Critical Role Announces Age of Umbra Daggerheart Campaign, Starting May 29th

An 8-part Daggerheart miniseries is coming from Critical Role. Announced today, Age of Umbra is a new Actual Play series featuring Matthew Mercer as game master and co-founders Ashley Johnson, Laura Bailey, Liam O’Brien, Marisha Ray, Sam Riegel, Taliesin Jaffe, and Travis Willingham as players. The new miniseries will take up the bulk of the summer months, providing more of a break to the core cast ahead of an assumed fourth full-length D&D campaign.

Daggerheart is a new TTRPG developed by Critical Role's Darrington Press. Although the base game is intended to be a high fantasy RPG, the game includes several "campaign frames" that add additional rules for specific types of stories. Age of Umbra was developed by Mercer and draws inspiration from games like Dark Souls, Tainted Grail, and Kingdom Death: Monster.

The miniseries will air on Beacon, Twitch, and YouTube, with episodes airing every Thursday. The first episode debuts on May 29th, with Session 0 airing on various Critical Role platforms on May 22nd.

The full description of the series can be found below:

Age of Umbra

is an eight-part Daggerheart mini-series from Critical Role of dark, survival fantasy, debuting May 29 on Beacon, Twitch, and YouTube. Set in the Halcyon Domain, a world abandoned by gods and consumed by darkness, the series begins by following five people from the isolated community of Desperloch as they fight to protect their own in the face of rising horrors.

The Halcyon Domain is a lethal, foreboding land where the souls of the dead are cursed to return as twisted, nightmarish forms. A dark, ethereal mass known as the Umbra roams and holds these fiendish monstrosities, further corrupting anything it touches. Sacred Pyres keep the corruption at bay, and small communities endure through cooperation. Out in the beyond, whispers speak of ancient secrets and powers, wonders of a lost age, ready for discovery to those brave enough (or foolish enough) to seek them.

Game Master Matthew Mercer leads fellow Critical Role co-founders Ashley Johnson, Laura Bailey, Liam O’Brien, Marisha Ray, Sam Riegel, Taliesin Jaffe, and Travis Willingham in a high-stakes actual play exploring hope, sacrifice, and survival in a world where death is only the beginning.

 

[OB1]

There are those who will continue to watch CR for a bunch of nerdy-ass voice actors (NAVAs) no matter what they play, but there are also those who very specifically need the combination of NAVAs and D&D.

I take this one step further. So far, the NAVAs have created their best material when playing D&D, and that is why the combination is so popular. It's what D&D helps create that's key (the same argument could be applied to why BG3 is so much more popular than Larian's other games). If the content that the combination of the NAVAs and DH create great material, then I think people would watch.

And it really makes sense if you stop and think about it. D&D is a system for telling collaborative stories that has been being refined and improved for 50 years. It should be unrealistic that a brand new game is going to be as robust as D&D is for that purpose right out of the gate, even if it's 'designed for the people playing it'.

Which, also, for the life of me, I can't understand how anyone thinks that DH is designed for the style of play that we've seen from CR over the last 10 years. CR is Mercer's world of Exandria. His control over that world is critical to the stories about the PCs. That's not to say he doesn't take inspiration or change things based on what the players do or show interest in, but the idea that the CR playstyle is collaborative world building just doesn't hold water.

I will say that the one aspect of DH that I do think will fit the CR crew is the initiativeless combat, even though that means that 3 or 4 of the players will provide most of the action in combat, with the others filling in when they see something interesting to do. It will likely make combat run much more quickly and smoothly.

 

[Reynard]

D&D is a system for telling collaborative stories

It really isn't, though. There is next to nothing in the system that encourages the telling of collaborative stories. As a SYSTEM, D&D is a tool for conflict resolution almost exclusively. Whether that results in a collaborative story experience or not is a function of the people at the table.

Daggerheart (among many other games) actually does have systems in its rules that encourage (or even require) collaborative storytelling.

 

[JConstantine]

Which, also, for the life of me, I can't understand how anyone thinks that DH is designed for the style of play that we've seen from CR over the last 10 years.

Not only that, but they were playing Pathfinder 1e before moving to D&D5e for streaming, Matt was playing 3.x before that, and as we've seen from when he ran Monsterhearts and Candela Obscura, he really doesn't grasp that style of play. Matt is D&D diehard through and through.

 

[Reynard]

Not only that, but they were playing Pathfinder 1e before moving to D&D5e for streaming, Matt was playing 3.x before that, and as we've seen from when he ran Monsterhearts and Candela Obscura, he really doesn't grasp that style of play. Matt is D&D diehard through and through.

I don't know if he is a "D&D diehard" through and through, but he is definitely a director style GM for a group that is mostly players okay being on near rails.

I am not sure where the idea that DH is meant to be a game built precisely for Critical Role's playstyle comes from. None of the CR folks were lead designers on the game, first of all.

 

[JConstantine]

I don't know if he is a "D&D diehard" through and through

I mean, in the penultimate episode (or maybe the one before) of Campaign 3, he literally squeaked "I love D&D!" like an excited child. That's after Daggerheart was well into development, after the OGL fiasco. The only thing the man loves more than D&D is the people he plays it with.

 

[Reynard]

I mean, in the penultimate episode (or maybe the one before) of Campaign 3, he literally squeaked "I love D&D!" like an excited child. That's after Daggerheart was well into development, after the OGL fiasco. The only thing the man loves more than D&D is the people he plays it with.

My point was more that he is definitely a traditional RPG guy, especially behind the screen.

 

[overgeeked]

And it really makes sense if you stop and think about it. D&D is a system for telling collaborative stories that has been being refined and improved for 50 years.

It's really, really not though. It's a wargame at its core and has been since the beginning. What little "collaborative storytelling" elements 5E has are bolted on and vestigial at best. It's also telling that those same elements were removed in the 2024 version of 5E while the wargame elements were expanded.

Which, also, for the life of me, I can't understand how anyone thinks that DH is designed for the style of play that we've seen from CR over the last 10 years.

Matt talks regularly about having to constantly fight the D&D system to tell the kinds of stories he and his players want to tell. Daggerheart was designed by them, for them. I'll believe what Matt says about what he and his players want.

CR is Mercer's world of Exandria. His control over that world is critical to the stories about the PCs. That's not to say he doesn't take inspiration or change things based on what the players do or show interest in, but the idea that the CR playstyle is collaborative world building just doesn't hold water.

Is it possible things go on behind the scenes—that is not aired for the audience—that you're unaware of when these strangers play their game? Just because you don't see them negotiating a worldbuilding detail live during the game doesn't mean there's no collaborative worldbuilding going on.

Not only that, but they were playing Pathfinder 1e before moving to D&D5e for streaming, Matt was playing 3.x before that

They started with 4E, then switched to PF for the home game. Matt started with 2E. And he's played a wide variety of games over the years. He's said a few times Deadlands is his favorite setting. Etc. Point being he's not locked in to D&D always and only like you seem to think. They're famous for playing D&D. Those are not the same thing.

as we've seen from when he ran Monsterhearts and Candela Obscura, he really doesn't grasp that style of play. Matt is D&D diehard through and through.

Matt has 5E-itus. He's run 5E so often for so long that it's now his default. You see it in a lot of referees when they try to run different games. They run any new game as if it were D&D 5E. It doesn't make them "diehards" it just means they've internalized that style. All it takes is a bit of time and practice to move on from that style.

I've seen this at my own table. Our long-time DM caught 5E-itus and now runs all other games like that. When we played DCC RPG, he called for rolls constantly...which is a 5E problem, that's not how DCC RPG is meant to be run. When we played OSE or B/X, he did the same thing, constant rolls. When we played Call of Cthulhu, same thing. When we played Dungeon World, same thing. Just like Matt did when running Candela Obscura.

You see this with players, too. In the OSE and B/X game I mentioned an avid 5E player assumed these OSR games played exactly like 5E. He discovered he was wrong the first time he charged into combat. It took him a few more dead PCs to finally break the habit.

 

[OB1]

It really isn't, though. There is next to nothing in the system that encourages the telling of collaborative stories. As a SYSTEM, D&D is a tool for conflict resolution almost exclusively. Whether that results in a collaborative story experience or not is a function of the people at the table.

Daggerheart (among many other games) actually does have systems in its rules that encourage (or even require) collaborative storytelling.

I didn't mean collaborative in the sense of the definition of that style in TTRPG Design, I meant it in the generic use of the word. That D&D is a story told by a group of people together where the outcome isn't known ahead of time due to the conflict resolution mechanics. The players want things, the DM puts up roadblocks to get what they want and thus a story is told. Storytelling is effective management of creating conflict and the resolution of that conflict and D&D does that very well.

 

[JConstantine]

Point being he's not locked in to D&D always and only like you seem to think. They're famous for playing D&D. Those are not the same thing.

I said he's a D&D diehard, not that he's locked into D&D. "Those are not the same thing."

Matt has 5E-itus. He's run 5E so often for so long that it's now his default.

I'd argue he has Pathfinder brain, as evidenced by his homebrew.

 

[Reynard]

I didn't mean collaborative in the sense of the definition of that style in TTRPG Design, I meant it in the generic use of the word. That D&D is a story told by a group of people together where the outcome isn't known ahead of time due to the conflict resolution mechanics. The players want things, the DM puts up roadblocks to get what they want and thus a story is told. Storytelling is effective management of creating conflict and the resolution of that conflict and D&D does that very well.

Stories emerge from D&D gameplay. That isn't the same as that being what it is made for. I was just trying to draw a distinction between "trad" games like D&D and "narrative" games like DH.