Acquisitions Incorporated Dumps D&D for Daggerheart, Except Daggerheart Is Run by the Same People Who Broke D&D
The biggest story in tabletop this week has been framed as a triumphant defection. Acquisitions Incorporated, the 17-year-old actual play series that predates Critical Role and built its reputation running official Dungeons & Dragons content at PAX conventions, announced at PAX Unplugged 2025 that it is abandoning D&D entirely. The new campaign runs on Daggerheart, the TTRPG published by Critical Role’s Darrington Press. The TTRPG community celebrated. What most of that coverage missed is who is running Daggerheart.
Jeremy Crawford and Christopher Perkins are the lead designers on Daggerheart at Darrington Press. Both men left Wizards of the Coast in mid-2025. Both were the primary architects of D&D 2024, the edition that drove Crawford to declare the game needed to be less white, removed orcs from the Monster Manual because depicting them as monsters was deemed racist, gender-swapped Dryads and Hags away from their traditional mythological depictions, and added a safe space mechanic to the Dungeon Master’s Guide requiring players to make an X with their arms to halt any game session that made them uncomfortable. That last feature was pulled directly from BDSM community safe word practice and inserted into a tabletop roleplaying game aimed at teenagers.
Fandom Pulse covered Perkins’ and Crawford’s departure from WotC last June. Crawford said at the time, “I’ve always believed that great games invite everyone to the table, and that’s exactly what excites me about joining Darrington Press.” Perkins said joining felt “a bit like coming home.” Neither addressed what they were leaving behind. Both left as the 2024 edition’s failure in the market was becoming impossible to ignore.
The problems they left behind at WotC are documented. Under their stewardship the game lost its core players. White male gamers, historically the plurality of D&D’s fanbase, were told by executive producer Kyle Brink in 2023 that “guys like me can’t leave soon enough for this hobby.” Brink is now gone too. The 2024 edition’s sales did not recover the ground lost from the 2023 OGL betrayal, when WotC attempted to revoke the open license that had made D&D the foundation of the entire TTRPG ecosystem for twenty years.
Now those same designers are building Daggerheart. The system launched in May 2025. It has a growing roster of actual play shows, a PAX presence, and this week the prize of Acquisitions Incorporated using it as its campaign platform. Crawford is GMing the first arc. Perkins takes over after that.
WotC launched its own actual play response the same week. Dungeon Masters, which premiered April 22 on YouTube, features Jasmine Bhullar as the GM. Bhullar’s casting, as Fandom Pulse noted in our April 21 article on the show, tells you everything you need to know about who WotC built this show for. The cast skews toward the same ideological demo that drove the 2024 edition’s design. The prior WotC actual play series, Dice, Camera, Action, collapsed in 2020 after cast controversies. The lesson WotC took from that was apparently to launch another one with a similar casting philosophy.
The real story underneath the Acquisitions Incorporated announcement is not that D&D players are finding a better home. It is that the people who damaged D&D have taken their brand relationships and their design philosophy to a new address and are building the same house again. Crawford and Perkins did not leave WotC because they had a change of heart about what tabletop gaming should be. Perkins said explicitly that Darrington Press felt like “coming home.” Critical Role’s audience is exactly the demographic their D&D 2024 decisions were designed to court. They are not escaping the ideology. They are doubling down on it with a fresh IP and a roster of actual play partners who were already aligned with them.
Daggerheart may well be a better-designed system than D&D 2024. That is a low bar. But players considering whether to follow Acquisitions Incorporated onto the new platform should know who set the table they are sitting down at.
Does the Daggerheart team’s D&D 2024 track record change whether you’d try the game?
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