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At the Daggerheart panel during this year's PAX Unplugged, it was hard to pick just which of the many announcements was the most exciting. But I will say this, there was one moment that I knew I needed to hear more about; that is, the moment producer Elise Rezendes and designers Rowan Hall and Spenser Starke announced that a campaign was coming to the new Daggerheart game book (Hope & Fear, if you're asking) that would allow players to build their own Big Bad.

Wait, what? Isn't that the GM's job?

I had to know more, so when I got to sit down with the folks behind Critical Role's very own TTRPG, I asked them to tell me as much as they could about this new campaign frame, Reign of the Weredragon, and how its central villain, a mystical dragon queen called Forlorn, is a creation from the whole table.

"This is something we may have wanted to do since Candela," said Hall, referring to Candela Obscura, the horror-leaning game both her and Starke worked on before Daggerheart. 

"We've always talked about doing collaborative Big Bads," responded Starke. "But we only cracked it, I think, very recently. So, we were inspired by For the Queen by Alex Roberts. 

"It's the best TTRPG ever made," Rezendes broke in, "Period."

In case you don't know, For the Queen is a fantasy TTRPG by Alex Roberts. Using only a deck of cards, the game tells a story by inviting players to participate in a series morally fascinating prompts, building out a tale of a Queen who is either worthy to be saved by her subjects or worthy of revolting against, all decided by who the group collaboratively agrees the Queen is. of Like Daggerheart, it is published by Darrington Press.

"It's the most efficient role-playing game ever made," agreed Starke, "It packs the biggest punch with the smallest components. It's got the idea that we have a Big Bad that we want all the players to care about deeply for them to be in contention with. Generally with Big Bads, they're going to show up a couple of times during a campaign. Most of those times you aren't going to be able to fight them because they're too powerful or they're going to show up and be like, 'Go, my pretties,' and then disappear. You're like, 'That's the one we have to kill, and then by the end, you're facing them. It's kind of the basic structure.'

"But I found in the kind of campaigns that I've run that oftentimes," Starke continued, "If I'm just building that Big Bad, I have to work really hard for the players to not just want to kill them, but, like, care about them. Like, they'll want to kill them because players want to destroy anything that's bad, usually. But there's a difference between my players caring about the villain and and the characters wanting to end them."

"Just like most of the stuff that we do in Daggerhart," wraps the game designer, "We really wanted the players to feel like they were involved in the world building. Part of that is by saying, okay, we're setting up the like framework, the skeleton of who this person is. [...] But then digging into her history is all about answering these prompts at the table and together, sort of building out who this person is, what they've done, why they matter. By the time we got done, doing our play tests of those, we all had such a better vision of that character than we ever would have had reading a couple of paragraphs in a book."

Sounds like a damn good time, Spenser. Not that we aren;t fans of paragraphs in campaign books, particularly of the Evil Dragon Queen kind.

Daggerheart: Hope and Fear is expected in 2026.

From the lands of Exandria to your very own smartscreens, Popverse has everything you need to know about the TTRPG phenomenon that is Critical Role. Here you'll find:

• Popverse's Critical Role watch order
• An interview with GM Brennan Lee Mulligan
• The cast's appearance at C2E2 '25

...and more. Roll initiative, player. Adventure awaits.