Critical Role to Run Grimdark Daggerheart Miniseries

Critical Role has a new Daggerheart miniseries in the works, which will showcase the Age of Umbra campaign frame developed by Matt Mercer. In a recent video posted to social media, Mercer showed off the final print version of Daggerheart's core rulebook, which will release in May. During the video, Mercer discussed some of the campaign frames that will appear in the new book, including the previously announced Age of Umbra setting. In the video, Mercer announced that Age of Umbra will be featured in the next Daggerheart Actual Play miniseries being developed by Critical Role.

Mercer developed the Age of Umbra campaign frame as an intentionally grimdark setting inspired by Dark Souls and Kingdom Death: Monster. Speaking at PAX Unplugged, Mercer discussed the setting in further detail. "The campaign I created, Age of Umbra, is [similar to] a Soulsbourne," Mercer said. "It is a dark, challenging very grim place by design. In Daggerheart, our menagerie games are very silly and very fun and lean on flexing and going over the top with our characters. Age of Umbra is meant to be the opposite. It is a landscape that has been without gods for over 100 years; they abandoned the people and the realm itself is kind of rotting and dying. The survivors that exist there have to hold on to what community there is to get by as the dark things in the shadows grow darker and larger as time passes."

"There are threats and dangers whenever you rest that might give the GM more Fear," Mercer said later in the panel. "You might actually be attacked before you finish resting, so you want to have somebody take the Watch action while you have downtime to mitigate that danger. There are mechanics in this frame to set that theme that no place is really safe. There are things lurking out there and there's longstanding corruption beyond just damage that exists in this space."

The announcement, while minor, has some major implications for Critical Role. The popular actual play show recently wrapped up its third campaign and there was speculation that the show would switch from Dungeons & Dragons to Daggerheart for the next ongoing campaign. Considering that Age of Umbra is developed by Mercer and is being featured in a new miniseries, it seems like the plan is still for Critical Role to focus on Exandria in their ongoing campaign and use various miniseries to explore other kinds of stories and worlds. We'll have to see as Critical Role said they'll make more announcements about its future later this spring.

 

[Imaro]

Okay then a decade plus versus just released, also 3PP versus official support from one of the co-creators?

Soooo lack of play experience is the answer. Cool.

 

[zakael19]

Or I can use a grimdark setting for 5e (there's a few of them) that add and modify mechanics to support the genre. I feel like both Daggerheart and 5e out of the box are default heroic fantasy.

Edit: This is the sentiment I'm trying to understand...It's shoehorning or forcing for D&D to add/modify rules to better represent a certain genre but it's done in Daggerheart and there's no criticism, no reminders that there are better games for emulating X out the box. Why?

If D&D shipped with custom/optional mechanics to fit a variety of different stories you might want to tell with the system instead of a handful of condensed mechanics it might be getting there. All the DH “frames” have mechanics that reinforce the narrative themes they want to tell.

What Matt has done with this one is say “hey, this is a system for telling heroic stories. But sometimes you may want to tell a story that’s in a pretty dim place that wears on the heros. They’re still heros tho.” And so you can lose your Hope faster, there’s narrative side consequences recommended, and you have a mild “rest in a safe place or face actual badness maybe.”

I don’t think AoU is “grimadark” at all - and I wouldn’t recommend DH for playing a game like Mork Borg or anything else where the PCs are disposable scoundrels.

 

[Kichwas]

Or I can use a grimdark setting for 5e (there's a few of them) that add and modify mechanics to support the genre. I feel like both Daggerheart and 5e out of the box are default heroic fantasy.

Edit: This is the sentiment I'm trying to understand...It's shoehorning or forcing for D&D to add/modify rules to better represent a certain genre but it's done in Daggerheart and there's no criticism, no reminders that there are better games for emulating X out the box. Why?

Daggerheart has a 'lighter footprint' so is easy to reskin to different genres.

D&D by the very existence of a skill system and spell slot system is NOT a very customizeable game unless you ignore how nothing fits the genre you're playing in.

D&D is not 'heroic fantasy' in the least. D&D is D&D fantasy.

It is its own genre and is so tightly typed to that genre it shocks me that people would even try to use it to emulate anything other than itself.

Daggerheart is very close to a 'generic RPG'. They could reskin it as a competitor to 'tri-stat / BESM' - as the opposite of GURPS and Hero. The domain cards are not yet tightly defined.

They will get there. But the nature of them is plug and play and how they're used and work can be defined in each card. There's no spell system with slots / charges and so on. There's no list of skills and sets ways of using them that constrains what can be played.

There is only a class system which is... too specific to be 'generic' <--- that's the only space where Daggerheart 'fails' to be heroic fantasy and ends up it's own genre. But with D&D that break is in every aspect of the game.

However the way the classes of Daggerheart are made (combine any 2 domains then add 2 special abilities unique to the class) means a potential second edition could make them 'generic' - much like how the 'second edition' of 'The Fantasy Trip' ended up being GURPS. But doing this would probably make it a more bland game.

Being a lightly typed system, the Campaign Frames can tweak just a few dials in places and get a different result without major adjustment, and you don't need to remake or ignore how whole swaths of the game no longer 'fit'.

With every game you need to 'reshape the genre to fit it' - with D&D this is extreme, with Daggerheart it's more medium light.

 

[nyvinter]

Edit: This is the sentiment I'm trying to understand...It's shoehorning or forcing for D&D to add/modify rules to better represent a certain genre but it's done in Daggerheart and there's no criticism, no reminders that there are better games for emulating X out the box. Why?

There are not much difference in rules between Urban Shadows and Masks — except for how stats go up and down dynamically in the last — but because they're a fiction first games they feel vastly different in play. But I think we're talking past one another because we see these games and rules in a fundamentally different way. So I really don't know what to say here.

Daggerheart can do fantasy with high magical abilities, I'd say it's not the game for subtle grounded fantasy and it would require a lot of work to be science fiction (but then again some people did Star Wars 5e so what do I know).

And the GM principles that guides Daggerheart has been around since 2010. It does new things as a remix with things from other games, it's not revolutionary in any way. Apart from having the cards with the core book for $60 — that's just mindboggling.


As for not grimdark: had grimdark fiction been like the grimdark games they would have changed protagonists each second chapter — for me that would have been super-boring but each to ones own. Side characters die, collateral demoralising damage occur. Protagonist gets mangled and bruised in all the ways, but they seldom die. Grimdark is not my favourite genre but I take the books over the meatgrinder games any day.

 

[Reynard]

Daggerheart has a 'lighter footprint' so is easy to reskin to different genres.

D&D by the very existence of a skill system and spell slot system is NOT a very customizeable game unless you ignore how nothing fits the genre you're playing in.

D&D is not 'heroic fantasy' in the least. D&D is D&D fantasy.

It is its own genre and is so tightly typed to that genre it shocks me that people would even try to use it to emulate anything other than itself.

Daggerheart is very close to a 'generic RPG'. They could reskin it as a competitor to 'tri-stat / BESM' - as the opposite of GURPS and Hero. The domain cards are not yet tightly defined.

They will get there. But the nature of them is plug and play and how they're used and work can be defined in each card. There's no spell system with slots / charges and so on. There's no list of skills and sets ways of using them that constrains what can be played.

There is only a class system which is... too specific to be 'generic' <--- that's the only space where Daggerheart 'fails' to be heroic fantasy and ends up it's own genre. But with D&D that break is in every aspect of the game.

Being a lightly typed system, the Campaign Frames can tweak just a few dials in places and get a different result without major adjustment, and you don't need to remake or ignore how whole swaths of the game no longer 'fit'.

With every game you need to 'reshape the genre to fit it' - with D&D this is extreme, with Daggerheart it's more medium light.

You can reskin anything. You can make D&D post apocalyptic science fantasy by renaming things and describing things differently and not change a single rule. You can make it more or less deadly with a few of the (2014) suggested optional rules.

I think it is false on its face to say that D&D 5E is not a customizable game.

 

[Kichwas]

You can reskin anything. You can make D&D post apocalyptic science fantasy by renaming things and describing things differently and not change a single rule. You can make it more or less deadly with a few of the (2014) suggested optional rules.

I think it is false on its face to say that D&D 5E is not a customizable game.

Sure. Rip out the entire skill, spell, vancian (daily charges) magic, class, equipment list, magic items, monsters, and feat system and D&D can be reskinned...

But.. that kind of makes my point.

 

[nyvinter]

I think it is false on its face to say that D&D 5E is not a customizable game.

You can customise it a lot. Like the Star Wars 5e I mentioned above. It clearly got spaceships and charming scoundrels in every spaceport but in the end all abilities that use the spellslots still feel like spells — even if they did improve a lot on the utility ones — and the game overall feels like D&D 5e cosplaying as something else.

 

[Arilyn]

Or I can use a grimdark setting for 5e (there's a few of them) that add and modify mechanics to support the genre. I feel like both Daggerheart and 5e out of the box are default heroic fantasy.

Edit: This is the sentiment I'm trying to understand...It's shoehorning or forcing for D&D to add/modify rules to better represent a certain genre but it's done in Daggerheart and there's no criticism, no reminders that there are better games for emulating X out the box. Why?

I think it's because DH is a more loose game in terms of rules. Yes, it has crunch in the combat rules, but a lot of play is driven by what the GM does when spending a fear. This will be heavily influenced by the themes of the genre currently being played. I think it'll be an easier system to tinker with to arrive at different genres. However, I believe DH will always have at least a streak of heroic fantasy running through it, regardless of setting trappings.

We're seeing excitement around the possibilities of DH because the game is encouraging tables to create their own settings with very solid playable examples in the book, which range from grounded military type fantasy to kinda goofy to dark. As @dbm said, it's like Savage Worlds in this regard although I feel SW is stetchier.

 

[Reynard]

Sure. Rip out the entire skill, spell, vancian (daily charges) magic, class, equipment list, magic items, monsters, and feat system and D&D can be reskinned...

But.. that kind of makes my point.

No. You don't have to do any of that. Call crossbows "guns" and rename Arcana "Tech" and you are literally halfway there.

 

[BRayne]

Or I can use a grimdark setting for 5e (there's a few of them) that add and modify mechanics to support the genre. I feel like both Daggerheart and 5e out of the box are default heroic fantasy.

Edit: This is the sentiment I'm trying to understand...It's shoehorning or forcing for D&D to add/modify rules to better represent a certain genre but it's done in Daggerheart and there's no criticism, no reminders that there are better games for emulating X out the box. Why?

"Out of the box" those things are included in Daggerheart with the Age of Umbra campaign frame is the main thing