How Fractured Worlds Works
The Mortal Realm is being overwritten. Seven World-Truths press against it from within and without. This reference explains the rules that govern what happens when reality stops being one thing.
The Core Premise
Fractured Worlds is a supplement for Daggerheart. It adds one foundational layer to the game: the Sovereigns have arrived, and the territories they control no longer follow the Mortal Realm's logic. Every rule in this supplement follows from that premise.
When a Sovereign's Reality Engine stabilizes over a region, that region becomes a zone: a territory where different physical, metaphysical, and narrative laws apply. Crossing into a zone is not merely a change of scenery. It is a change of physics.
They carry possibilities. In a reality being overwritten, the stubborn existence of an unwritten future is an act of revolution.
The Seven World-Truths
Six Sovereigns have established zones in the Mortal Realm. A seventh territory, the Mortal Remnant, represents what the Realm itself fights to preserve. Each World-Truth has a genre logic, a mechanical identity, and three Reality Origins available to Stormbound who have been shaped by it.
Iron Dominion
Axis: Machine Supremacy vs Arcane Chaos
Suppresses magic. Amplifies technology and discipline. Improvisation is harder. Emotional volatility weakens outcomes. The Grand Calculus Engine does not merely suppress magic, it predicts rebellion and adjusts for it.
Emerald Wilds
Axis: Primal Magic vs Industrial Civilization
Metal corrodes. Spirits manifest visibly. Natural healing improves. Written records decay; oral tradition strengthens. Nature is not peaceful. It is territorial.
Aether Republic
Axis: Advanced Science vs Arcane Mysticism
Gravity is negotiable. Technology upgrades naturally. Magic manifests as exotic energy discharge. The Republic calls its expansion liberation, which makes Chancellor Vale more dangerous than most.
Infernal Marches
Axis: Infernal Strength vs Mortal Resolve
Oaths are physically binding. Cowardice costs Stress. Weapons gain weight from honest combat. Champions radiate visible power that cannot be hidden in a Crucible Zone.
Velvet Shadow
Axis: Occult Contracts vs Modern Order
Secrets shift probability. Written agreements become bound contracts. Shadow entities grow stronger as party Stress rises. Cities fall silently, from the inside out.
Bioforge Continuum
Axis: Engineered Flesh vs Natural Humanity
Healing accelerates but modifies tissue. Mechanical equipment degrades. Damaged integrated enemies may gain adaptive benefits. The Loom does not destroy. It upgrades.
Mortal Remnant
Axis: Human Potential vs World-Truth Overwrite
No axiom governs. All magical traditions function. Desperate actions may carry a higher baseline of success. World-Truth conversion attempts require more to take hold. The Mortal Realm pushes back.
Stormbound
Player characters in Fractured Worlds are called Stormbound. They are individuals who carry within themselves what the Sovereigns covet most: possibilities. The stubborn fact of an unresolved future. In a world being overwritten, this makes them dangerous.
Stormbound are mechanically built on standard Daggerheart classes. Fractured Worlds adds one new layer - a Reality Origin - representing how sustained exposure to a Sovereign zone has changed them. Reality Origins are not classes and not backgrounds. They are scars.
New Mechanical Systems
Fractured Worlds introduces three interlocking systems on top of the Daggerheart base rules.
1. Zone Logic
Each Sovereign zone has a Reality Logic: a set of passive environmental rules that apply to everyone inside it, regardless of class, origin, or intent. Zone logic is not a spell and cannot be dispelled. It is the physics of that territory. The GM applies it consistently; players learn to work with it or around it.
See Zone Logic for the full entry conditions for all seven zones.
2. Reality Origins
Each Origin has two features: a Passive that functions continuously, and a Reality Burst, a triggered ability that invokes the deeper logic of the Sovereign world that shaped the character.
Reality Bursts have specific mechanical triggers. The trigger must be established in the fiction before rolling. They carry flavor text: the internal voice of that origin's truth.
See Reality Origins for all 21 Origins with full mechanical text.
3. Hope Economy by Realm
Different Sovereign zones interact with Hope spending differently. Some Reality Bursts require spending Hope. Some passives respond to enemy Hope expenditure.
| Realm | Hope Signature |
|---|---|
| Iron Dominion | Drain - some passives cost enemy Hope; suppressive |
| Emerald Wilds | Mild positive - Hope spend aids allies |
| Aether Republic | Spend-heavy - mobility Bursts cost Hope repeatedly |
| Infernal Marches | Spike - Bursts trigger at low HP, preserving Hope |
| Velvet Shadow | Neutral - no Hope cost on most Bursts |
| Bioforge Continuum | Minor sink - reroll Burst costs Hope |
| Mortal Remnant | Burst - Surge of the Unwritten is the highest single-turn Hope spend in the system |
GM Note: Party Composition:
- Avoid full-party Iron: suppression effects stack and reduce party agency.
- Avoid full-party Infernal: Hope inflation distorts the economy. Mixed-realm parties create the most dramatic tension at zone borders, which is exactly where the best Fractured Worlds stories happen.
The Sovereign Conclave
The Sovereigns do not serve a single master. They do not march in unified columns. They are rivals who share only one goal: the apotheosis of their World-Truth, and they cooperate only when convenient and betray one another when profitable.
Each knows the others are close to something. Each watches the others with the wariness of rivals who have not yet decided whether this is the moment to cooperate or betray.
The relationships that matter most to players operating across multiple zones:
- Iron vs Bioforge: The Engine cannot model mutation cascades. Bioforge-influenced territories are Priority Containment Zones. Direct conflict has not been committed to.
- Iron vs Wilds: Active containment. The Dominion is testing a compound that disrupts the Heartroot Nexus's root network locally. Deployment at scale would devastate everything living in the Verdant Zones.
- Aether vs Infernal: Two border incidents, officially misunderstandings. Vorn assesses Republic Sky-Marshals as professional, skilled, and fighting without honor. He does not mean this as an insult.
- Wilds vs Bioforge: Mirror hostility. Both claim primacy of organic life. Border territories produce fusions that neither ecology can fully account for.
- Shadow vs All: Pre-conflict intelligence gathering. Valez has not yet determined optimal leverage against the Bioforge Continuum - a being that changes what people are removes the conditions under which leverage operates.
The Near Now
The Shardfall did not end. It is still happening. New Sovereign zones stabilize where Reality Engines take root. Old borders shift as World-Truths expand and occasionally collide.
There is a prophecy, or something that functions like one spoken in the logic of each World-Truth in its own terms. That among the Stormbound will rise one who does not merely resist the Sovereigns, but absorbs their truths. One who understands every reality deeply enough to choose between them. One who will determine which logic, if any, defines existence at the end.
But the Near Now is not about prophecy. It is about the next session. The resistance cell. The haunted detective. The veteran who crossed from one zone to another and found themselves irrevocably changed. The spirit bargain made in desperation. The sabotage mission against a rail-cannon aimed at a capital.
The Mortal Realm is fracturing. This is where your story begins.
Continue to Zone Logic — entering a Sovereign zone and what changes.