A mighty yes—or ja, as they say in the Dwendalian Empire.
If you’ve been experiencing as much second-hand envy as I have for the cast of Critical Role, a rather famous D&D livestream that’s grown successful enough to have its own animated series, you’ve probably been getting even greener at the fact that it’s about to have yet another series produced from a different campaign.
It’s sort of the platonic ideal for anyone with a sufficiently advanced TTRPG game (and the accompanying brain worms) to imagine what their characters would look like rendered on the silver screen, but Critical Role’s gone and done it twice. Fans have known that Mighty Nein, which adapts Critical Role’s second campaign (which ran from 2018 to 2021 over the span of 141 episodes) has been in the works for some time now. Prime even put out a teaser for it back in July, which you can watch below.
Well, now we’ve got a status update, via a recent Polygon interview with Travis Willingham, Marisha Ray, and Liam O’Brien, all of whom are prolific videogame voice actors and the original cast members of the campaign being adapted.
Willingham, (voice of Grog Strongjaw, soon to be the voice of Fjord, and also CEO of the Critical Role company) told the site: “We have written all of Season 1. The storyboards are all being locked, if they haven’t been already. So it’s off to our overseas studio. We’re getting animation tests back and seeing things come back in colour. We’ve designed all the characters. The magical spells and effects are being considered. We’re talking about music, and how it’s going to be different from Vox.
“So it’s definitely more than halfway done, and I think everybody’s going to be really thrilled with the way it’s turning out.”
Honestly, I’ve always thought that a Mighty Nein adaptation would be more suited to TV. Being chronically TTRPG-brained, I did in fact watch the entire thing almost episode-by-episode as it came out—and I always found the vicious fantasy politicking, dramatic twists, and more complex ethics to be more of a draw. Less gung-ho dragon slaying, more Game of Thrones with a surplus of terrible dads (except for Yeza Brenatto, my short king).
That’s not to say that The Legend of Vox Machina has had a rough go of it—quite the opposite, it’s getting a fourth season—but that OG campaign was developed off the back of a Pathfinder game the cast played at home. Because it was quite a few (but not all) of their first tries at the hobby, the Vox Machina crew is very classically trope-y. You’ve got your big dumb barbarian, you’ve got your feelings-focused (but still kickass) druid, you’ve got your edgy rogue, you’ve got your smutty bard—it works, don’t get me wrong, but it’s definitely playing the D&D hits.
The Mighty Nein, meanwhile, are a lot more complex. O’Brien’s Caleb Widogast is a deeply troubled and haunted Wizard, Willingham’s Fjord is a Texan-accented Warlock who keeps vomiting water, and Ray’s Beau is a standoffish and severe monk with family problems, to name just a few. They’re exactly the kind of characters a table makes once they’ve grown comfy with the rules and want to add a dash of spice to things.
Willingham notes that, for similar reasons, the campaign will delve deeper into its characters’ pasts before they all get looped together. “It is not going to be the same tone as Vox Machina. In Vox, they start together. They’re kind of a bunch of slap-dicks that are just making the best of their situation.”
With the Mighty Nein, though, Willingham says they wanted to “back up even further, and start from what I think we would call a Session Zero perspective, which is meeting the characters individually, taking our time with how do they come together? and really letting people see the earliest parts of their journeys.
“Because as anyone that knows the Mighty Nein campaign would know, the characters don’t even know if they’re the good guys or the bad guys. That’s something we’re excited to explore.” Ray adds, forebodingly: “Yeah, we did not start off as friends.” I yearn for the heartache and the drama, so bring it on.
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