Earlier this month, Critical Role not only announced the release date of their hotly anticipated Campaign 4, October 4th, but also that Matthew Mercer would be joining the table this time around as a player and not as the GM. The role of GM would go to Brennan Lee Mulligan, and Campaign 4 would be set in a completely new setting.
Critical Role Campaign 4 Setting Is Araman
Last Thursday at the bottom of the regular Beacon and Critical Role newsletter an interesting image was included of a five by five square of letters, clicking on which would lead you to join the Beacon Discord and access the #what-do-you-seek channel.
This led puzzle hunters down the rabbit hole to share word of this ARG, hunt for any other clues, and ultimately the answer. This puzzle was solved earlier today and led to the discovery of a secret page on the Critical Role website that contained a password field, and the password itself.
Travelling to https://critrole.com/unseal and entering the password ARAMAN (in all capital letters) eager fans can get access to a 20 second recording of Brennan Lee Mulligan setting the scene for Campaign 4. The audio is as follows:
“Within the world of Araman, there exists a growing darkness in the shadow of revolution. Seventy years ago were the Shapers cut down, those seven lords of creation that saw fit to cast their children into ruin and shadown forever…”
Accompanying this audio file is the date: August 21st, 2025 10am PT
There are plenty of questions left to answer about Campaign 4 including who will be joining Matt and Brennan at the table, and what game system will be used. One or both of those might be answers on August 21st.
The Critical Role ARG Solution
If you’re interested in learning what it took to solve the clues and reach this conclusion then be sure to head over to the large Google Doc that was used to collect all possible answers and crack the conundrum in under a week.
