Critical Role Expands Beyond D&D, Experimenting With New TTRPG Formats

Thanks to their streaming hub Beacon, Critical Role has been pushing well past its D&D roots, a direction Marisha Ray addressed directly during a spotlight panel at Emerald City Comic Con 2026. "We're definitely looking to expand into different genres," Ray said, pointing to Weird Kids as "a really great success" and noting that Draw Your Weapons, developed with animation studio Titmouse, had just launched on the platform.

The expansion marks a deliberate evolution for a company that built its entire identity on D&D. Critical Role's publishing imprint Darrington Press released Daggerheart, its own fantasy tabletop RPG, in May 2025. The system is story-driven by design, encouraging players to think narratively rather than mechanically, and uses a mechanic called Duality Dice, where players roll two twelve-sided dice: one for Hope and one for Fear, with each outcome generating a resource that shapes the narrative for either the player or the GM.

The initial print run sold out in under two weeks, despite the team believing they had enough inventory to last a full year. After the game's release, Matthew Mercer stated that Daggerheart was a major part of the company's future business plans.

Daggerheart was built for longer campaigns, while Darrington Press also developed Illuminated Worlds, a separate system optimized for short story arcs, both announced in April 2023. The scope has only grown since. At Gen Con in July 2025, Darrington Press announced multiple upcoming Daggerheart expansions, including a romantasy-themed campaign frame titled "With Love and Magic," a new genre setting by Jeremy Crawford, an interconnected adventure supplement by Chris Perkins, and a new world created by Keith Baker and Jenn Ellis.

In November 2025, Darrington Press announced the expansion sourcebook Daggerheart: Hope and Fear, which "nearly doubles the character creation options" with new classes, subclasses, ancestries, and a transformation mechanic covering options such as werewolf, vampire, ghost, and demigod. The expansion is scheduled for summer 2026, with pre-orders open for both standard and deluxe boxed editions.

The breadcrumbs back to D&D are still easy to spot. Critical Role started every Thursday with Matthew Mercer running fifth-edition games for fellow voice actors Laura Bailey, Liam O'Brien, Taliesin Jaffe, Marisha Ray, Sam Riegel, Travis Willingham, and Ashley Johnson. Their first campaign, Vox Machina, concluded in Fall 2017 in Mercer's homebrew continent of Tal'Dorei before the party moved on to a new group of heroes adventuring through the grim continent of Wildemount. Mercer's Blood Hunter, a full twenty-level class he designed himself, remains available on the Dungeon Masters Guild and in the D&D Beyond character builder with Critical Role content enabled.

Ray framed the expansion not as an abandonment of that legacy but as a continuation of the studio's mission: "We're always trying to find new groups and new games and new people to platform and new ways to reinvent the medium." With two animated series on Prime Video, Campaign 4 in full swing, and more Exandrian lore in the pipeline, Critical Role is showing no signs of slowing down.