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.

 

[overgeeked]

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.

It’s the difference between potential and kinetic energy. A game can be potentially deadly and it can be deadly at the table. They’re connected but do not have a guaranteed 1-to-1 relationship.

Bad dice luck can turn a “non-deadly” game into a lethal play experience. The reverse is also true.

Good play or player skill can turn a “deadly” game into a nonlethal experience. The reverse is also true.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Good play or player skill can turn a “deadly” game into a nonlethal experience. The reverse is also true.

Absolutely. Risk It All has the potential to amplify this effect too.

When the PC had to make the Death move in my game, the player had been rolling hot the whole time, he got dropped not because of bad luck, but because the player had just decided to ignore all the damage he was taking in favour of staying very aggressive (and also wasn't complaining about it so none of us even knew he was on 1 HP, unlike the Rogue who started moaning as soon as he hit 3 HP lol, and got told - correctly - by another player, to use a healing potion). Then of course he continued to roll hot and Risk It All rewarded him.

It happens. We played a session of Mothership and I don't think I failed a single actual skill/stat check, even though my odds were like 35-60% depending on the roll, and I made a lot of them (I did fail a bunch of saves though), which made it a lot less horrifying for us because I was pulling off a lot of risky stuff. The android's player failed like, 80% of the checks he made to the point where he started trying to avoid doing anything that might require a roll, but luckily for morale we'd developed an Alien(s) movie dynamic with his PC so nobody cared!

 

[overgeeked]

For example, in my Daggerheart playtest the players had utterly atrocious luck with the dice. Far more fear and failures than there should have been which made the game harder on them. But, none of the PCs ever dropped to 0 HP. Even so, all the players said they'd never Risk It All with the dice luck they were having that game. Terrible dice luck pushed the game into a more difficult and challenging direction, but never forced the game into "deadly" territory because the PCs are robust and, thanks to death moves, the players always have control over how deadly the game is for them and their character.