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Either you already know what “Critical Role” is, or you don’t have any D&D nerds in your life — and if that’s the case, you should fix that. But as Sam Riegel and Travis Willingham, two executive producers and lead nerdy-ass voice actors behind the show that has done as much as “Stranger Things” to generate cultural interest in Dungeons and Dragons, look back on shepherding two Amazon animated series through production? They’re finally getting to the point where they can really get weird.
A little character backstory, if needed: “Critical Role” began as a livestream “actual play” series on Felicia Day’s Geek and Sundry YouTube/Twitch channel. There, viewers could watch a group of LA-based voice actors perform the silliest, most heartfelt, and most epic parts of a D&D campaign they began as a hobby, DM’d (dungeon mastered) by Matthew Mercer.
Meanwhile, Willingham, Riegel, Laura Bailey, Taliesin Jaffe, Ashley Johnson, Liam O’Brien, Marisha Ray, and sometimes special guests, played the characters who delved through dungeons and fought at least five (5) dragons. By the end, they were basically Gods.
“Critical Role” still runs on Twitch, YouTube, and its own bespoke streaming service, Beacon, on Thursdays, now playing a fourth campaign DM’d by Brennan Lee Mulligan and featuring a cast of 13, including the actors from the show’s original party.
Professional D&D Content Creator is kind of a job now, and the core cast of “Critical Role” is deeply involved in shaping the series and the company they built around it. Willingham is the CEO of Critical Role Productions, which includes a gaming imprint, record label, nonprofit organization, and film and TV production company. They’re all still voice actors and voice directors in the industry; Riegel’s won six Emmys for his voice-direction work.
The “CR” team’s experience straddles the most established corners of the animation industry and streaming ecosystem pre-pandemic, which positioned them to make the athletics (or acrobatics) check from table to animated series. They’re now four seasons into “The Legend of Vox Machina,” based on their first campaign, and the first season of “The Mighty Nein,” based on their second campaign, premiered last year. Riegel and Willingham are deeply involved as EPs on animated shows (Riegel has written eight episodes of “The Legend of Vox Machina” and “The Mighty Nein”) and are arguably as adept at both animation and actual play in telling the stories of fantasy heroes with a playful edge.
At this point, they can really start to emphasize the playful edge in “The Legend of Vox Machina,” both because they have a number of seasons of story under their belt and because they have years of making series under their belt.
“Now it’s jazz,” Riegel told IndieWire on an episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast. “We get to just freeform and improv and have fun with these characters and show them in situations they wouldn’t normally be in, or do different stylistic choices. There’s other episodes coming up later in the season that break the format in other ways, that introduce new characters that weren’t part of the original campaign.”
Willingham called the first seasons of the animated series a selection-and-preference exercise about how the “CR” team wanted to approach adaptation and the kinds of risks they wanted to take. “The Mighty Nein” departs in some core ways from the livestream version of Campaign 2 — and with the confidence to take a more sweeping, adaptive, and creative approach that now benefits both shows.
‘The Legend of Vox Machina’ Courtesy of Prime Video“It was the greatest teaching instrument and the most immediate absorption technique ever to get plunged into full production of an animated series,” Willingham told IndieWire. “We got to see what the design pipeline was like, how concepts worked, how storyboard artists approached scripts, what the script breakdown process was like, all of those things. It was like seeing behind the curtain at ‘The Wizard of Oz’ at every little stage.”
Behind the curtain, however, there’s just people — and on good shows, they’re hopefully people with good taste and a strong vision. That’s what helped the “Critical Role” team not only make the leap to producing animated series but also do so while still working on their streaming shows, other projects, and personal voiceover work.
“We didn’t feel like the moment was too big for us. We instantly had thoughts, preferences, feelings, desires, things that we wanted to inspire the team to attempt or try,” Willingham said. “I think all of us could rattle off five or six shows that shaped us as we were kids, and that sense of wonder and magic that is so inherent in animation — that was the thing that we were looking forward to the most. So that’s really what we’ve been tasking ourselves with the most: how can we make this animated property really make you feel, whether it’s laugh or cry or feel despondent or grief or tension or stress. That’s what we take the most pride in.”
‘The Legend of Vox Machina’ Courtesy of Prime VideoJust like D&D action economy, artistic at-bats have a way of creating a virtuous cycle for the team that takes them. “ Producing animation has made me a better voiceover director. Being a voiceover director has made me a better voiceover actor. Being a voiceover actor has made me a better writer. Everything feeds into each other in a creative loop,” Riegel said. “I think that’s one of the great things about ‘Critical Role’ in general. Travis is our CEO; he’s expert-level at business-y stuff. There’s a reason Laura is in charge of our merchandise. She is a tastemaker. Everybody in our group is an expert at something, and we serve to support each other.”
Supporting each other’s artistic growth and creating great animated stories, however, means really stretching and testing the animated characters in ways that not even the D&D Dice Gods can dictate. “We really mistreat our characters,” Riegel joked. “We put them in situations that they cannot get out of in one piece. And that ability and that fun and that opportunity to take these building blocks we’ve built — now we’re throwing out the instruction manual and now we’re just playing with the Legos on their own now.”
“ We just want to contribute as many misunderstood Legos to that big plastic Tupperware tub that makes an ocean of intimidating pieces with which to build,” Willingham agreed.
“The Legend of Vox Machina” and “The Mighty Nein” are streaming on Prime Video.
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