How important a role turned a D&D game night into a hit animated series

There is a term for perfect dice rolling in Dungeons & Dragons; it’s called Natural 20, which gives the player the maximum possible value on a 20-sided die for moving, attacking enemies, or casting spells. When the group of friends behind the Crucial Role web series – aptly named after this particular throw – roll the dice on their business, there’s no denying that they hit their mark. Naturally those 20 an online empire, the dynamics of Critical Role will always be the same: a simple game played between friends.

It all started in 2012, when a group of voice actor friends gathered at Marisha Ray and Matthew Mercer’s apartment for a night out of Dungeons & Dragons, a popular tabletop role-playing game (RPG). “I don’t know what the hell is going to happen. I just said, “Sure, I’m going to come over here with a pencil and see what happens.” And then Laura [Bailey]voice,” Ashley Johnson told The Daily Beast with a laugh during a joint Zoom call with Bailey and Ray.

That night laid the groundwork for Important Roles. “It’s where we all connect and where all of our lives turn completely around in the best way,” says Johnson. Those eight friends — Johnson, Mercer, Ray, Bailey, Taliesin Jaffe, Travis Willingham, Sam Riegel and Liam O’Brien — soon became the founders and stars of the most popular D&D streaming show.

It will take a few years from that first game for many audiences to finally enter the world of Exandria – the vast and magical world created by Mercer, where all the stories in the Critical Role take place. A global audience was introduced to the world in March 2015 when the first episode of Critical Role was streamed on Geek and Sundry’s Twitch page (and subsequent episodes). YouTube page). They continued to host the entire first campaign of the series, entitled Vox Machina, which consisted of 115 episodes, until the end in October 2017.

It is this campaign and story that underlies Amazon Prime Video’s R-rated animated series The Legend of Vox Machina, dropped the entertaining first three episodes on January 28. Like Critical Role’s own journey to global audiences, the series took a long time to make.

The important role has attracted millions of fans on it Official Twitch channel in March 2019, when they launched Kickstarter to fund a 22-minute animation special based on the Vox Machina campaign. Before moving into fan sponsorship, the team tried to introduce the show to Hollywood, but despite their huge online popularity, it proved difficult to sell.

“Our show has a lot to offer,” Ray admitted with a smile. “There were a lot of classes to it and we learned that really quickly the more we introduced it.” Ray said that there were countless hurdles the Critical Roles team faced, including having to explain tabletop RPGs and the concept of streaming on Twitch. And when it comes to adapting stories into an animated series, many people have trouble getting around the concept. “Everybody was wondering, ‘Wait, are you guys looking at you guys sitting at the same table? I didn’t understand,” Bailey recounted.

The team quickly realized that their fans didn’t have such mental barriers, so they took the project to them directly. “They were really good for us there,” Ray said. Not only did the fans succeed in funding the project, with an initial goal of $750,000, but they also surpassed a ton. When Kickstarter ended in 45 days, Critters – as the name is dear to the huge fan base of Critical Role – raised a whopping $11.3 million, making Vox Machina special as one of the most funded Movie & Video projects in Kickstarter history. Funding enabled the project to expand from a single 22-minute special into a 10-episode series.

The monumental fundraising milestone also makes it hard for Hollywood to ignore the demand for the series. Right after the campaign ended, Prime Video appeared and it was announced on November 5 that the platform will not only distribute the series but will fund two more episodes of the first season as well as the entire 12 episodes of the second season. “Interestingly, when you have one of the best performing Kickstarters in history, [it] getting a lot of people’s attention — some people’s attention that we didn’t have before,” Ray said.

When the first three episodes of the series aired on a Friday – after the premiere was postponed from original date of 2020 due to COVID-19–Fans old and new can finally see the world of Exandria come to life, thanks to the animators at Titmouse, the company behind Big mouth. It’s still surreal for the Critical Roles team, who not only reprise their characters from the series, but also act as executive producers (yes, all eight of them).

“A lot of these worlds are just in our collective imagination,” Mercer told The Daily Beast via email. “It’s now possible to see these incredible designers, artists, and animators bring it to life in ways we couldn’t have imagined… I’m constantly beside myself .”

Legend of Vox Machina also gives the group of friends the chance to go back to the characters that tied them together in the first place. While one can imagine how difficult it is to return to the shoes and voices of these characters after so many years, Key Role friends say it feels like coming home. “That’s how it all started. Liam has always said that Vox Machina is the heart and soul of Critical Role, and it’s true,” Bailey said. “It feels really cool and comfortable to come back with these characters. … I forgot how much I missed those characters until I saw Pike out of you, Ashley and Keyleth out of you, [Marisha]. ”

“It was really like seeing an old friend again,” Ray added.

Another thing the friends behind Critical Role can agree on is that the journey from a private game between friends to a colossal creative empire is a wild one – and a which they hope will continue for a long time. “None of us could have foreseen this path from our small game and it feels like we are constantly trying to pick up momentum, even when we are ready,” says Mercer. or not.

“We love and trust each other very much and are both aligned with our values ​​and hopes, so the common pitfalls and nightmares that often occur when friends do business together are not an issue. topic,” added Mercer.

In fact, this group of friends is so tight-knit that they even have a very detailed apocalypse strategy, just in case. “We’re on each other’s post-apocalyptic plans,” Ray said with a laugh. “If the shit hits the fan, all we need is a home that works for all of us. And we can farm and we can play D&D and it’s going to be great. ” Johnson added, “We really talk about this plan a lot.”

While the team remains tight-lipped about any future Critical Role projects, animated or not, their future certainly looks bright. “We developed the proverb ‘we have to be careful what we want’ among us because we chase it so hard,” says Ray. “You have to be careful with the inside jokes [because] a joke that could, in three years, turn into an animated series. “

With that kind of magic, the Critical Role really seemed unstoppable.