Critical Role returns to its fast and loose livestream roots to promote its Hasbro-killer board game empire

The Critical Role cast brought back The Menagerie, a quirky set of characters, for a second round of Daggerheart fun times.

• Critical Role started off as a Twitch livestream, but it now mostly rolls out pre-recorded episodes.
• The crew returned to its chaotic roots to promote Daggerheart, a new game it created in-house.
• Daggerheart is positioned to be an answer to Hasbro's D&D — the game that CR became famous for playing.

For a crew that became famous on the livestreaming platform Twitch, it is now rare, nine years on, to see the cast of Critical Role going live to their 1.3 million followers.

But while a March livestream was framed as a one-off event, the cast got back together on Tuesday night to promote their new game, Daggerheart.

Playing a motley crew called The Menagerie, the cast — minus resident jokester Sam Riegel — took a close to four-hour-long jaunt through another fantasy world of longtime game master Matt Mercer's making, unraveling the mystery of a dark power plaguing the land.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, Critical Role is a group of eight voice actors who've been playing their way through three sprawling Dungeons & Dragons campaigns on Twitch for over 1,300 hours.

Now, Critical Role — a company by the same name the eight co-founders run together — is dabbling in everything nerdworld, from creating two of their own animated series to building a board game empire.

Daggerheart, which dropped in open beta format in March, is one of several games from CR's publishing house, Darrington Press. It appears to be an answer to the Hasbro-owned D&D — and, as the CR crew demonstrated, it can draw an audience.

Daggerheart has its own lore, magic, and monsters, but it still functions on core tenets like character sheets and rolling dice. It also comes with character cards and introduces the TTRPG world to a new slate of character types.

What makes CR's new venture into Daggerheart so interesting is that the crew appears to be embracing, once again, the funhouse chaos of its early-day Twitch streams.

The Daggerheart stream also starkly contrasts with the intense narrative and life-and-death stakes unfolding in the team's main campaign. It's different from the tragedy one expects when engaging with Candela Obscura, a gothic horror game the crew is also promoting.

In Daggerheart, the cast plays a motley crew of non-human adventurers. The BAFTA-winning Laura Bailey of "The Last of Us: Part II" fame is a self-described "sneaky little mushroom" rogue. The team's heartbreak prince, Liam O'Brien, plays a monkey with an Irish accent and major healing powers.

At the risk of spoiling the episode for fans, the "Daggerheart" two-shot game now looks set to get a third installment. The group didn't manage to complete what they needed to do during Tuesday night's episode, so it's morphing into a mini-campaign.

The cast members have talked about how fun creating their new characters for Daggerheart has been. But it's unclear how much time the main cast plans to invest in running Daggerheart games live, considering these characters were built for a quick, one-off session.

"It's a bug and a monkey and a mushroom and a frog. So, we'll see," O'Brien said during an April episode of the team's talk show, "4-Sided Dive."

It isn't just fun and games, though — CR is now in the big leagues, and big money is involved. They've notched some major milestones in recent years: their live show sold out an arena in London, and even Amazon agreed to fund their animation projects, after an $11.3 million fundraising run smashed Kickstarter records.

The crew is also striking out on their own with an in-house streaming service, Beacon. It's a daring gambit that, if successful, will cut major streaming partners like Amazon-owned Twitch and YouTube out of their empire.