DHW 08: A Night in Haven

A Night in Haven: A Daggerheart Adventure in the Witherwild

You went to bed in a holding cell for something stupid. By morning, the spymaster is dead, the city is a battlefield, and both sides are certain you did it.

A Night in Haven is the pivot session — the night the campaign stops being odd jobs around the edges of the war and forces the real question into the open: when both sides think you belong to the other, whose war is this, and what are you willing to do about it? It is built for level 5 characters (level 6 with light scaling) and runs as a single high-stakes evening that opens soft and goes very hard.

Perfect for groups who want a session that recontextualizes everything, a mystery with real teeth, and a battlefield you survive by leaving, this adventure includes:

• A reverse railroad opening — every PC ended this day, separately, in the same Haven cell for something small and humiliating. The destination is fixed. How they got there is theirs to narrate
• Kreil's visit — Haven's tired, dry-witted spymaster, almost warm, promising to sort it all out in the morning. It's the last time anyone sees him alive
• The reveal — a warded door drifting open on its own, a corridor of dead soldiers, and the most wanted figure in the war coming apart into three raccoons that scatter into the dark. The Fanewraith was never one person. She was never even a person
• A timed, combat-free investigation — six clues, one per trait, against a countdown the players can see. Successes assemble the night's real revelation; failures recap the three-way politics of Phylax, Kreil, and the Fanewraith. No roll is wasted — failure grounds the board, success reveals the move
• The fighting retreat — the Pitched Battle (Tier 3 Event) run as a series of short bursts: group Agility rolls to advance, party-sized encounters when they go badly, and a raccoon fleeing north to pull the party off the field. The faction that likes them less supplies the enemies
• The Fanewraith's plea — at the treeline, the woman who plays everyone realizes she was played, and makes the campaign's central offer honest: she wants the same eye Phylax wants. She's not the clean choice. She's the better of two thieves, and she knows it
• Full Tier 3 soldier roster (Conscript, Elite Soldier, Archer Squadron, Knight of the Realm), scaling guidance, and stat-block notes for Kreil, Phylax, and the Fanewraith — none of whom are meant to be fought tonight

By the end, the party's neutrality is gone. Haven wants them for murder. The insurgency thinks they're collaborators. Phylax has the Reaping Eye and a head start west — toward the dragon that locks the great tree, the tree that climbs to Nikta, and the second eye both thieves mean to take.

The real question the campaign now asks isn't who reaches the Shepherd first. It's whether anyone should pluck a god's last eye at all.

Written by Richard Kevis and K.S. Kuffer | Playtested by Karl Pohl | Inspired by Daggerheart by Darrington Press | Licensed under the Daggerheart Community Gaming License | Witherwild Designed by Carlos Cisco, Rowan Hall, and Spenser Starke