Critical Role has announced a new Daggerheart miniseries. The multimedia company behind the acclaimed actual play series has confirmed a new mini-campaign to showcase their upcoming original fantasy TTRPG. This new campaign will feature their grimdark campaign frame: The Age of Umbra.
The Daggerheart Miniseries Announcement
In a social media post on X (formerly known as Twitter), Critical Role's own Matt Mercer posted a video. In the video, he showed off the final version of the Daggerheart core rulebook. While showing off the book's pages, Mercer lingered on an entry for campaign frames. One of those campaign frames is the Age of Umbra, a grimdark fantasy setting.
The video ends with Mercer confirming that Critical Role will be producing a new Daggerheart actual play miniseries set in the Age of Umbra. According to a report by EN World, Mercer intentionally created the Age of Umbra to be similar to the Soulsborne series or the board game Kingdom Death: Monster. It is a dark, grim, and challenging world, a sharp contrast to the core game's lighter, more heroic tone.
"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."
The announcement of this Daggerheart miniseries is during an interesting transitionary period for Critical Role. The show just wrapped up its third campaign with an impressive 8.5-hour finale, and they have announced several smaller series like EXU: Divergence.
This has led to speculation that Critical Role may move away from Dungeons & Dragons and pivot entirely to Daggerheart for future campaigns. But given that the studio remained committed to Campaign 3 while producing and publishing the gaslamp fantasy RPG Candela Obscura, those worries appear unfounded.
