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.

 

[Imaro]

The context was the Age of Umbra combats and their deadliness to the combatants. I followed it back several posts to be clear. Are you unclear of the context of your own conversation?

No, I'm not. And what you quoted was in reference to a specific statement made by another poster... you should also keep the time-frame this conversation took place in since it was weeks ago... but you keep doing you.

 

[John R Davis]

I do play DH.
I do own my own copy of DH
I haven't seen any other CR but I watched a few hours of AOU
Does Matt
A)always talk so much as in amount of screen time, if would drive me nutz if a GM did that much, and
B) re narrate when someone's already established what happened in their own narration. This would drive my nutz x D12.

Thx
John

 

[Imaro]

If deadliness is only defied on character actually dying during the game rather than how the rules interact, then Call of Cthulhu isn't particular deadly at all.

Seeing people go "It's gone X sessions and no-one has died!!1!" from the start makes me think people don't care about how players approach the game, combat, and character death. Daggerheart is deadly but with mitigating levers appropriate to the genre it operates in, one of these are the death move to survive and possibly take a scar. You still made a Death Move though. And while you can't be oneshotted in combat as such, if you're pushed of a cliff you will die when you hit the ground even at full health. Heck, I'd even argue that being swallowed by a dragon is there as well. No silliness like 6d6 acid damage each turn while you try to speedrace the intestines.

And while that genre is heroic D&D fantasy, the heroic bit is pretty important. It doesn't care about DCC funnels or OD&D — even if the amount of spells a player have is definitely way more retro than 5e. If you want a meatgrinder then it's not the right game, not that some of the stream audience seem to care about the distinction.

To be fair the players asked Matt for a very deadly game... so the expectations were set there, and I think the disconnect is that AoU is no more or less deadly than any other Daggerheart campaign framework. An expectation was set (correctly or incorrectly) that didn't feel like was being met.

To be frank I don't think a game where the choice of death is made by the PC's can be "deadly" in the traditional sense and that is where I think the dissatisfaction lies. Even when death happens (Which admittedly finally happens near the end of the series) in the back of your mind you're thinking that the player could have just chose not to die... so is it a deadly game or are they just making a bad decisions... honestly, I think the marketing around this aspect of AoU was just bad... especially since your main audience is still D&D players.

 

[The Soloist]

Does Matt
A)always talk so much as in amount of screen time, if would drive me nutz if a GM did that much, and
B) re narrate when someone's already established what happened in their own narration. This would drive my nutz x D12.

Thx
John

This! 100%. I also find he often takes control of characters, telling this and that happens, without input from the player. It’s more obvious in AOU because he is trying to fit his story inside an 8 episode format.

 

[nyvinter]

To be frank I don't think a game where the choice of death is made by the PC's can be "deadly" in the traditional sense and that is where I think the dissatisfaction lies.

Sure it is but in a dramaturgical way rather than random. And it's way more inline with the grimdark literary genre it's inspired by, things go to naughty word and the main character get's mangled but they do survive.

The disconnect is that some people believe that death is the only consequence that matter and gets very loud when others disagree.

 

[Imaro]

Sure it is but in a dramaturgical way rather than random. And it's way more inline with the grimdark literary genre it's inspired by, things go to naughty word and the main character get's mangled but they do survive.

The disconnect is that some people believe that death is the only consequence that matter and gets very loud when others disagree.

I disagree... one death we saw was dramaturgical... the other was, well... random. And again it was the CR crew and Matt who claimed this would be a super deadly game... regardless of whether the genre is about mangled protagonists or not ( and to be fair that isn't really what's happening either... I believe one character with one scar at this point). So then claiming the fans have the wrong expectation when it's based off their own marketing seems off.

The disconnect isn't that some people believe that death is the only consequence that matters... it's that this was sold as a super deadly campaign and it fell flat in that aspect but there are those arguing that somehow we should have known it wouldn't be exactly what CR claimed it would be.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

To be frank I don't think a game where the choice of death is made by the PC's can be "deadly" in the traditional sense and that is where I think the dissatisfaction lies.

The disconnect isn't that some people believe that death is the only consequence that matters...

I mean, these points kind of contradict each other, or at least appear to.

Personally I'd say that if the campaign was expressly sold as "deadly" as in "PCs will die!!!", rather than just "this will have a grimdark tone" (which I don't specifically remember being the case, but might have been) then it sounds like there are three potential issues:

1) Matt isn't hitting the PCs as hard as he could be - i.e. he needs to add more to the encounters, push them harder, etc.

2) The players don't want the PCs to die, so when they get the Death move, are just refusing to die, or risk death.

3) The players are luckier or more skilled than Matt accounted for. Like, it doesn't matter how many times you get someone to Death move if they pick the "take a chance" option and get lucky.

I've stopped watching myself (too busy with other things) but I'm guessing 1 is the most likely.

 

[Imaro]

I mean, these points kind of contradict each other, or at least appear to.

Personally I'd say that if the campaign was expressly sold as "deadly" as in "PCs will die!!!", rather than just "this will have a grimdark tone" (which I don't specifically remember being the case, but might have been) then it sounds like there are three potential issues:

1) Matt isn't hitting the PCs as hard as he could be - i.e. he needs to add more to the encounters, push them harder, etc.

2) The players don't want the PCs to die, so when they get the Death move, are just refusing to die, or risk death.

3) The players are luckier or more skilled than Matt accounted for. Like, it doesn't matter how many times you get someone to Death move if they pick the "take a chance" option and get lucky.

I've stopped watching myself (too busy with other things) but I'm guessing 1 is the most likely.

Funny you mention this because in the episode where someone does fall... I believe Matt discusses later in the after show about how he went over budget in designing the encounter to make it harder.

Not sure how those points contradict and yes the campaign was sold as very deadly and the CR players told Matt they wanted a super deadly campaign... tone and deadliness are 2 different things.

 

[Arilyn]

Matt has been pushing them hard. They got lucky on the risk it all rolls. I'm no longer watching but from internet chatter, I believe this has changed.

I love DH but not a fan of game streaming.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Not sure how those points contradict

The first one, it only makes sense for people to be "disatissfied" if they only consider death to be death if it's death, as it were, which almost directly contradicts the second point.

Funny you mention this because in the episode where someone does fall... I believe Matt discusses later in the after show about how he went over budget in designing the encounter to make it harder.

Yeah it seems like you'd want to do that if you were doing "super deadly". The game is relatively deadly even without that (imho, I don't really agree that being able to choose not to die doesn't make it so, but YMMV), but there's no way you reach "super deadly" without either:

A) Hitting them with solidly designed standard encounters back-to-back (i.e. with no time to rest).

or

B) Hitting them with extra-points encounters if they're going to be coming in relatively "clean" HP/Stress/Armour-wise.

But from the below it sounds like maybe he was?

They got lucky on the risk it all rolls.

Ok so that was the third possibility.

So if that's true, then that's the whole cause. You can make it very deadly, but Risk It All is letting luck decide your fate, and it's absolutely possible for PCs to get lucky repeatedly with that. It's unlikely to happen but it can happen.