A Q&A With The Bards Of New York!
If you’ve been following the thrilling new Bards of New York miniseries, Voltaire’s Aces, you’ll know it’s a gripping, high-stakes fantasy heist played in Daggerheart – but if you’re new to this world, worry not! We sat down at the high rollers table to get some answers from The Bards on everything from their homebrewed world of Regolus Prime, to the experience of bringing that world into Daggerheart!
In your own words, tell us what Bards of New York is - and what you do!
Bards of New York is an actual-play tabletop role-playing narrative series available as a livestream, YouTube show, and podcast. Featuring a talented company of NYC-based, classically trained actors and creatives, the show shines with its emphasis on roleplay, incredible fan engagement, and immersive voice acting.
At its heart, Bards of New York is about communal storytelling, exploring themes of capability, possibility, and found family. While the tales often delve into dark and challenging moments, the journey always seeks the light, mirroring the resilience and hope found in our own world. From political subterfuge to disappearances of gods with plenty of heart-wrenching, spicy romance in between, a decadent buffet of stories is told around the table, no matter the campaign or story.
The wider Bards of New York community, affectionately abbreviated as BONY and peopled with the Bardlings, is built on the pillars of inclusivity, support, and genuineness. Together, the audience and creators foster a welcoming and uplifting space where folks can feel seen, heard, and part of the adventure.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a seasoned TTRPG player or have never heard of a d20. If you’re here for love, positivity, community, and stories that will stick with you for eons to come, we’ll welcome you into our mythweaving with open arms.
What is Voltaire’s Aces - and what do new viewers need to know when diving in?
In the grimdark world known as Regolus Prime, we follow our crew, the Aces, as they track down and liberate a group known as the Golden Sentinels from a divine prison. This 10✨ish✨ episode miniseries will take us on a character-driven journey through The Prime to discover just how far each of our Aces is willing to go to complete the job.
With playing a new system comes learning a new system! If you are unsure about how Daggerheart and its mechanics function, this campaign is a great place to start, because we’re learning it right alongside you! We will learn how the system functions and what rules we can — and can’t — bend together. No viewing of any previous BONY campaigns is necessary to jump into this new myth we’re weaving, although some small easter eggs may find their way from past Regolus stories.
What prompted you to first try bringing Daggerheart into the world of your actual plays?
Across all of the BONY universes and their stories, a few things remain consistent: We love a story that is character-driven and roleplay-focused. Over the many years we’ve been telling stories together through this medium, we’ve learned to embrace soft magic, the rule of cool, and to push the limits of a roleplay system and its mechanics. If a game master or player has an amazing idea, we don’t want to stifle that; we want to celebrate it! We are big believers that if the mechanics of a game are getting in the way of telling the story, then something needs to change.
So, when the folks at Darrington Press reached out to us to talk about Daggerheart and the opportunity to take the souped-up racecar that is Hope & Fear out for a spin, we were eager to get behind the wheel of what sounded like a system basically built for our specific style of play.
As we’ve built characters, planned sessions, and used the mechanics of Daggerheart, we’ve quickly learned just how correct y’all were. Daggerheart not only gives you the room to exercise your creativity and flavor, it encourages it!
From the more bespoke nature of character creation with things like ancestries, communities, and transformations — you don’t have to pick and choose between being a ghost or a gnome stat-wise (you can be both!), which can facilitate so many more interesting character backstories that feel more layered and lived in — to the implementation of one of our favorite mechanics, Experiences, where the only limit to giving your character proficiency in broad or specific situations is your creativity. All of this has really, truly wowed us.
Just a moment longer on Experiences: The fact that you can use these little phrases to hint at your player’s past and knowledge to the other people at the table is brilliant. Your friends are always going to want to know the story behind why one of your experiences is called “Tarnished by Grace”. Brilliant. No Notes. Obsessed.
What was your experience of porting existing ideas, characters, and concepts into Daggerheart?
For us, one of the very best things about Daggerheart as a system is that it feels designed to allow maladaptive daydreaming to work within its ruleset. Approaching Daggerheart felt less like trying to wrench and bend pre-themed rules to fit a homebrew world, and much more like opening a brand new toolbox, filled with gleaming multitools! Particularly, the Hope & Fear expansion leaned heavily into the darker fantasy elements that got some of our Bards interested in roleplaying games in the first place! Gives us plenty of ideas for a campaign frame… All this to say, the more Daggerheart we read, the more it felt like Regolus was always meant to be experienced through the lens of this game system!
Some examples of how effortless the port over to Daggerheart felt:
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- Blood Magic is an imperative, crucial, and really fun narrative tool in our stories set in Regolus Prime. We knew we’d need to figure out how to make a Blood Mage work in this system. It’s a core part of the fabric of the world… And [SPOILER ALERT] one of our Aces is a Blood Mage. Hannah and Will started chatting about building a class from scratch — until they started to understand how brilliantly modular Daggerheart truly is. With a simple tweak to the Sorcerer’s Primal Origin subclass, and swapping out old domains with the new Dread domain and The Void Blood Domain, a Daggerheart Blood Mage was born! Complete with all the exact lore-accurate and mechanical flavour from previous stories!
- We needed to give Marran, our Solarborne Ace, some armour that matched the vibe, aesthetic, and function of the Space-Marine-esque “Godlight Plate” we had previously homebrewed for another TTRPG system. Ideally, the armour would be solar-themed, mechanically powerful, but also low-ish level. We were convinced we’d have to brew something again, but lo and behold, in Hope & Fear, we found the Tier-2 Gilded Sunplate, checking literally every box. We say again, made in a lab. Obsessed. No Notes.
How has Daggerheart influenced the roleplay elements of your actual play experience?
We’re huge roleplayers and actors. That’s our wheelhouse. In other systems, we found ourselves needing to adjust many mechanics and rules to help facilitate the roleplay. Compare that to Daggerheart, which not only encourages roleplay; it’s baked into the mechanics. You want to heal someone with that cool spell? You’ve gotta talk to that person and share something important about yourself! That’s exactly the type of mechanical encouragement we want in a TTRPG system!
It reminds us of our favorite video games where you MUST do the companion quests in order to have the best outcome during the final battle to save the world. Nothing matters if nothing matters, and Daggerheart walks in lockstep with the belief we’ve always had at Bards of New York: if you don’t know or care about the characters, then what are we even doing here?
You’re using some Daggerheart: Hope & Fear elements in Voltaire’s Aces - what are your favorite new mechanics and additions?
Did we hear transformation?! We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again; the system of Daggerheart allows for peak creativity and endless options. Sorry if we sound like a broken record (we’re not really that sorry). To know that even if things go poorly for our crew and we lose one of our Aces, we don’t really have to lose them thanks to the reanimated or ghost transformation in Hope & Fear, which allows you to resurrect your character or be a GHOST! How cool is that?! Until that happens, Hannah is thirsty to showcase Qazri’yel’s Vampire transformation, and Dan is going feral over Barbra’s werewolf Werehag transformation.
Some other Daggerheart: Hope & Fear specific goodies we plan to utilize in Voltaire’s Aces include the never-ending buffet of adversaries and their monstrous stat blocks. We’ll also see various communities, from the Warborne Marr’Aan to the Hearthborne Theoduros. Incredibly flavorful items, like Omisha’s Thief’s Compass and Artemis’ Cheater’s Coin. Loads of very tantalizing spells and domain cards — looking at you, Dread Domain — and much, much more. We are constantly discovering new mechanics/items in Hope & Fear. It truly is such a cool system y’all have built.
Can you give us any sneak peeks at what folks can expect from the latter half of the series?
- Every heist crew needs a worthy vehicle, and the Aces are no exception. Having arrived in the crown jewel of the Empire, Calanthus, they may have to look toward the docks and start planning a boat heist! The docks will spoil the Aces for choice. The rarest, the historic, and the most enchanted ships all dock at the Sapphire Citadel.
- Voltaire has his sights set on the horizon across the sea, and the strange shapes shifting on dark skies. One way or another, the Aces must eventually head west and wrestle with — if not outright steal — the titanic secrets of faith and steel the Mortal Empire has been hiding in the waves.
- If the Aces can make it to the end of Voltaire’s insane plan, then there is a good chance they’ll land on the doorsteps of the Gods. That close to claiming their bounty, the Aces will face their harshest challenge as they attempt to pull off the ultimate crime — breaking divine law in a god’s own house. If myth and legend have taught us anything, that’s never a good idea.
Check out Voltaire’s Aces, a ten✨ish✨ sponsored miniseries on The Bards’ Twitch and YouTube channels! The series also features some of the new content from Daggerheart: Hope & Fear, like new classes and mechanics — so be on the lookout!