I am the sicko shouting "yes!"
If you’ve not been keeping up with The Legend of Vox Machina’s animated series on Amazon—first, I encourage you to do that, because it’s genuinely proving to be some excellent high-fantasy TV, but secondly, you might want to stop reading here, because I am gonna get elbow-deep in some spoilers for episodes 7-9 of season three.
If you don’t care about spoilers, though, let me catch you up to speed. The Legend of Vox Machina is an animated series based on a livestreamed campaign of 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons that ran from 2015 to 2017 over the course of 115 episodes, going under the title Critical Role, which starred a handful of super prominent voice actors in gaming. It’s still going today, on its third campaign, but the series is based on that 100+ episode debut.
In the TTRPG space, Critical Role is credited—pretty fairly—with causing a bit of a renaissance, easily on par with Stranger Things in terms of getting people into rolling dice. To put it in perspective, when the now-bigboy company asked for Kickstarter help to fund The Legend of Vox Machina, it broke $1 million in the first hour, then proceeded to rake in $11.3 million of funding total. They’ve got enough money to produce and distribute their own TTRPG systems: People like this thing.
Which means that the animated series’ departures from the livestream story last week are very bloody brave—in the literal sense of the adjective. Two character deaths rocked the boat hard enough that water’s getting in through the cracks, and I’m finding myself in the position of a sicko yelling “yes, yes!” through the window.
First up, Percival de Rolo—voiced by Taliesin Jaffe—has bit the bullet after Anna Ripley, who is supposed to get coup de grâce’d by a set of very pissed off adventurers (but doesn’t), shoots him through the chest. The death itself isn’t the interesting bit here, it’s the permanency.
D&D 5e is generally pretty lax with resurrection rules, to the point where DM Matthew Mercer had to devise a homebrew resurrection ritual to keep character deaths meaningful back in 2015. The Legend of Vox Machina’s in-universe rules are a lot less lax. Percy, who was originally resurrected not soon after Ripley killed him, is left dead as a doornail in a stone coffin. He gets a funeral scene and everything and, at the time I’m writing, is considered donezo by everyone involved.
His soul hasn’t passed into the beyond—his toxic ex-demon, Orthax, eats the souls of gun victims, it’s a whole thing—which means that his future resurrection is very likely. It does, however, change the tone of the entire rest of the season, as several beats from the livestream are now missing one white-haired goth nobleman.
Then there’s Kashaw Vesh, a guest character from the livestream portrayed by Will Friedle, who gets turned to paste.
While Percy’s death seemed like a brave, interesting departure from the source material, turning a pretty well-loved side character into a Red Dragon pancake is like stabbing a knife through it. Especially because I’m a lot less certain that dude’s coming back—chosen oomfie of the goddess of death, Vax’ildan, watches him go into the Raven Queen’s embrace. Which is the spiritual equivalent of taking a bow before backflipping into traffic, while on fire. It’s not something you generally survive—Kashaw willingly went to that farm upstate.
The series hasn’t been a stranger to narrative departures from its source material, obviously, but those changes have mostly been in the service of efficiency. After all, your average D&D session lasts around four hours, which is way too much runtime to condense into a show. Comparatively, these changes are huge—and as someone who sat down and watched all 115 episodes of the dang thing, bawling my eyes out live in 2017, I’m here for it.
These changes ensure that long-time fans like me aren’t just sat here crossing off entries on a bingo card. I’d be gently entertained, but otherwise non-responsive, to the dramatic stakes of these final battles if that were the case. Now, Critical Role and the folks at Titmouse have made a statement that no-one is exactly safe—main cast members like Percy’ll probably come back with an appropriate amount of gravitas, but side-characters? There’s every chance they can get blown up for good.
As for the wider fan response, Matthew Mercer popped up on X with a tentative “So… how are we all doing this morning?” after the episodes dropped. I’m not going to go deep into quote tweets but suffice to say, it’s not so good. I guess we’ll just have to wait for a Critical Role videogame to make it to market so I can defend Kashaw Vesh with my own two gamer hands.
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