Mark your calendars, tabletop fans! After weeks of wondering when the biggest actual-play show on the internet would pick its story back up, we have a date at last. Critical Role Campaign 4 returns on Thursday, August 27th, and every one of the eight founding cast members will be sitting at the table when it does.
The campaign went quiet after episode 31, which aired back on June 25th, and the break was never framed as a stumble. The team has said Campaign 4 will now pause "wherever the story finds a natural pause" and has dropped the old monthly rhythm for good. The August 27th return is the first hard date fans have had to circle since the hiatus began, per Popverse's episode tracker.
When Campaign 4 kicked off last October, it rewrote the show's oldest tradition. Longtime Game Master Matthew Mercer took a seat as a player for the first time, handing the screen to Dimension 20's Brennan Lee Mulligan, as Rolling Stone reported at the launch.
That change is the backdrop for the return. All eight founders (Mercer, Laura Bailey, Taliesin Jaffe, Ashley Johnson, Liam O'Brien, Marisha Ray, Sam Riegel, and Travis Willingham) are back for the August session, joined by an expanded roster. Luis Carazo, Robbie Daymond, Aabria Iyengar, Whitney Moore, and Alex Ward round the group out to thirteen players total, per Nerdist.
For anyone who fell off during the hiatus, the structure is worth a quick recap. The thirteen players opened Campaign 4 with a full-table overture before splitting into three smaller groups - the soldiers, the schemers, and the seekers - whose separate stories weave together across the new world of Aramán, which has been described by the cast as a love letter to their home setting of Exandria. The campaign runs on the 2024 Dungeons & Dragons ruleset and is expected to play out over at least three years, so August 27th is really the resumption of a very long haul.
The wait wasn't empty. Sliding into that Thursday timeslot during the break was Age of Umbra: Sallowlands, a six-episode miniseries that premiered July 9th and ran through mid-August, per the official Daggerheart site.
The miniseries stands out for reasons beyond timing. It runs on Daggerheart, the narrative-forward system from Critical Role's own Darrington Press, and it put Matthew Mercer back behind the GM screen for a darker, standalone story. Laura Bailey joined him at the table alongside Jennifer English, Abubakar Salim, Vico Ortiz, and Zachery Renauldo, per Nerdist, playing five misfits searching a cracked badlands for salvation.
That Daggerheart got the spotlight during the break is a milestone in itself. The system only reached full release last year, and handing it the flagship Thursday slot, with Mercer running it, highlights confidence Critical Role has given its in-house game.
New episodes of everything Critical Role, the main campaign and its miniseries alike, stream on the group's subscription platform Beacon plus its Twitch and YouTube channels, with podcast versions following for audio listeners, per Bell of Lost Souls.
The return picks the story back up right where episode 31 left its three groups hanging, so it will also serve as the payoff to that mid-campaign cliffhanger. Between a new GM at the head of the table, a brand-new world in Aramán, and eight familiar founders all playing at once, this stretch is the biggest structural experiment in the show's decade-plus history.
So where do you land as the countdown begins? Are you more excited to see all eight founders back at one table, or did Age of Umbra: Sallowlands sell you on Daggerheart as the system you want more of?
Let us know in the comments below.
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