Matt Mercer steps back into the GM chair for Age of Umbra: Sallowlands, a six-part Daggerheart miniseries premiering July 9 on Beacon, Twitch, and YouTube. The standalone story returns to the grim Halcyon Domain—a post-god forsaken realm Mercer once called "Soulsborne-esque, super dark and deadly"—but shifts focus to the arid, storm-swept Sallowlands, a new region of cracked badlands and buried horrors where five outcasts chase salvation or ruin.

The cast mixes familiar faces with fresh talent: Laura Bailey and Zachery Renauldo from Critical Role circles join newcomers Jennifer English (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33), Vico Ortiz (Our Flag Means Death), and Abubakar Salim (House of the Dragon). Mercer’s return is the headline, yet the series remains a limited excursion rather than any shift away from Brennan Lee Mulligan’s ongoing Campaign 4 in Aramán.

Official announcements and the Polygon report frame it as a deliberate expansion of the first Age of Umbra’s survival-fantasy tone, promising brutal encounters and emotional stakes without the weight of a hundred-episode arc. The timing—three weeks from the article’s June 16 publication—gives Critters a quick, contained fix of Mercer’s signature world-building before the main campaign rolls on.