Critical Role
- Critical Role launched "Daggerheart" — its own tabletop roleplaying game system — on May 20.
- The team's eight cofounders are going all-in for a splashy promo for the game, "Age of Umbra."
- There's a lot riding on "Daggerheart's" success — and CCO Matt Mercer says it'll be a "major part" of the team's future.
Critical Role, the nerdworld business that has sold out stadium shows in and outside the US, just launched its new game, "Daggerheart," after more than a year of beta testing.
The team's cofounders rolled out the game on-stream on May 20, kicking off a new era for the business's game-making arm, Darrington Press.
"Daggerheart" plays like a sophisticated, modern answer to the 50-year-old "Dungeons & Dragons" — the Hasbro-owned game that first made CR nerdworld-famous. Now, the eight CR cofounders run a multi-division business that spans live shows and streaming, podcasting, Amazon-backed animations, gaming, and publishing.
The "Daggerheart" starter kit comes with a 366-page rulebook, around the same length as the main "D&D" rulebook. The core set comes with 279 player cards. Unlike "D&D," CR's "Daggerheart" involves the use of a card system that outlines each character's backstory and history.
Matthew Mercer, CR's chief creative officer, told Business Insider that the process of creating Daggerheart has been a "wild and rewarding journey."
"The scale of collaboration between both studying what elements of TTRPG gaming we've all been drawn to, and then implementing those lessons into a new game system has been a whole host of new challenges and unexpected revelations along the entire process," Mercer said.
"There's still so much more to come, and Daggerheart will most definitely be a major part of CR's future and content alongside everything else we've been working on," he added.
The eight cofounders are using other arms of the company to promote "Daggerheart." They're releasing an eight-part miniseries where they'll all be at the table, playing the game. It's titled "Age of Umbra," a dark fantasy-themed adventure that premieres on May 29.
Mercer told BI "Age of Umbra" is a marked departure from Exandria, the high fantasy setting that CR has been streaming in for its main campaign for 10 years.
Mercer said guiding the seven other cofounders, who've been playing "D&D" on-stream for a decade, was easier than he expected.
"We intentionally designed the game to be quite intuitive, and while there's always a learning curve to any new system — especially if you're having to unlearn habits from other game systems — everyone ultimately slipped into the game rapidly and comfortably," he said.
Designing 'Daggerheart'
Critical Role
Spenser Starke, the lead game designer for "Daggerheart," told BI that the game has been built for narrative-focused play, but it also has the latitude for "cinematic combat."
"The most challenging part of designing the game for me was trying to ensure all the mechanics felt balanced and locked together at every level to create a cohesive game," Starke said.
The player cards, Starke said, were a high-priority item for the development team, particularly the ancestry, community, and subclass cards — elements that go into character creation.
CR's Darrington Press created "Daggerheart" in-house, meaning Starke and his crew of designers built the book to the final stages of production, overseeing everything from art to the last edits.
One of the later additions to the rulebook that Starke and his team made was campaign frames, a quick-start method for new players to get their home games going.
"The design team spent so much time, effort, and energy putting that chapter together, and I'm really proud of what we created," Starke said. "We're truly so excited for people to take the format for campaign frames and start building their own."
Starke and Mercer also teased that there'll be more updates coming down the pipe soon.
"We can't announce anything officially, but know we are working every day on new, exciting stuff for 'Daggerheart,'" Starke said.