Critical Role’s iconic Dungeon Master Matt Mercer is taking a break for the next campaign. He is being replaced by someone who is no stranger to the group.
Anyone who is into tabletop role-playing games will have heard of Critical Role . For more than a decade now, the group of voice actors has been playing one adventure after another in front of an audience of millions on Twitch and YouTube – always under the direction of Dungeon Master Matthew Mercer.
But for the fourth major campaign, someone else will be taking the helm. Experienced game master Brennan Lee Mulligan is stepping into Mercer’s shoes.
“Trust me, we’ve been cooking”
On October 2025 Critical Role will launch its next main campaign. The theme, players, and rules are not yet known, but we do know who will be leading the adventure.
On the last Critical Role Direct , the group announced that a new Dungeon Master will be taking the boss’s chair. But before you start missing him: Mercer himself will be participating as a player.
To ensure that no one messes with the world of Exandria he created, Brennan Lee Mulligan will be taking over as Dungeon Master for the first time. But he’s no newcomer. Mulligan has long made a name for himself as the game master of the successful tabletop show Dimension 20. Critical Role CEO and player Travis Willingham say to Variety about him:
We’ve been big fans of Brennan for many years. And when it came time to give Matthew Mercer and the world of Exandria a little breather, Brennan seemed like the perfect storyteller to take our community to a whole new place.
But we won’t have to miss Mercer as game master entirely. The voice actor announced on social media that he is far from hanging up his GM hat. He will continue to lead shorter adventures in the Exandria setting and at Age of Umbra:
And for those who don’t use Insta! https://t.co/HA9qrKZJp4 pic.twitter.com/fZsSgnX553
— Matthew Mercer (@matthewmercer) August 3, 2025
Even though changing game masters after 10 years is a big change, Mercer asks fans of the group to trust him. In the coming weeks, there will be exciting announcements about additional participants and the new world – in addition to the usual live shows, the animated series, and more from the Age of Umbra universe with the in-house rule system Daggerheart.
