Role’s Daggerheart Unveils Reign of the Weredragon, a Curse of Strahd-Inspired Campaign Frame

As the tabletop role-playing game renaissance continues to accelerate, Critical Role’s in-house system Daggerheart has quietly delivered one of its most ambitious creations yet: Reign of the Weredragon, a new campaign frame revealed at Gen Con 2026 and rooted in the legacy of Dungeons & Dragons’ most celebrated adventure. The expansion, part of the first Daggerheart supplement Hope & Fear released last month, was shaped by Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford, the two designers who defined D&D’s 5th edition before departing Wizards of the Coast in June 2025 to join Critical Role’s publishing arm, Darrington Press. Through a Polygon video interview, the pair explained how they approached the project, blending familiar tropes with Daggerheart’s distinctive collaborative storytelling philosophy.

In Daggerheart, a campaign frame is what Perkins describes as “a neatly packaged story that has a narrative attached to some kind of setting, and that setting usually has a vibe or a genre or a mood.” Game Masters can adopt a frame and expand its themes, rules, characters, and locations into their own campaign. Hope & Fear introduces four new campaign frames alongside a broad array of character options, more than 100 new adversaries, and fresh equipment and loot. Perkins and Crawford went further than most contributors, engaging directly in the rules development across the supplement.

“Both Jeremy and I arrived at Critical Role at the back end of Hope and Fear’s development,” Perkins tells Polygon in a video interview. “We jumped in immediately to lend a hand. Much of the book was written at that point, but there were still some gaps. One of the things that we were offered was a chance to write one of the campaign frames.”

Chris Perkins, Darrington Press

Crawford added that the two designers assisted the team on every aspect of bringing the expansion to market, working under the leadership of Rob Hebert, Rowan Hall, and Spencer Starke.

A Modern Curse of Strahd

Reign of the Weredragon openly channels the best-selling D&D adventure of all time, Curse of Strahd, which set the template for a singular, dominant villain. Perkins said the idea came naturally during early development.

Image: Darrington Press/Tamara Osborn

“When we started working on Reign of the Weredragon, one of my first thoughts was that it would be cool to have a campaign frame revolving around a singular villain,” Perkins says. “Strahd is a great example of that, but it was Jeremy who inspired me for our villain, Forlorne Lykona, based on our mutual appreciation for Disney villains.”

Chris Perkins, Darrington Press

The result is Forlorne Lykona, the evil sorceress ruler of Whelvia, whose design echoes Maleficent with a dragon transformation and a suite of curses aimed at unwary players. Like Strahd, the players are warned not to confront the villain too early, risking transformation into cursed weredrakes. An oracle known as the Astromancer provides five “revelations” that guide the party toward the final confrontation, mirroring Madame Eva’s role in the original module.

“One of the things that we wanted to explore in Reign of the Weredragon that is different from Curse of Strahd is that the characters are all from this land,” Crawford says. “Unlike in Barovia, where they come from the outside and are trapped, they have personal stakes in Whelvia. And the players also help the GM create the villain.”

Jeremy Crawford, Darrington Press

Players as Co-Author

The module’s most distinctive mechanic places the players at the center of the narrative. During session zero, the GM and players collaboratively construct Forlorne by defining key personality traits and events from her past. The GM selects prompts from a set of 40 and works around the table, inviting players to answer questions that shape the villain’s story. Crawford noted that this process unlocks Daggerheart’s central ambition: connecting players with the world, setting, and adventure while making them feel like narrators in their own play experience.

The approach draws on Alex Roberts’ For the Queen, another Darrington Press title, which pioneered similar collaborative character-building techniques. Perkins hinted that the campaign frame concept could grow into full-fledged adventures.

“The idea of taking a campaign frame and blowing it out into an actual campaign-sized adventure has certainly been at the forefront of Jeremy’s mind and mine,” Perkins says. “We have to figure out what is the best time and story with which to do that, but we haven’t announced anything officially yet.”

Chris Perkins, Darrington Press

Looking Ahead

Fans can preview what a Reign of the Weredragon campaign looks like in the upcoming Critical Role live actual play miniseries, which will be GM’d by Perkins himself. The project arrives as Perkins and Crawford continue to settle into their new roles at Darrington Press, where they have largely stepped back from the daily public presence they once enjoyed in D&D’s promotional circuit. Their contributions to Hope & Fear and now Reign of the Weredragon signal a fresh creative direction for Daggerheart, a system that launched to sold-out demand in May 2025 and has since cultivated a devoted community eager to see where the designers take the franchise next.