Dawnsbury Days

Dawnsbury Days is a single-player, turn-based tactics roleplaying game with cRPG elements, based on the PF2E tabletop rules. You lead the Dawnsbury Four, four young heroes from a small town, through a quest to save their home and further adventures. Choose their abilities, fight monsters, make friends, find loot and level up as you seek the sinister force behind the dangers that have plagued Dawnsbury for seven years.

The Dawnsbury Four

Seven years ago, the Night of the Shooting Stars brought continuing dangers to Dawnsbury. The nearby volcano has not stopped erupting, support from neighbouring towns has dwindled, kobold brigands threaten the countryside, and the Golden Candelabra—a treasured artifact that protected the town for generations—was lost that same night.

The Dawnsbury Four are childhood friends who have trained for years under the town mentor Roderick. Their first quest is to find the Golden Candelabra and return it to Dawnsbury, but doing so may bring further dangers and draw out the force behind the town’s troubles. The main adventure has over 20 encounters and follows the friends as they face their first serious challenges as adventurers. A playthrough takes about 4 hours; the expansion follow-up adventures bring the total to about 13 hours.

Tactical combat

Battles take place in turn-based mode on grid-based battlefields. Each turn, you have three actions to spend on movement, attacks, spells, combat maneuvers, potions, defensive actions and more. You can preview the effects and success probability of actions before committing, and preview and review the dice rolls for attacks, saving throws and damage.

Encounters are balanced, though many are difficult. On harder difficulties, consistently winning means using your options carefully: buffs, demoralizing enemies and flanking can be better choices than a third attack, which is affected by a punishing multiple attack penalty. The game presents its combat encounters one after another, with fully voiced cinematic cutscenes between them. Animations are fast, cutscenes can be skipped, and an easy difficulty lets you focus on the Dawnsbury Four’s story.

Character customization

You choose each character’s ancestry, heritage, background, class, subclass, ability scores, skills, feats, spells and items, then make further choices when they level up. The game offers 9 ancestries: Dwarf, Elf, Gnome, Goblin, Halfling, Human, Leshy, Oozekin and Orc. Its 17 classes are Alchemist, Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Champion, Kineticist, Magus, Monk, Oracle, Psychic, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, Strategist and Wizard, each with different play patterns.

More than 300 feats and 450 spells add further options, alongside a range of weapons, armor, worn items and consumables. You can instead select prebuilt characters for each level, with items included, and have them level up automatically. The base game’s character level cap is 4; the expansions raise it to 9, and the Four-Leaf Clover expansion raises it to 15.

Adventures and scenarios

Alongside the main adventure path, free encounter mode offers over 30 additional scenarios with little story and a focus on combat. You can also download custom encounters made by modders. The Profane Barrier and Good Little Children Never Grow Up expansions add more scenarios.

The base game includes some exploration and downtime: you can improve weapons with runes, find secret doors, trade items and deal with hazards. The expansions add more out-of-combat content. The first includes exploration sequences, optional sidequests and social encounters; the second is more freeform and nonlinear, with skill checks, dialogue trees, conversations with secondary characters and optional hidden secrets. The third adds a home base to improve and customize, books to collect and read, and sidequests. Its conversations with enemies can affect or prevent combat, early choices can shape later events, and problems often have multiple solutions.

Rules and modding

Dawnsbury Days aims to follow the PF2E rules closely. It includes full voice acting for every line and cutscenes at the beginning and end of every encounter. Character creation and gameplay options are built around the tabletop rules, with story, characters and encounter design intended to support that style of roleplaying.

The game supports custom maps, encounters, campaigns, portraits, rules, classes and more. Mods can add ancestries, backgrounds, classes, feats, spells and variant rules; more content is available through mods. Dawnsbury Days is single-player, but Steam Remote Play Together lets other players control the game using their mice and keyboards, with each player controlling their own character. You can combine this with the in-game GM mode, which lets you control enemy creatures instead of leaving their actions to the computer.