New Critical Role Campaign To Use D&D Instead of Daggerheart
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In an announcement that took many fans by surprise, Critical Role recently announced that season four of their popular actual play series will in fact use the Dungeons & Dragons 2024 rules rather than the new Daggerheart system.
The news has caused a bit of a stir online, as many within the TTRPG community had assumed the show would opt for Daggerheart, which was recently released in May 2025 and created by Critical Role’s Darrington Press as a potential rival to Dungeons & Dragons.
So just what does this mean for the future of D&D and Critical Role? Below, we break out all the details.
What is Critical Role Campaign 4 about?
The fourth campaign of Critical Role will see longtime DM Matt Mercer step down in favor of Brendan Lee Mulligan of Dimension 20 fame. The cast, however, will feature 13 players, which includes Critical Role veterans Laura Bailey, Taliesin Jaffe, Ashley Johnson, Matt Mercer, Liam O’Brien, Marisha Ray, Sam Riegel and Travis Willingham, as well as new additions from actual play veterans Luis Carazo, Robbie Daymond, Aabria Iyengar, Whitney Moore and Alex Ward.
If 13 players sounds like a lot for a standard game of D&D, it’s because Brendan Lee Mulligan will be running a West Marches-style campaign. This is a type of play that harkens back to the earliest days of Dungeons & Dragons and is essentially a sandbox campaign where a group of players share a persistent world. Each session, however, can have a different party and instead of the DM driving the plot, players choose where to go and what to do next, creating a player-driven, open-world adventure with an emphasis on exploration and discovery.
To handle juggling multiple players, Lee Mulligan has divided the cast into three groups: the Swords, the Seekers and the Schemers. Each group will embody one of the three core pillars of TTRPG gameplay, with Swords focused on combat, Seekers dealing with exploration and Schemers all about social interactions.
The first four episodes of the new campaign will introduced the primary arc and link the 13 characters together. After that, the characters will split apart and we’ll see each of the three group play out their own separate narratives.
Notably, all of the adventures will take place in a new campaign setting known as Aramán, a world where 70 years ago the mortal population rebelled against and overthew the gods, resulting in a new world where magic has seeped into every day existence.
Campaign four premieres on October 2nd, 2025 and will be available on Beacon.tv as well as Critical Role’s YouTube and Twitch channels. On-demand videos will be available the following Monday, with podcast recordings released in parts in the two weeks after the premiere.
Why is Critical Role using D&D instead of Daggerheart?
In a recent interview, Critical Role’s Marisha Ray explained that: “When creating the worlds that we build and explore in all of our content at Critical Role, we have always held strong to the belief that we should use the system that best supports the story we want to tell… We are certainly spoiled for choice when it comes to TTRPG systems that the cast knows and loves, so we are very excited to explore more of both Daggerheart and Dungeons and Dragons in our near (and hopefully distant) future.” It’s not clear, however, if Wizards of the Coast was involved in this decision and may have influenced it, either monetarily or with some other compensation.
Campaign four, however, will actually still have a Daggerheart component to it, as Critical Role has also confirmed that Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins (the two senior designers who previously lead the D&D team at Wizards of the Coast) will be working on new Daggerheart material that ties directly into campaign four. What this material will look like and when it will be released, however, are not yet known.
Final Thoughts
It’s surprising that Critical Role is once again using Dungeons & Dragons for campaign four, and whether or not Wizards of the Coast was involved in the decision, it’s likely good news for the D&D brand as a whole.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on this story in the days ahead and will update this page with new information as it’s made available. In the meantime, below is also a video from Critical Role’s official YouTube channel which offers more details on what to expact in campaign four.
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Jason Volk is the Publisher of Dungeons & Dragons Fanatics and lives in the wilds of Western Canada. He has been playing D&D for over 25 years and is a huge fan of Dragonlance and the Forgotten Realms. His favorite character of all time was a Necromancer named Neek who spent most of his adventuring career resurrecting the corpses of slain monsters. When he’s not playing TTRPGs, Jason enjoys video games, Magic: The Gathering, Warhammer 40K, watching football and spending time with his wife and adorably nerdy children.
