Critical Role Cast Teases Its Future and a Potential "Passing of the Torch"
Laughing (and crying) together, the tabletop RPG giants reflect on their legacy and what comes next, from live-action to video games
by Dana Reboe
After 50 years creeping from the margins of popular culture into the mainstream, Dungeons & Dragons is now bigger than ever. Evolving beyond its roots as a pen and paper tabletop RPG (TTRPG), D&D has inspired countless imitators, novels, movies, video games and — most importantly — generations of storytellers and creators, who learned to broaden the scope of their imagination by playing the game.
It’s those storytellers now whose impact in the era of YouTube, Twitch livestreaming, and podcasting have reinvented Dungeons & Dragons for a new generation, capitalizing on the rise of longform content and direct fan engagement to build a major following and make the often daunting world of tabletop roleplaying more accessible. Among them, Critical Role has been the most prominent.
Initially began as a home game for friends, the series jumped to Geek & Sundry’s Twitch and YouTube channels as a live actual play, where a bunch of “nerdy ass voice actors” (Travis Willingham, Matthew Mercer, Marisha Ray, Laura Bailey, Ashley Johnson, Taliesin Jaffe, Sam Riegel, and Liam O’Brien) spend hundreds of hours building out their own fictional world, improvising their way through each step along the way.
Fast forward to the present and Critical Role has blossomed into so much more than its cast could have expected. After splitting from Geek & Sundry in 2018, Critical Role began its rapid expansion to other platforms, beginning with a Kickstarter that raised more than $11.3 million to create their first animated series, Prime Video’s The Legend of Vox Machina.
Today, Critical Role has evolved into a multimedia enterprise consisting of the core show (which has three campaigns), one-offs and spin-off web series, supplementary comics and books, an animated series (with another on the way) produced by their own production company, Metapigeon, and even their own subscription-based streaming platform, Beacon, which houses a whole suite of their content. They’re also moving beyond the core of D&D, developing their own tabletop gaming systems, such as Candela Obscura and soon-to-be-released Daggerheart, through their publishing arm, Darrington Press.
But after achieving so much over the course of their near-decade long journey, the team behind Critical Role is at a crossroads. With The Legend of Vox Machina recently picked up for a fourth season and their third live-play D&D campaign (Bell’s Hells) rapidly approaching its climactic end, there’s a feeling that a very large chapter is about to close. But what comes next remains a mystery to fans and the creators alike.
Rolling Stone recently sat down with the Critical Role cast to discuss their many projects, what their evolution looks like, and to reflect on the ever-growing legacy that they’ve built together.
RS It’s safe to say that there are a lot of spinning plates in the air. What has it been like to watch the brand evolve from posting snippets of your home game on Vine to a multimedia juggernaut?
Matthew Mercer: I think for a lot of us this continues to be beyond our expectations. We work so hard to make what’s in front of us the most honest and best it can be. And each time we get past that milestone, more opportunities open. It’s this perpetual momentum of looking up from our work and going, “Oh, wait, what’s happening?” And then following those threads. It’s been a very wild progression that I’m still wrapping my head around.
Travis Willingham: I would say it’s nothing short of a dream. Whether it was the live stream turning into comic books, making merch, and having a community, to the animated series and all of these evolutions, it’s been a very willful pursuit. These are things that require will and hard work, a larger team and bringing on people that are smarter and better than we are to help enrich what we’re doing. To see the fruits of this labor pay off and continue to pay off, it’s extremely rewarding. We know we’re in very rarefied air that we’re creators that own the IP and these characters and we can be involved in them. We’re able to portray them. Our DNA is all over everything that we do. So in that way, it’s extremely special. It’s something that we have lofty ambitions for and we keep trying to climb as high as we can.
RS How selective are you about including the characters you’ve created in pre-established IP like Pillars of Eternity? Are we going to see more of that in the future with characters from Vox Machina or (Campaign 2) The Mighty Nein?
Willingham: Any chance we get to dive into different worlds and work with artists and companies and dev studios we think are a good landing spot for the IP in these characters, we’re going to jump at. But it makes us hungry for more of our own stuff.
Marisha Ray: I’d say we’re very protective with our characters and our IP. If we partner with somebody, our grubby little hands are in every step of the process and all the reviews and making sure that everything still feels like our DNA is there. And that’s kind of continuing to keep that integrity and quality control while also getting really excited about seeing these partnerships because we’re nerds at heart.
RS Fans are starting to see some crossing of the streams between the campaigns. With Episode 110 of Bell’s Hells, and then The Legend of Vox Machina, you’re pushing the boundaries of your own continuity and storytelling. What are the challenges of that, as players and creatives?
Sam Riegel: The biggest challenge is keeping our voices straight in our heads because we’ve played so many different characters over the years. And Matt is so good at flipping from one character to another, to another, to another. He’s got practice, but we are dumb at it [laughs]. We’re so used to playing one character for three years. Flipping back and forth between characters we’re struggling to get to Matt’s level of expertise at that, but it’s so fun to be able to see all of the fruits of our labor and Matt’s labor come together after all these years and create really just such a full, exciting, diverse world.
Laura Bailey: Since we’re working on The Legend of Vox Machina and The Mighty Nein animated series, the characters are fresh in our heads. We’re getting to be those characters every week. So, it wasn’t like jumping in from ground zero at least with these last episodes.
RS When adapting your campaigns into animated series, how do you boil down hundreds of hours of story into something more manageable? What story beats do you decide to keep or add? What do those conversations look like?
Mercer: I mean, it’s a protracted conversation. Before planning anything like this, we have extensive writers’ rooms where the cast gets together with the writers for the season of these projects. And we break down together over weeks the important things for us as players that happened to our characters, that happened to the story and essentially piece out what is necessary to tell the story in a very fruitful and important way. And then we have to decide which ones don’t make it or how we can merge things for the adaptation, bringing forth the heart of what we enjoyed about it originally. It’s a big challenge, but it’s also a really fun puzzle to piece together.
And then to the point of having the hindsight of all this world that we’ve explored since those stories were first told, we have the opportunity now to go back and even weave them tighter together. We’ve colored in some of those fog of war, dark spots in the world’s history since we first did this. And it’s a really cool chance to further tie it all together and make the world even that much more broad and detailed and expansive. It’s a wonderful puzzle to solve together.
RS What challenges were there in developing The Legend of Vox Machina? What lessons have you learned that you’re carrying with you into creating The Mighty Nein animated series and beyond?
** Willingham:** Ours is a very unique show in that we have a billion main characters. There are seven of us walking around at any time, which we found out in animation is hard to draw. It’s a challenge for animation studios. There was a bit of a learning curve in the first couple of seasons about how many characters could be in each shot. How would scenes work? Do we need to reduce the amount of faces that are there? Just so that the animation process is simpler. We’ve seen in seasons one and two was a more honest adaptation of the campaign.
And now in season three, what we’ve really been excited to explore, utilize and sort of reveal is a divergence from some of those story beats that happened in the campaign. We’ve told that story. And a lot of those moments, as Matt mentioned, that happened in the live stream are perfectly laid in that improvised live space. And we want to replicate those if we can. But in a lot of situations, we’re looking for ways to improve the story or give fans who think they know what is coming is something new. We want to unsettle them. We want to breach their expectations and make them guess and become new fans as well. In exploring new ways that we can approach this story and sort of deliver the same sort of oomph, that ability to make you laugh one second and cry the next, that’s what’s really been exciting about the animated series.
RS I wish I could have recorded my reaction to Xerxes in The Legend of Vox Machina because my brain broke. [laughs]
Willingham: That’s what we wanted. Brain breakage.
RS As Campaign 3 draws to a close, there’s a lot of buzz about what potentially comes next. What can you tease about the next couple of years?
Ray: We have so many plans. We still have so many dreams, all those things that Travis was touching on earlier that we want to pursue, that we want to achieve. We’re looking and taking as many opportunities as we can while people are still watching us and enjoying what we do [laughs]. In terms of the channel and gameplay, we’re still going to be playing games together. We’re looking forward to maybe playing other games. Of course, we have Daggerheart that Darrington Press has been working so hard on. We’re excited to show that off in meaningful ways and also working with other creatives and other storytellers. We’re continuing to try and think outside the box as we go on, while still holding true to what we love doing, which is just a bunch of nerdy-ass voice actors playing games.
RS You’ve developed Candela Obscura, Daggerheart, and new ways of playing tabletop. For a lot of people, Critical Role is the blueprint. Does that responsibility ever weigh on you?
Ray: I feel like when we started, still playing in Laura and Travis’s living room, we got this opportunity through Geek & Sundry and Felicia Day to stream the game. Our first thought was, “Oh, putting the thing you love on the internet is kind of scary.” And then our second thought was, “If this introduces even just a handful of people to the joy that we get to experience playing tabletop games and everything that is open up to us as a group of friends, then we’ve done something.” We’ve always approached this by inviting other people to play. So, I hope that that’s still maintaining and still true to this day and even further on a wider scale. The heart of the goal is still there.
Liam O’Brien: I love it. I was one of the kids in the Eighties who was hiding in my bedroom with this stuff and didn’t know anybody who played it. And when we played it together for the first time as adults, we were so excited, like electrified by it, and to see that bubble out exponentially so that other people can do it too. And we’ve heard countless stories of friend groups, second families, like we are to each other. That is such a huge gift and just makes me happy. Like it was such a great effect of all this. And I don’t know why it happened, but it did.
RS Let’s talk about the balance between innovation and preservation. How have you found new ways to create and tell new stories while paying homage to stories from the past?
Mercer: That’s a good question. It’s trying to straddle two different diverging paths. When you’ve built an established audience, there is an instinct to cling to what’s comfortable, but also we as creators, as artists, as performers, want to perpetually challenge ourselves and surprise each other. That’s what makes this so fun for us at the table, it’s surprising each other and trying to surprise our audience. And that comes with both how we play the game and how we want to create things that are whole cloth and new. We all have so many weird ideas and inspirations that come out of playing together, that come out of riffing on ideas, dreams we have, and people we get a chance to collaborate with.
We are very lucky that we built this space where we can explore these things, both as new IP and bringing in new radical ideas into the worlds we have already created. I’ve had dreams since high school to play a game with friends in a world consistently over multiple campaigns and now getting to do so and bridge it all together in a really epic moment is something that I’ve always dreamed but even through that process it’s created all these other weird spinning off thoughts and ideas. We’re all just riffing on each other. I would say we’re cognizant of the challenge and responsibility, but also what makes all this so special is that we don’t care and we do what feels right and important to us and trust that it will resonate with other people, too.
Riegel: The first audience for anything Critical Role makes is the eight of us. Be it the live play or the scripts for animated series or new ideas that Marisha wants to put on our channel. And if we can make the eight of us entertained and laugh or cry, it usually works on a bigger scale. And if it doesn’t, at least we got eight laughs out of it.
RS You’re continuing to show the world the power of storytelling by including new perspectives; Tales from the Stinky Dragon, and MIDST. Can you talk about what goes into working with these new IPs and what you’re looking for to branch out the world?
Ray: It honestly came down to, “Oh, these people are cool and they remind us of us” [laughs]. So much of what drove those partnerships was being able to envision them as a part of the greater Critical Role and Beacon family. And both of them were really seamless fits and we’re excited to find more partners that fit that bill.
Riegel: We are a group that loves to create things, but we’re also a group that are fans of things and fans of creators. And with Metapigeon we’ve been able to develop brand new stuff, ideas that have come from within this group, as well as finding other creators out there who have ideas for graphic novels or TV series or animated series. We have features that are in development, feature films. We also have a live-action series that we recently pitched and another animated series that has nothing to do with the world of Exandria that’s already in development. We have lots of great, cool, amazing ideas. The television and film development game is hard, but there’s eight of us and we have lots of ideas. Odds are in our favor. If we have a 1% success rate, we have way more than a hundred ideas. So something is bound to stick.
RS As voice actors, video games are your bread and butter. So, is there talk amongst you of creating your own? The Critters would like to know.
Bailey: We’ve been talking about creating a video game since we first started playing together.
Willingham: I would say it’s an active pursuit on our end. The last few years we have been having necessary conversations to figure out how to do that smartly. It’s, you know, it’s an entire enterprise that’s separate from what we do on Beacon, Twitch, or YouTube, it’s separate from the animated series and it comes with its understanding that has to be undertaken. Those are all things that we’ve been actively pursuing. But the concise way of saying it is that we are starting to come to the end of a long road that we’ve been undertaking for the last couple of years.
And hopefully, we’ll have something really exciting to share, maybe around the end of the year, maybe at the beginning of 2025, just in time for our 10-year anniversary. But it’s something we’ve definitely had our minds on. Those collaborations we’ve had with various partners have been little toe dips in the pool just to see how it feels. You know, there’s a lot of upheaval in the interactive space right now. And we’ve seen studios sort of bear and weather those strains. It’s trying to become smarter about it and find out how we might fit into that larger ecosystem.
RS How have you changed as people and creatives? What have you learned about yourselves and each other in this journey?
Bailey: When we started 10 years ago, we were a bunch of slapdick actors, you know what I mean [laughs]? Who did not have a lot of responsibility outside of showing up to set, reading our script, and making sure we get a good performance. What I’m saying is I watch Travis every single day and he’s grown exponentially in these last 10 years. When we made him our CEO, it was because he knew how to incorporate our business. And he took that responsibility and he’s just grown and grown and grown so much. And to see him and Sam really undertaking that executive producer role on the animated series as well, just 24-seven noses to the grindstone, making things happen. And I’m blown away with every single member of this group, with how they’ve taken their responsibility within the company and grown it. I want to cry right now. Everybody’s grown so much as a person that it’s just been so beautiful to see.
Ashley Johnson: It’s wild to me. Now I’m going to get emotional too. You’re all making me very emotional. Put it in the article. Let me ruin the moment [laughs]. It’s wild sitting here and thinking about the 10 year journey we’ve been on, sitting down at a table, our foundation starting with collaborating and then doing everything people said not to do, which is start a company with your friends. But every step of this journey never gets old. It blows me away that we’ve been able to branch off on our own, leaving a protective umbrella of somebody else taking care of us, now we’re the umbrella and being able to sort of make our own decisions creatively. Putting a bunch of creatives and artists in a room and being like, “Okay, you guys have a business together.” And, we all trust each other so much and we love creating together because that’s where our relationship and friendship started. And thinking about the future with what we’re going to be able to do and what our plans are. I can’t wait.
RS What advice would you give yourself from 10 years ago with the knowledge that you have today?
Riegel: There was a moment. There’s been a bunch of moments over this journey where we all checked in with each other and we’re like, “Are we doing this?” I wouldn’t change any of those moments, but it’s fun to look back and just be so grateful that we said yes, that we said, “Yeah, let’s give it a shot and put our faith in each other because we’ve done so much great stuff.” And I think we’ve all become, well, I’ve become a better person as a result [laughter]. I mean, Ellen DeGeneres just released a whole comedy act about how being famous made her mean, I feel like it’s the opposite with us. We pulled a reverse Ellen. We’ve become nicer, and kinder. We have a foundation where we give money away to charities, I am so grateful that we said yes to all of those moments along the way.
Taliesin Jaffe: Never forget the rough times. Never forget how hard it was, never forget those moments of real distress, especially that unique distress that comes if you’re a creative wondering every week whether this may be the end. It was a great run. And then never get to the point where you feel like you just deserve it without any real thoughtfulness or effort.
RS How excited should the community be about what you all have cooking for the 10th anniversary?
Riegel: Mid. We’re probably going to have a newsletter [laughs]. We have so much stuff planned for next year between the live shows and The Mighty Nein animated series and new shows on Beacon and one shots and mini-series and who knows what after campaign three and merch.
Jaffe: It’s whatever delights us. That’s what’s coming up. It’s whatever delights eight people.
Ray: Our 2025 is packed.
RS When you think of legacy, what does that mean to you as a company, a brand and as people?
O’Brien: Storytelling and art tell us so much about ourselves as people. It is at the center of being a human being. And it has been for centuries and centuries. I think that’s why we’ve approached it with so much love, care, and heart. And so, if there’s a legacy from what we’ve done, I think that it lives at tables all across the world where other people are approaching the story with so much love and heart and care.
Mercer: Outside of the creative legacy and storytelling legacies, we’ve worked so hard to build the foundation of this company that we want to be the rest of our lives in a way that will shepherd everything we want to create. And in time shepherd to the next generation of storytellers. I hope to one day pass the torch to a bunch of incredible people with new ideas and new perspectives and give them the space to tell their stories. And we can be the distant creative grandparents to them and be proud from the shadows. This is an enduring opportunity to be a place that fosters that sort of experience and enables the ability of people to engage with it. And I plan to be doing this till I am withered and gray.
Jim Carrey was famously homeless for a time before he made his break in In Living Color. I have doubts that these are his words.