Critical Role Announces Campaign 4, With Some Big Changes

 After ten years of Critical Role and three epic campaigns taking place in the expansive world of Exandria, we've been left for the past few months wondering what comes next for the massive actual play franchise.

Well, at the recent live show, we got our answer: Campaign Four is coming on October 2nd of 2025. While I won't go into specific spoilers, Critical Role's third campaign felt very much like a culmination of what had come before, with the adventurers of the first and second campaigns joining in the epic fight against the big bad. The very nature of Exandria is changed by the end of it, and while there's tons of potential for future stories in that post-campaign-3 world, it also felt like a good opportunity to close out the story of Exandria, at least for now.

Ten years is a long time for a creative, performance project, and so I was among many who speculated that we might see a real shake-up for Critical Role's fourth campaign. The announcement has confirmed that speculation:

Campaign four will be set in a new world. On top of that, it's also going to have a new game master, though anyone who pays any attention to the world of Actual Play will already know his name: yes, it's Brennan Lee Mulligan, the primary DM of Dimension 20, and basically tied as "most beloved actual play DM" with Critical Role's Matt Mercer. Mulligan has already done several projects with Critical Role, including DMing the Calamity triad of mini-campaigns, EXUs Calamity, Downfall, and Divergence, the middle of which actually formed a crucial interlude within Campaign 3.

We also know that the players are going to be a mix of returning faces and new players. The only confirmed player, though, is Matt Mercer himself. Mercer has appeared as a player with Mulligan as the DM in both Divergence and Dimension 20's Escape from the Blood Keep.

Now, we have some unanswered questions:

Who else is playing? I would assume some of the main Critical Role cast will be joining along with Mercer, but as of now, we don't know who. The Venn diagram of players who often play with Mulligan and who have appeared on Critical Role is fairly broad (of Dimension 20's core "Intrepid Heroes" cast, three have appeared in various Critical Role shows).

Next, what system are they using? Critical Role's publishing arm, Darrington Press, just released their Daggerheart system, and then swept up longtime D&D designer legends Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins, so I would not be shocked to see them using their own in-house system rather than D&D. That said, I also could imagine they'd keep up good relations with the folks at WotC by continuing to use D&D, and perhaps avoid alienating audiences who are more familiar with that system.

Anyway, I kept up with Critical Role's second and third campaigns from their very start, and so I'm very eager to see what comes next for them.