Dawnsbury Days is a turn-based tactics roleplaying game with cRPG elements that's based on the rules of PF2E, the second edition of a powerful tabletop ruleset originally published under the OGL.
You play as the Dawnsbury Four, a group of four young heroes from a small town. You choose their class, feats, spells, and other abilities as you lead them through a quest to save their home town from a multitude of dangers, and then further adventures beyond.
You will fight monsters and face dangers, yes, but you will also make friends, acquire loot, and level up, and eventually — hopefully — you will defeat whatever sinister force is behind all the dangers that have beset Dawnsbury for the last seven years.
The main adventure can take about 4 hours for a single playthrough (about 13 hours total including expansion follow-up adventures), but you can then replay it with different party compositions and besides the main adventure path, you can also try and defeat some of the powerful foes in additional scenarios in free encounter mode.
Features
A complex rule system which makes for strong strategic gameplay, highly faithful to the tabletop rules
Extreme character customization
9 ancestries (Dwarf, Elf, Gnome, Goblin, Halfling, Human, Leshy, Oozekin, Orc)
17 classes (Alchemist, Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Champion, Kineticist, Magus, Monk, Oracle, Psychic, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, Strategist, Wizard), each with different play patterns
300+ feats and 450+ spells to further customize your characters
More available through mods
20+ encounters in the main adventure path telling a story of childhood friends braving their first serious challenges in adventuring, and 30+ additional scenarios in free encounter mode (more available with the Profane Barrier and Good Little Children Never Grow Up DLC expansions)
Full voice acting for every single line, with cutscenes at the beginning and end of every encounter
Character level cap is 4. (It increases to 9 with the DLC expansions; and to 15 with the upcoming Four-Leaf Clover expansion.)
Highly moddable: Support for custom maps, encounters, campaigns, portraits, rules, classes and more
Tactical combat
Each turn, you get three actions to spend on moving, attacking, casting spells, taking combat maneuvers, drinking potions, and defensive or other actions.
You can preview the effects and success probability of all actions before you commit and weigh your options. All combat encounters are balanced, but many are difficult: To win the game reliably and consistently on harder difficulties, you will want to make use of almost all of your options.
Every +1 matters: Buffing your allies, and demoralizing or flanking your enemies are often better options than making a third attack in a turn which would be affected by a very punishing multiple attack penalty anyway.
Fully-voiced cinematic experience
This game is a cinematic experience, where you fight one combat encounter after another, and these fights are interspersed only with (fully voiced!) cinematic cutscenes. The game doesn't waste your time: animations are lightning fast, cutscenes skippable, and you can really focus on the engaging combat experience.
Or you can choose an easy difficulty, and enjoy the story of the Dawnsbury Four, young adventurers full of hope and optimisim grappling with their first real challenges.
Story of the Dawnsbury Four
Ever since the Night of the Shooting Stars seven years ago, the small town of Dawnsbury has been beset by dangers. The nearby volcano hasn't ceased erupting, support from neighbouring towns has lessened and kobold brigands terrorize the countryside. What's more, the Golden Candelabra, an artifact that protected Dawnsbury for generations, has been lost that same night.
But now new heroes may rise up: you play as the Dawnsbury Four, a group of childhood friends who have trained for years under the tutelage of the town mentor Roderick, and you are now finally ready to embark on your first quest: to find and retrieve the Golden Candelabra and bring it back to Dawnsbury where it belongs.
But even that may only usher in further dangers and provoke whatever sinister force is behind all these woes...
Accurate to tabletop
Dawnsbury Days uses the rules of PF2E, the second edition of a powerful tabletop ruleset originally published under the OGL, and strives to remain as faithful to them as possible, so that the gameplay of Dawnsbury Days mirrors your experiences when playing with friends around the table.
You play exclusively in turn-based mode on grid-based battlefields, and you can preview and review all dice rolls required to make attacks, saving throws or to deal damage.
The game also aims to replicate the elusive 'feel' of a tabletop roleplaying game, with story, characters, and encounter design all in service to that goal.
Deep character customization
You choose your characters' ancestry, heritage, background, class, subclass, ability scores, skills, feats, spells and items — and that's just at level one.
On each level up, you select from additional feats (and for spellcasters, spells) to further customize your character.
There is an extreme variety of weapons, armor and worn and consumable items to complement your character.
But you can also choose to skip all of that and use one of the many pregen characters which are pre-built for each level, complete with items, and you can even have them level up automatically.
Additional scenarios and modding support
Besides the main adventure path, you can also fight additional scenarios with minimum story but with the same engaging gameplay.
You can also download custom encounters created by modders from the Steam Workshop for additional challenge and variety. Some of these can be really difficult and unique!
Dawnsbury Days is fully moddable, and there are already 100+ mods available on the Steam Workshop. With mods, you can add custom ancestries, backgrounds, classes, feats, spells, and even variant rules. Documentation on how to create custom mods, including example mods, is included with the game and is available in the Steam community hub as well; and there are modder support channels on the Dawnsbury Days Discord server.
Multiplayer?
Dawnsbury Days is a single-player game.
However, you can use Steam Remote Play Together to play it with your friends. In this mode, one player hosts the game, and other players can control the game with their mice and keyboards as well. Each player can then control their own character.
You can further combine this with the in-game "GM mode" which allows you to precisely control each enemy creature instead of having the computer move them automatically.
Out-of-combat gameplay
The Dawnsbury Days base game focuses on combat encounters, though it does have some exploration and downtime elements — enhance your weapons with runes, find secret doors, buy and sell items, deal with hazards.
In the first expansion (character levels 5–8), you will see more exploration sequences, optional sidequests, and noncombat social encounters as well.
The second expansion (character level 9) is even more freeform and is nonlinear — you will see out-of-combat skill checks, dialogue trees, conversations with secondary NPCs, and a lot of optional hidden secrets.
The third expansion (character levels 10–15) is a true cRPG. You will gain a home base that you can improve and customize, you will collect and read books, and complete sidequests. You will speak with many enemies with dialogue trees, often affecting combat or even entirely preventing combat based on conversation. Your choices early on will affect the story later. The game becomes even more nonlinear and often offers multiple ways of dealing with a problem.
