One of the gospels of playing Dungeons & Dragons is to never split the party. And yet, Critical Role is doing exactly that for its upcoming fourth campaign - but for a good reason. In a big change from the three previous campaigns that the titans of actual play ran, Campaign 4 will have Brennan Lee Mulligan replace Matthew Mercer as the Dungeon Master, the story is set in a brand new fantasy world of Mulligan's creation, five new players are joining the cast, and the game will be what's known as a "West March" campaign. When the campaign begins on October 2, the 13 players will split into three different groups all on their own quests (with the potential for crossover) as they traverse across the mythical land of Aramán.
"We're all fans of that kind of storytelling, whether we've watched Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, or other kinds of epic fantasy series," Critical Role's Sam Riegel tells GamesRadar+ during an interview with the cast. "It's so fun to be able to check in on characters in different phases of their journey and wonder how and when those journeys will intersect and how their quests will become one quest."
Although Campaign 4 still uses D&D, Critical Role recently released a tabletop RPG system of its own - Daggerheart. The core set is currently available for $59.99 at Amazon, or direct from Darrington Press.
Typically, one of the big benefits of a West March-style campaign for home games of D&D is that it boasts modular, quest-based gameplay which makes it easy for players to slot in or out of a session due to scheduling concerns. As professionals, scheduling woes (the bane of any normal D&D group, or anyone playing the best tabletop RPGs) are not an issue for Critical Role. Instead, following the soldiers, schemers, and seekers will let the players explore a world on several levels like never before.
"There is something very fun about West Marches often being used to help people flow in and out of campaigns. It's a logistical thing, often," Aabria Iyengar, one of the new additions who has previously DMed Critical Role spin-off series, explains. "But you get to live in and tell a story in a world that's so big, you get the opportunity for there to be different things that different groups care about. It's a really fun complexity to add to this kind of storytelling."
Mercer, playing in a main campaign rather than DMing for the first time, adds that one of the challenges of running a game is figuring out how to continue making it so that "all of the important things are only the responsibility of the people at this table," a plight that Iyengar sympathized with.
"West March actually allows for a much more natural fracturing and stakes between multiple different perspectives and groups," Mercer says. "In an interesting way, it actually makes for a much more realistic way that a lot of these stories would be tackled in a fantasy world like this."
The first four episodes of the new campaign will introduce everybody, Marisha Ray says, adding that "the stakes are high from minute one. This is not your average adventuring party meeting in a tavern."
This quartet of "overture episodes," as the cast is calling them, will give audiences an idea of what everybody's motivations are before they split off. After that, episodes will follow one group for a little bit before switching to another group as supposed to rapidly jumping back and forth. It's possible that characters might switch from one group to another, mixing up the parties, at some point during the campaign, but the cast says nothing is planned. Ensuring that the expanded cast and wider format is coherent and easy to follow was an early concern, according to Ray, and one they've taken steps to assuage—successfully, they think.
"After that first episode, we were like 'Oh, this is working wonderfully,'" Mercer says.
There's been another big change for Campaign Four, behind-the-scenes. In June, Critical Role announced that it had hired Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins to work for their publishing arm, Darrington Press. Crawford and Perkins both came from Wizards of the Coast, where they were lead game and rules designers for Dungeons & Dragons. This gives Critical Role a whole new resource when it comes to homebrewing—creation of classes, monsters, items, or other content that's original to the table rather than pulled from an official source.
Matt Mercer and Brennan Lee Mulligan have a lot of interesting things to say about the wonderful world of tabletop RPGs, and we caught up with them earlier this year about sharing worlds and what they want next for Exandria Unlimited. You can catch the entire interview here.
"If we come up with an idea, we can take it to Jeremy and Chris and say 'Is this possible? Can we make this balanced and make it work?' And they either say yes or no," Laura Bailey explains, and new cast member Alexander Ward says that the pair helped refine his first-ever homebrew for his character.
"It's hard to call it homebrew when the people who are helping us shore it up are Jeremy and Chris," Mercer jokes.
With a new campaign style, bigger cast, better homebrew, and a new setting, there's plenty for everybody—players included—to look forward to exploring in Campaign 4. Mercer said he had some "coffee dates" with Mulligan near the end of Campaign 3 to talk cosmology and to make sure that the events of Campaign 3's finale and Mulligan's new campaign wouldn't cross over the same beats or retread the same territory, but otherwise he takes no credit for Aramán and is excited to learn about it as he plays. As far as the players know, there's no connection to Exandria or Campaigns 1 through 3—"other than the Orc naming convention that involves adding a fussy little 'J' in," Iyengar quips. (The elves of Aramán, like the elves of Exandria, tend to have apostrophes in their names, too.)
One thing that won't change? The relationship that Critters—the fans—have with the cast and characters.
"I think the parasocial relationships are still gonna be there," Ray says. "We've had the character art out there for, what? A week? And there's already shipping happening. It's so fun."
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