Critical Role is heading back into the dark. Age of Umbra: Sallowlands, the studio’s latest actual play miniseries, arrives July 9, and it trades the usual high-fantasy sparkle for something far bleaker: a story about grief, ruin, and communities that no longer exist.
For the uninitiated, Critical Role is the juggernaut that turned a group of voice actors playing tabletop RPGs into a full-blown media company, complete with animated adaptations and a loyal fanbase known as Critters. The Age of Umbra setting is one of its more oppressive creations — a world smothered by encroaching darkness, where survival is never a given and hope is in short supply. Sallowlands leans hard into that mood.
Joining the table this time is Vico Ortiz, a newcomer to the Critical Role cast, who spoke with Polygon about what Critters should brace themselves for. The short version: this isn’t a triumphant hero’s journey. It’s a meditation on loss.
That framing matters. Actual play thrives on improvisation and emotional risk, and a setting built around grief and lost community gives the players room to lean into vulnerability rather than spectacle. Where many campaigns chase epic combat and loot, Sallowlands appears designed to sit with the harder feelings — what people carry when the world around them has already fallen apart, and what it means to keep going anyway.
For a fresh player like Ortiz, stepping into a table this established is its own kind of challenge, and the somber tone raises the stakes. There’s nowhere to hide behind comic relief when the story itself is about mourning.
- Format: a Critical Role actual play miniseries
- Setting: Age of Umbra — a dark, foreboding world defined by grief and lost community
- New face: Vico Ortiz joins the cast
- Debut: July 9
It’s a canny move. Critical Role built its reputation on the intimacy of watching real people react to a story unfolding in real time, and darker material tends to produce the most memorable moments — the silences, the hard choices, the roll of the dice that decides whether a beloved character makes it out. Sallowlands is betting that Critters want to feel something heavy, not just cheer for a win.
Whether it lands will come down to the same thing every Critical Role series lives or dies on: chemistry at the table and the willingness to let the darkness breathe. With a new player thrown into the mix and a setting this unforgiving, there’s plenty of room for both catharsis and heartbreak.
