real NSIS installer, and the app updates itself through electron-updater behind a small state machine that always asks before downloading. Shipping it meant debugging a blank window in the packaged build (absolute asset paths under file://) and an OneDrive sync lock that broke the build inside a synced folder.

Try it

Windows installer, no account or internet needed. Your data is one JSON file on your machine.

Download for Windows → Read the full write-up

Latest release: v1.8.9

The installer isn't code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen may warn you: choose "More info", then "Run anyway". It ships without any published book content. Unofficial fan project; Daggerheart is a trademark of Darrington Press.

Version history

v1.8.9 — summon buttons resolve the book's own math ("equal to twice the number of PCs", or "as many Lackeys as there are PCs") against your actual party size, and an Environment's Potential Adversaries line is clickable the same way; the Equipment page gets a jump nav down the side plus a Table-view header that stays pinned while scrolling; Consumables can now carry the corebook's roll Value the same way Loot does, and every Loot/Consumable item (Core and Hope & Fear) has its Value filled in; a Session renames by double-clicking its title; and quieter in-flow saves (HP marks, renames, rolls, region picks) use a brief toast instead of a blocking dialog.
v1.8.8 — another quick fix: Adversaries and Environments that disappeared from Sessions which already had them (a side effect of the v1.8.6 board fix never touching the data already on disk) are restored automatically.
v1.8.7 — a quick fix for v1.8.6: some Sessions failed to open because of leftover data from an older version, and now open normally again.
v1.8.6 — a new Session no longer starts with the last one's Adversaries and Environments (Clone Most Recent still carries them over on purpose); Notes support live Markdown formatting (bold, headers, lists) and a two-column layout; Weapons split into separate Primary and Secondary tables with a Range field and a Set filter; and Loot shows its corebook roll Value (e.g. Caltrops is 1).
v1.8.5 — Session music as a proper player: a region plays its whole folder song after song, with back and skip buttons and a play bar to move within a song; tracks and regions rename on double-click; and a fix for choosing a region not changing the music.
v1.8.4 — search the Adversary and Environment pickers by Tier, type and name; a button on any feature that summons another Adversary, which adds it to the fight and rolls the count where the book gives dice; Environments that pin full-width above the board; a per-Campaign image folder for maps in the Session sidebar; tabs inside a Notes tab; mixed Ancestry and draggable framing for the art on a Party tile; foldable Adversaries and Environments sections; and a fix for new or edited content not reaching a Session that was already open.
v1.8.3 — Campaign Frames: a new section for the rulebooks’ setting-pitch format, written either as structured sections or in an Advanced Markdown format drawn as letter-size two-column pages, with pictures, watercolor stains and watercolor-edged images, per-frame CSS, a built-in guide and PDF export (using The Homebrewery’s MIT-licensed Markdown flavour and mask images); a Campaign can name its frame. Also: Equipment opens as a table, and errors use the app’s own dialog.
v1.8.1 — a Table view for Adversaries and Environments, now the default, where clicking a row opens its full stat block in place; a Collapse All button for the stat blocks in a fight, with roll results shown beside the buttons on a collapsed one; Heritage and Optional Mechanics in one shared layout, alphabetical, with full-width features and a filter by Set; and Equipment's compact view renamed to Table.
v1.8.0 — stack any identical Adversaries into one stat block by dragging, each keeping its own HP and Stress, with an outlined card and running count while you drag; a Kill button and a Slain tally; renamable Notes tabs that follow the Combat tab of the same name and carry forward; a Fear rail on the left edge; a reworked Campaign page with Sessions and the Party side by side; Party members as Class, Subclass and Heritage with Domain-coloured tiles and multiclassing; and the app's own confirmation dialog and scrollbars.
v1.7.2 — Battle Points: each Combat tab scores its roster against the corebook's encounter budget, with the rulebook's adjustments; and Minions now pull in as one counted stack that can be split, merged or mixed into groups by dragging.
v1.7.1 — Combat tabs: prep several encounters per Session, each tab with its own Adversary/Environment roster that carries forward to later Sessions; a draggable Journal bubble with detachable floating notes; per-Session Notes; a drag-reorderable Session page; and a quantity stepper for pulling in several Adversaries at once.
v1.7.0 — merged the Session page's Adventuring/Combat tabs into one always-on-screen page, and Music folders can now be scoped to a single Campaign instead of always being application-wide.
v1.6.0 — the Dice Tray's buttons are now real polyhedral wireframes (tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, and so on) with their own facet lines, label below the shape instead of overlapping it; a sidebar spotlight for Combat tiles; a Conditions rules reference on hover; and a round of fixes (the Equipment table's boxy cells, newest-first Sessions, clearer button labels).
v1.5.0 — a reworked Combat panel (stackable Conditions, Difficulty/Threshold overrides kept alongside the book value, a Roll Log), a redesigned Dice Tray with shaped die buttons, and music you can manage without leaving a session.
v1.4.0 — real Domain iconography sampled from the corebook, a new app icon, a freeform dice tray and one-click damage rolls, and a round of load-time and editing-speed improvements.
v1.3.0 — a visual refresh across the whole app: pill buttons and boxed panels replaced with soft glow states and hairline dividers, a redesigned Domains list, and clearer text and contrast throughout.
v1.2.0 — renamed to Daggerheart Brewery with a new icon; a condensed Equipment table view; Session music that persists across navigation; a frameless fullscreen mode.
v1.1.0 — in-app update checking; data-driven Evolution/custom feature sections; Core subclasses.
v1.0.0 — first public release.