Critical Role Expands Deal With Amazon To Create Mighty Nein Series
Liveplay podcasts are one of the key reasons tabletop games have broken into mainstream culture, and the biggest of these is Critical Role — in fact it might be a little TOO big. The archive of episodes stretches back to 2015 and numbers in the thousands, and you can’t just pick up any episode and join in because they’re all connected. It would benefit Critical Role greatly if the immense storylines they’ve cooked up could be condensed in the form of a TV show…ah wait, it already happened.
The Legend Of Vox Machina, based on CR’s first campaign, started as a Kickstarter to produce the funds for animating a pilot episode. The response was MUCH larger than anticipated and the group ended up amassing the funds to finish an entire season. That attracted the attention of Amazon, who agreed to fund a second season if CR would agree to Prime exclusivity. They signed the deal and it’s been candy from there. Vox Machina has performed well for Amazon Prime; a third season is in production and after that story is finished, more is on the way.
Critical Role and Amazon have signed a new deal that means their second campaign, The Mighty Nein, will also be animated in its own series. This is the campaign most fans of the liveplay remember most fondly because it was the part they came in during. Mighty Nein has the same cast as Vox Machina: Laura Bailey, Taliesin Jaffe, Ashley Johnson, Liam O’Brien, Matthew Mercer, Marisha Ray, Sam Riegel and Travis Willingham. All of them are professional voice actors that, initially, just broadcast their D&D games to the world for fun.
The setup for Mighty Nein is similar to that of Vox Machina: it “follows [a] band of criminals and misfits who also happen to be the only hope of saving the kingdom when an arcane artifact capable of reshaping reality falls into the wrong hands.” A little teaser was whipped up by Amazon to announce the show.
Keep in mind no animation has been finished yet — it’ll be a while. In the meantime Vox Machina has plenty of story left. You can check out new episodes weekly on Amazon Prime.
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