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Cracking jokes based on their easy, practiced familiarity with one another. Howling with collective delight when a dice roll goes their way, howling with collective despair when it doesn't. I'll be honest: A large part of the appeal of Critical Role to me, at a time when all human interaction takes place over interminable Zooms, was and remains watching these friends gathered in the same room, building something together.

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He's a smart enough DM to do all the work necessary to build a vast world for his players to live and fight and die in, but he knows how to channel their energy and let the chemistry between them drive the story wherever it wants to go. A palpable, loving, gorgeous mess, filled with in-jokes and dead-ends and call-backs and lulls and pee-breaks and endless rules discussions and running gags and merciless teasing and long waits for players to decide what actions, if any, they'll take.ĭungeon Master Mercer isn't to be blamed for this rich, funky, organic messiness in fact, he's to be commended for it.

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But in a very real sense, that's not what Critical Role is about.īecause each episode of the web series is an individual Dungeons & Dragons game session, it's.

Together, they have adventures, and ultimately, they save the world.

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Pop Culture Happy Hour The best movies and TV of 2021, picked by NPR critics In the first campaign, which The Legend of Vox Machina is based upon, the characters consist of: Grog, a huge, lovable, but defiantly slow-on-the-uptake barbarian, played by Travis Willingham Percy, an arrogant gunslinger, played by Taliesin Jaffe Vex, a charismatic archer, played by Laura Bailey her twin Vax, a brooding rogue, played by Liam O'Brien Keyleth, a naive druid, played by Marisha Ray Scanlan, a horny bard, played by Sam Riegel and Pike, a compassionate healer, played by Ashley Johnson. In any given campaign, the same group of players (with some roster changes) play as the same set of characters, while dungeon master Matthew Mercer walks them through the vast world he's so painstakingly wrought.

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(A third campaign recently launched, plus there've been a huge number of one-shots and standalone miniseries, so: Yeah.)

If you're scoring at home, we're talking several weeks' worth of content, here, as individual Critical Role episodes tend to run three to four hours in length, and the two previous storylines (or campaigns) have run to 115 episodes and 141 episodes respectively. The Legend of Vox Machina is based on one of the campaigns that took place on the web series Critical Role. If anything, that only helps it bring the source material to life, as the special effects budget of animation is effectively unlimited - no iffy CGI dragons, rubber costumes or one-dimensional greenscreen vistas here.įor the uninitiated: In Dungeons & Dragons, players work with a Dungeon Master - a kind of all-knowing storyteller/referee - to craft storylines about the characters they're playing, which are called campaigns. It's not that fact that The Legend of Vox Machina is an animated series that sets it apart from the other fantasy shows listed above. But the nature of what's been tossed over the side is wholly different in nature as a result, anyone unfamiliar with the source material won't notice what they're missing. (The characters on Game of Thrones, for example, crossed vast oceans and endless deserts like they were hopping in a cab from the East Village to Hell's Kitchen.) Which is unfortunate, because of course it's exactly those layers of historical detail that fundamentally shape the world in question, and its inhabitants.Īmazon's funny, violent and well-realized The Legend of Vox Machina, based on the popular web series Critical Role, is no different - a lot of things gets lost in translation. But they've got a point: Television adaptations must prioritize plot over established, painstakingly wrought characterization, interiority and even geography. Pop Culture Happy Hour 'Peacemaker' takes aim at a broad, stationary target - with machine gunsįans of the source material inevitably grouse about the elements that get lost in the shuffle, because that's what fans do.

The legends of vox machina