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Critical Role expected Daggerheart to do well, but they didn't expect it to do 2500% more than their projections

Critical Role's Daggerheart printed what they thought were a year's worth of campaign books in 2025. They lasted two weeks

It's been one hell of a year for Daggerheart, the fantasy TTRPG created by Critical Role's Darrington Press as a response to Dungeons & Dragons. To be fair, 2025 has also been, well, the only year for the game, as it just dropped this past May. Though new to store shelves it may be, fans of the game have every reason to celebrate its entry into the market, and thanks to some folks at Critical Role's business division, they now have some numbers with which to do so.

Specifically, we're talking about Ed Lopez and Ben Van Der Fluit, Critical Role's chief operating officer and senior vice president of business and content development, respectively. Lopez and Van Der Fluit recently sat down with Business Insider to get nitty-gritty about Daggerheart's success, and we couldn't help but notice one pretty incredible stat.

"The amount of units that we ordered we thought was going to last us a year," said Lopez, speaking of the Daggerheart core set manuals, "And it lasted us literally two weeks [...] It's a great problem, it's a Champagne problem, but it's now changing our view in terms of what this product can be."

Far be it from us to guess what's going on in the brilliant minds behind the Critical Role media empire, but we'd guess that view reads something like: 'This thing is a cash cow.' Assumptions aside, we know for a fact that the Daggerheart team is responding aggressively to the hunger TTRPG players have shown for the game, testing out a digital-release strategy for other campaign frames and answering fans' desire for a GM fear-counter.

I won't pretend to know how many of the latter are currently in production but, if recent history has taught us anything, Darrington might want to make more than they think are going to sell. 

Daggerheart is available now, wherever you buy your games.


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Grant DeArmitt

Grant DeArmitt: Grant DeArmitt (he/him) likes horror, comics, and the unholy union of the two. In the past, and despite their better judgment, he has written for Nightmare on Film Street and Newsarama. He lives in Brooklyn with his partner, Kingsley, and corgi, Legs.

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