The Legend Of Vox Machina animated TV series, set to premiere on January 28 of this year, revealing the unseen origins of the original Critical Role series. The show was funded after a massively successful Kickstarter campaign by fans of the long-running Dungeon & Dragons actual play series. Matt Mercer, Laura Bailey and other professional voice actors will be voicing the characters they created during the first season of Critical Role - specifically, the reckless heroes of a fantasy adventuring party called Vox Machina. Rather than merely adapting episodes from the Critical Role series proper, The Legend of Vox Machina is also going to tell the story of Vox Machina's rise to glory and fame, adapting Critical Role game sessions that pre-dated the start of the livestreams.
The Critical Role franchise as a whole - the actual play episodes, the merchandise, the official D&D sourcebooks, the spin-off comic books - started out, essentially, as a birthday present. Liam O'Brien, a voice actor who's portrayed characters in cartoons such as Naruto and video games such as Nier: Replicant, wanted someone to run a classic Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy tabletop roleplaying game for his birthday. Fellow voice actor Matt Mercer agreed to be his Dungeon Master. They enlisted friends from their voice acting social circle - Laura Bailey, Ashley Johnson, Travis Willingham, Marisha Ray, Sam Riegel, Tallisen Jaffe, and Orion Acaba, to start with - in order to fill out the campaign's roster, and had a rip-roaring good time weaving stories about a group of fantasy adventurers going on quests and courting trouble in the original fantasy world of Exandria.
As told in this story by Polygon, after hearing about their RPG campaign and its sheer liveliness, the YouTube channel and media production company Geek & Sundry approached D&D DM Matt Mercer to see if they'd be interested in live-streaming their games for internet audiences. Critical Role (converted from the first edition of the Pathfinder TTRPG to the then-recently released D&D 5e) swiftly become one of the most popular actual plays online thanks to the imaginative world-building of Matt Mercer, the high-level roleplaying of his voice actor players, and its increasingly elaborate set design/game props. When the Critical Role gang launched a Kickstarter to raise money for a single animated special, legions of "Critters" wound up blowing through multiple fundraising milestones, eventually raising over $11 million. With these funds, the Critical Role team worked with an animation studio to create a whole series of animated episodes that re-envision some of the most dramatic moments in Critical Role Season 1, and some of the most pivotal moments from the campaign's pre-stream days.
The Legend Of Vox Machina Adapts A Pre-Stream Critical Role Arc Where The Party Saves Tal'Dorei
The first part of The Legend of Vox Machina, from its Kickstarter page and the trailers released by Amazon Prime, will retell the "Saviors of Tal'Dorei" story arc from the pre-stream sessions of the Critical Role game group. According to the official recap, the adventuring party Vox Machina was hired by a high elf noble called Syldor Vessar (the estranged and neglectful father of party members Vax'ildan and Vex'ahlia) to find a missing associate of his from the Council of the Kingdom of Tal'Dorei. After accepting this seemingly innocuous quest, Vox Machina inadvertently uncovers and foils a conspiracy of demons, criminals, and dragons that has magically enthralled the royal family of Tal'Dorei. After defeating a massive treachery demon and restoring the souls of Tal'Dorei's rulers, the formerly down-on-their-luck Vox Machina are hailed as heroes and gifted a castle called Greyskull Keep for them to rule.
The second part of The Legend of Vox Machina will likely adapt the infamous "Briarwood Saga" of Critical Role's "Vox Machina" campaign, a story arc where the dark past of the party's gunslinger, the aristocratic Percival Fredrickstein Von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III (played by Tallisen Jaffe), comes to light. Fans should have a lot to look forward to, especially since this will be the first time they'll really get to experience the gang's very first outings through more than just a brief synopsis.
Source: Polygon