Critical Role's New Daggerheart Campaign Reinvents a Formula That Made D&D History

Sep 21, 2026 · 6 min read

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Published Sep 21, 2026, 1:00 PM EDT

Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford talk about their work on Daggerheart Hope & Fear

Critical Role’s Daggerheart RPG pays homage to D&D’s best-selling adventure with new campaign

An image of Strahd from D&D over the cover of the Daggerheart expansion Hope & Fear

It’s a great time to be a tabletop role-playing games fan — perhaps even the best time in more than a decade. I’m not just talking about the flourishing TTRPG market, with indie projects getting almost $4 million in funding on their first campaign day, or about the exciting barrage of Dungeons & Dragons products announced at this year’s Gen Con. The true MVP of this TTRPG Renaissance age is one that, paradoxically, is often absent from the news cycle: Daggerheart.

Critical Role’s in-house TTRPG launched in May 2025 and immediately sold out. The game has a vast, tight-knit community of players, but unless you’re already part of it or watch Critical Role regularly, it can feel relatively obscure. But that’s by design: Daggerheart lacks D&D’s cross-media promotional power, and it doesn’t care. Quietly, the game is setting out not just to sell out its books, but to revolutionize fantasy TTRPGs as we know them.

One item that did make the news: Back in June 2025, the two designers who shaped D&D’s 5th edition, Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford, left Wizards of the Coast to join Critical Role’s publishing arm, Darrington Press. In layperson's terms, this was the equivalent of Shigeru Miyamoto leaving Nintendo for Sony. In the year since, however, both designers have been relatively quiet, except for a handful of interviews and public appearances. It’s a big difference from when they were popping up every day in D&D's Instagram video.

Former D&D head designers show their first Daggerheart contribution in Hope & Fear

Perkins and Crawford have certainly not been idle. They’ve been working on a range of Daggerheart products, which were finally revealed during Gen Con 2026. They were also involved with Hope & Fear, the first Daggerheart expansion, released last month.

“Both Jeremy and I arrived at Critical Role at the back end of Hope and Fear's development,” Perkins tells Polygon in a video interview. “We jumped in immediately to lend a hand. Much of the book was written at that point, but there were still some gaps. One of the things that we were offered was a chance to write one of the campaign frames.”

In Daggerheart, a campaign frame is, as Perkins describes it, “a neatly packaged story that has a narrative attached to some kind of setting, and that setting usually has a vibe or a genre or a mood.” A Game Master (GM) can pick up a frame and use it to build their own campaign by expanding the presented themes, rules, characters, and locations.

Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford during a 2025 interview with Todd Kenreck

Hope & Fear includes four new campaign frames, a plethora of new character options and over 100 new adversaries, and new equipment and loot options. “In addition to creating one of the campaign frames, Reign of the Weredragon, Chris and I really rolled up our sleeves and engaged in rules development in every part of Hope & Fear,” Jeremy Crawford says. ”We were able to assist the team with every aspect of bringing Hope & Fear to the market, all led by the very capable and talented leads of the book, Rob Hebert, Rowan Hall, and Spencer Starke.”

Reign of the Weredragon draws inspiration from Curse of Strahd

Reign of the Weredragon wears its inspiration on its sleeve, and it’s none other than the best-selling D&D adventure in history: Curse of Strahd.

“When we started working on Reign of the Weredragon, one of my first thoughts was that it would be cool to have a campaign frame revolving around a singular villain,” Perkins says. “Strahd is a great example of that, but it was Jeremy who inspired me for our villain, Forlorne Lykona, based on our mutual appreciation for Disney villains.” The evil sorceress ruler of Whelvia, Forlorne is, indeed, pretty close to Maleficent, complete with a dragon transformation, but she also brings a nasty set of curses to unleash on unwary players.

This is another similarity with Curse of Strahd: the players are not supposed to confront the villain immediately, lest they end up turned to stone or transformed into cursed weredrakes. An oracle called the Astromancer will give the characters five “revelations,” clues to find items and allies that will help them in the final battle, thus playing a role similar to Madame Eva's in Curse of Strahd.

“One of the things that we wanted to explore in Reign of the Weredragon that is different from Curse of Strahd is that the characters are all from this land,” Crawford says. “Unlike in Barovia, where they come from the outside and are trapped, they have personal stakes in Whelvia. And the players also help the GM create the villain.”

A werewolf is one of the new character options in Daggerheart: Hope & Fear

During session zero of a Reign of the Weredragon campaign, the GM and the players will build Forlorne collaboratively by defining some key personality traits or events from her past. The GM selects a number of prompts from the 40 provided and goes around the table asking players to answer the question. It’s a method inspired by the game For the Queen by Alex Roberts, also published by Darrington Press.

“This process unlocks what we're searching for in Daggerheart,” Crawford says, “how to connect the players with the world, the setting, and the adventure, always making the players feel like they are narrators in the play experience."

Daggerheart campaign frames could expand into full settings

Published adventures are a fundamental piece of TTRPG culture, but during their time at D&D, Perkins and Crawford also shook up that formula significantly by giving us products like Curse of Strahd or Rime of the Frostmaiden: large adventures that can function as long campaigns and, at the same time, provide most of the information a campaign setting would. Some of Daggerheart campaign frames, including Reign of the Weredragon, could be easily developed into something similar.

“The idea of taking a campaign frame and blowing it out into an actual campaign-sized adventure has certainly been at the forefront of Jeremy's mind and mine,” Perkins says. “We have to figure out what is the best time and story with which to do that, but we haven't announced anything officially yet.”

Meanwhile, fans can get a taste of what a Reign of the Weredragon campaign looks like in the upcoming Critical Role live actual play miniseries, which will be GM’d by Perkins himself.