The Returns Desk
An endless counter where Librarians leave through their Doors and are checked back in.
- Briefed by
- The job
- The world
- The record notes
- Target
- Complication
A Daggerheart™ Compatible custom setting
The Interdimensional Library
Every world has a story. Find your place in the Library.
The Library keeps. It does not write.
Roll a mission
Every mission starts with a thin file from a case officer. Roll one to see the kind of job a new team gets handed. Your GM rolls the real one, with a few tables you don’t get to see.
A seat at the table
One mission, three evenings. Live over Discord voice, three hours a night, four Librarians to a table. New to Daggerheart? We start with a short orientation.
First session$10
Your arrival. Found or Sentenced, your trial or your waking, and your first Door.
Sessions two & three$15 each
The mission proper. Same table, same Librarian you built on night one.
What you needNothing
Dice are rolled for you if you have none. Discord, a microphone, and an evening.
New to the Library?
- 1
Meet the Library
Learn what the Library is, who it serves, and how it works.
- 2
Find your calling
Explore the paths, peoples, and possibilities within its walls.
- 3
Prepare for your first Door
Get what you need to step beyond your world.
- 4
Join a table
One mission, one evening, online over Discord. Three hours. Beginners welcome.
One rule before you begin
Never read your own book.
Explore
The Four Wings
The Library was founded millennia ago, outside time, to hold the record of every world and the oldest tomes of all of them. It now protects knowledge, objects, living beings, and dangerous things from across the multiverse. It never bothered to change its name.
Knowledge & histories
A book for every world
Every known world has a record here, and the record changes when the world does. Before a mission, a careful Librarian reads ahead: if the record already shows an event, you are allowed to be its cause.
- The Moss Index. Ask a question aloud at the reference desk. Moss answers truthfully, exactly, and only what you asked.
- The reading rooms. Silence is enforced by the Censors. Literally.
- Your own book. It is shelved here somewhere. Nobody will tell you where.
Artifacts & relics
Things worth keeping
Relics, instruments, and wonders recovered before they could be lost, burned, or used. Each one is catalogued, and a few are still looking for a way out.
- The Honest Pen. Writes only true sentences. Lies leave the page blank.
- A Jar of Last Light. The final sunset of a sealed world.
- The Book That Reads Back. It learns its reader while they read it.
- The Unfinished Atlas. Some pages are maps of places not yet found.
- The Doorless Key. Opens a Door to a world the Library has no record of.
Lives worth saving
The Calloway Sanctuary
Refugees from dying worlds, the last of a species, gods with no worshippers left. Long ago, Chief Warden Hesper Calloway held a Door open against orders and walked two hundred survivors inside. The wing was built around the people she saved. Old staff still call it the Folly.
- The Wardens' oath. No one left behind.
- Rescue Tokens. Each carries one passenger home. You are issued exactly as many as Sanctuary approves.
Dangerous holdings
What cannot be destroyed is kept
Anything too hazardous to leave loose comes here, under the quiet watch of the Custodes. Below it lie the Closed Stacks: bottomless, sealed, and home to worlds the Library had to close for good.
- The last page. Before a world is sealed, the Custodes read its final page aloud.
- The Witch's Seal. Three knotted cords, tied here, hold back a witch's craft until the Library decides to loosen them.
Places you will come to know
The Monitoring Hall
A domed hall of glowing tracks, one for each world, showing how much it has been changed.
The Atrium
The heart of the Library, where prophecies surface as text on the walls.
The Break Room
It is always three o'clock in the afternoon there.
Staff Quarters
Your room slowly reshapes itself to match the world you came from.
The Drifting Halls
Corridors that have come loose. Maps of them expire.
Life here
Your orientation
You are a Librarian. Not the quiet kind. This is what the job is, who you answer to, and the five words you need before your first mission.
The Mandate
"The Library keeps. It does not write."
Librarians are readers, not authors. When you change a world's course, its record rewrites itself and the true account is lost for good. Interfering is not forbidden. It is costly, and the choice is always yours.
Impact
- MinorA bribe, a saved life. Logged and expected.
- MajorA toppled official, a turned battle. You will be writing a report.
- CriticalHistory altered at scale. The Censors take an interest.
Five words to know
The Library
Founded outside time to hold the book of every world, so that nothing true would ever be lost. It keeps far more than books now.
Librarian
The job. Everyone also holds a rank and a classification.
Door
The passage into a world. Some open onto other moments in time.
Impact
How much your team changed a world.
Recall Token
Brings you home. Bound to you alone. Lose it and you are stranded.
Your first Door
Missions run one to three sessions. You are briefed, you step through, and you come home moments after you left, however long you were gone.
How you arrive
Every Librarian is a Recruit: someone whose home world's record was lost or sealed. There are two ways in. The Found went to sleep in a world and woke at the Returns Desk holding a library card with their name already printed on it. They remember their lives, not the crossing. The Sentenced got in the Library's way, were judged to have value, and chose a library card over a cell. They work off a charge sheet, one mission at a time. Both end up on the same teams.
What you carry
A Recall Token, a passbook that writes you a cover identity on the far side of every Door, a reading lamp that shows ink only Librarians can see, and a library card that is a badge, a key, and a translator for dead scripts. Doors translate living speech, so you will understand the locals. Understanding their customs is your problem.
Where the Doors lead
- A cursed valleyGothic horror under a sky that never clears.
- A spire-cityGuild houses powered by bound elementals.
- A skyship armadaFleeing a storm that eats the sky.
- A clockwork empireAt the height of its power.
- A mythic ageWhere gods walk openly.
- A fey dream realmRuled by courts that trade in names.
Ranks
- PageNew arrivals. Shelving, deliveries, haunted reading rooms.
- Junior LibrarianWhere you start. Retrievals and surveys of stable worlds.
- LibrarianContested acquisitions and worlds in conflict.
- Senior LibrarianDangerous artifacts, failing worlds, Doors into other times.
- Principal LibrarianAccess to the Closed Stacks.
Classifications
- ArchivistLore and research.
- RetrieverField operations and combat.
- LinguistLanguages and translation.
- ConservatorArtifact and magic handling.
- LiaisonDiplomacy and cover identities.
- WardenProtection and threat response.
Who you answer to
Field teams are drawn from several departments. You keep a home department, and its head keeps an eye on you.
Overheard in the Break Room
How true any of it is, nobody will say.
- "Moss laughed yesterday. Moss has never laughed."
- "Desmond Pike is auditing the Break Room. Nobody knows why."
- "There is a door in the Drifting Halls with your name on it."
- "The Returns Desk stamped someone back in who never left."
- "Ilse Marrow has a portrait in her office that blinks."
- "Two Librarians have the same name, the same face, and no idea about each other."
Your character
Find your calling
Every class, ancestry, and community has a place in the Library. These are the options that exist only here.
Build a Librarian
Make your character the usual way. These six steps fit them into the Library.
- 1
Choose a class
Every class fits. Each one also has a Library subclass, further down this page, if you want something made for this setting.
- 2
Choose an ancestry
Every ancestry fits; the Library recruits from everywhere. Clanks may have been built in Collections. Or play an Inkborn, someone who walked off a page.
- 3
Choose a community
Either the culture of the world you lost, or where you grew up inside the Library:
- LoreborneRaised among the Records wing’s archivists.
- OrderborneRaised inside the Library’s bureaucracy.
- HighborneOne of the old families that have served for generations.
- WanderborneRaised in field crews, always between Doors.
- UnderborneRaised near Containment and the Closed Stacks.
- SlyborneRaised on the Library’s shadier edges.
- Seaborne, Ridgeborne, WildborneThe culture of your lost home world.
- Sanctuary-bornBorn in Sanctuary to refugees of dead worlds.
- 4
Pick a classification
Your job title in the Library. Any class can hold any classification; these are the natural fits.
- ArchivistWizard, Bard
- RetrieverWarrior, Ranger, Rogue
- LinguistBard, Wizard
- ConservatorSorcerer, Druid, Wizard
- LiaisonBard, Rogue, Seraph
- WardenGuardian, Seraph
- 5
Found or Sentenced?
How did you come to the Library? Pick one. It carries through to your booking, and your GM builds your first session around it.
- 6
Answer three questions
Keep any you like and bring the answers to your first session. Pass on any you don’t.
Join a table
Download the Librarian’s Handbook PDF
Your sheet lives in Foundry. We build it together on night one.
The handbook has the full rules for every Library subclass, the Inkborn and Sanctuary-born, the Warlock patrons, and the Transformations.
Library ancestry
Inkborn
People who walked off the pages of the Records wing. Each began as someone in a book: a hero in a legend, a villain in a history, a nameless guard in a play. They bleed ink, and their source book is still on a shelf somewhere.
Paper-Thin. Fold flat to slip through any gap a sheet of paper could, and drift down like a falling page.
Written Role. Choose the part you were written to play: the Hero, the Rogue, the Mentor, the Monster, the Lover, or the Fool. Play to type and gain Hope. Act against it, and rewrite yourself one choice at a time.
Library community
Sanctuary-born
Born in the Calloway Sanctuary to refugees of dead worlds. Your neighbor came from a drowned city, your babysitter was the last of her species, and your schoolteacher used to be a god. You never traveled. The multiverse came to you.
Everyone's Neighbor. Once per session, when you meet a being, people, or custom from any world, say who you grew up next to that was something like it. Your next roll to understand, befriend, or calm them has advantage.
Library subclasses
One for every class. Each has a tell: the thing other people notice when you use your gift.
Marked by the Library
Transformations are earned in play. Each gives you a signature move and a cost you choose how to pay. A character can carry only one.
Patrons for the Warlock
The Library is full of things willing to bargain. Each asks for a tribute, and once a session, a favor. Your GM may offer others.