There's never been a show like The Legend of Vox Machina.
The adult fantasy cartoon adapts web series Critical Role's first Dungeons and Dragons campaign, which follows a band of dysfunctional mercenaries known as Vox Machina. (The name is Latin for "voice machine," a reference to the Critical Role cast's jobs as voice actors.)
Other films and TV shows have been inspired by tabletop roleplaying games in the past: Harmonquest combined live Pathfinder gameplay with animated renditions of in-game scenes, and 2015's The Last Witch Hunter was based on Vin Diesel's Dungeons and Dragons character (a character he has played alongside Critical Role cast members). However, The Legend of Vox Machina is the first show to use an entire campaign as source material.
Despite heading into uncharted adaptation territory, the team behind The Legend of Vox Machina discovered that drawing from Dungeons and Dragons — and this campaign in particular — had unique advantages.
"Tabletop RPGs are basically real-time writers' rooms," Marisha Ray, the voice of druid Keyleth, told Mashable. All eight of the founders and cast members of Critical Role, including Ray, are executive producers on the show: Laura Bailey, Taliesin Jaffe, Ashley Johnson, Liam O'Brien, Matthew Mercer, Sam Riegel, and Travis Willingham. Mashable spoke with each of them via Zoom, as well as with showrunner and executive producer Brandon Auman.
"It's the pinnacle of collaborative storytelling," Ray continued. "I can't think of any other medium that really allows you to build a story with everyone else like tabletop RPGs do. So naturally, when you're organically building this story based on impulse and choice, and really embodying and knowing these characters, you're gonna get a ton of great source material to pull from."
In The Legend of Vox Machina's case, that source material is 115 episodes of Critical Role, plus the earlier adventures of Vox Machina that occurred before the cast began streaming their sessions.
Even in the beginning of the campaign, the cast of Critical Role wondered how their adventures would translate to the screen, especially in a medium they all loved and were familiar with as voice actors.
"As we were playing this game, we couldn't help but have our imagination run wild with the dynamic ideas of epic action and silly character interactions," said Matthew Mercer, who created The Legend of Vox Machina's world of Exandria and serves as Dungeon Master for Critical Role's main campaigns. "We joked about — even early on — how this would make for a great cartoon. The fantasy genre lends itself well to animation. You can break a lot of boundaries that on-camera stuff keeps you at bay on."
Critical Role's dreams became reality starting in 2019, when they launched a Kickstarter campaign to create an animated special. The original goal was $750,000. Fans of Critical Role (aka Critters) funded the entire special in under an hour, then continued to smash Kickstarter records until they'd raised over $11 million throughout the campaign's 45 days. Amazon took notice of the outpouring of support and ordered two 12-episode seasons of the show.
"I can't think of any other medium that really allows you to build a story with everyone else like tabletop RPGs do."
With more room to tell the story of Vox Machina, the show's producers and writers still faced the daunting task of condensing hundreds of hours of improvised gameplay into 24 half-hour episodes of scripted television.
"We would sit for months and whittle away, figuring out what things would go, which things would stay, and what things we could add to help improve the story," said Travis Willingham, who voices barbarian Grog Strongjaw.
According to Mercer, "part of the challenge was finding what parts were important and how best to truncate the story, while still finding room for every character to have small interactions that are personal or funny and carry the heart of what we love about playing this game over to the series."
"I think all the small interactions can get lost in a lot of adaptations," said Bailey, who voices ranger Vex'ahlia. "Sam [Riegel] and Travis [Willingham] [who took the lead on the project for Critical Role] and Brandon [Auman] were so protective of those small moments that they really did come across."
In the end, the team settled on two main plots for the first season. One features campaign events that occurred before Critical Role began live-streaming. The other focuses on the fan-favorite Briarwood Arc, which sees Vox Machina facing off against the villainous Sylas and Delilah Briarwood (voiced by Matthew Mercer and Grey Griffin).
"The Briarwood Arc is just so rich with drama and backstory and relationships," said Auman. "It was pretty easy to choose that as the first season. Even watching the campaign, it feels like more than an RPG. It's this living, breathing thing with all these talented voice actors who are so good at improv. People think that this must be incredibly difficult to adapt, but in many ways, not really. Because it's all right there. We've got it all, it's just a matter of how we're going to get it down to 22-minute episodes."
Along with bringing the story to life, capturing the complexity of each character remained a major priority throughout the adaptation process. Throughout the campaign, Critters quickly grew to love the members of Vox Machina as well as the campaign's many non-player characters, all of which are played by Mercer in-game. And of course, these characters hold a special place in the hearts of the Critical Role cast as well.
For Sam Riegel, who voices bard Scanlan Shorthalt, the strength of Vox Machina's characters and each actor's knowledge of them were huge assets for producing the show. "This story, in particular, lends itself to adaptation because the characters are big and grand and bold and broad. We spent so much time with them in our campaign that we delved deep into their backstories and psyches," he said. "We know them inside and out and backward and forwards."
He continued: "Maybe in the first couple episodes, people just tuning in, who don't know anything about Vox Machina or fantasy or Critical Role, will think, 'Oh, wow, these are wild and crazy characters.' Which they are. But there's so much more to them than just that. As the season progresses, and the series progresses, we get to unveil to the audience the layers and layers that these characters have and the depth and richness of the world of Exandria."
With so much depending on character, it was crucial that The Legend of Vox Machina get everything just right, from a character's way of speaking to their inter-party relationships. After all, you can't have Grog without his iconic rages. You can't have Vex'ahlia (Laura Bailey) and Vax'ildan (Liam O'Brien) without their twin bond. Luckily, everyone in the Critical Role cast was involved in preserving the integrity of their character.
"We had the advantage of having each one of these characters' creators come in and tweak the dialogue so that it was perfect, to make sure that it's in the character's voice," said Willingham. "Everybody has their fingerprints and essence all over this thing. It would never have been as good if it was just one of us involved, or two of us, or even a handful of us. It took all of us to make the show. I think that's why it's as rich and entertaining as it is, because it's got all of our DNA in every episode."
The cast's ownership over story and character extended to the recording booth. "Taking it from the table to behind the mic felt like a natural progression," said Ashley Johnson, who voices cleric Pike Trickfoot. "It was a pretty easy transition because we're all so close and because we've spent so much time with these characters."
Originally, The Legend of Vox Machina was recorded in person, with all eight Critical Role cast members in the booth at once. In a way, it was like they were all playing at the table again. Even when recording shifted to home booth setups due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the cast worked to recreate the magic of the original game.
"We definitely bring the same sort of friendship and camaraderie and love for digging into the story that we had at the table with us," O'Brien said of recording dialogue for the show.
Everybody has their fingerprints and essence all over this thing.
Scripted television is obviously a different beast than improvised roleplaying, but the cast did get the opportunity to play around within the guidelines of each scene. After recording the script as written, the cast would do another pass. "Everyone would do whatever they thought would be a comparable version of the same scene," O'Brien said. "We would mix it up, and a lot of that has made it into the show. So some splash of improv has come with us from the table."
Recording also meant returning to these characters after spending years away from, a process which proved to be quite meaningful for the cast.
"When the Kickstarter took off the way that it did, all of us were beside ourselves with joy at the idea of stepping back into those shoes," Bailey said. "From the moment we got into the room together and got to embody Vox Machina again, it was such a magical moment, just to even make eye contact with everybody, because everybody's posture changes when they're playing those characters."
For Taliesin Jaffe, who voices gunslinger Percy de Rolo, returning to these character's origins was particularly moving. "We'd seen them already go through these trials and tribulations, so bringing them all the way back to just selfish, broken, wonderful young people was really nostalgic and a breath of fresh air. It was really nice to see them all the way back at the beginning, even knowing where we're going to go eventually with them. It felt very comfortable."
Despite the familiarity and preparedness that came with knowing their roles inside and out, the characters still offered new, welcome surprises. "There's always something new to learn about a character," said Johnson.
"It's just like with yourself," added Ray. "As you go through life, it's like, 'Oh, I learned something new about myself today!'"
With credits ranging from The Last of Us franchise to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Final Fantasy, the Critical Role cast members are no strangers to bringing characters to life. However, with The Legend of Vox Machina they get to inhabit characters they've created themselves, and have been playing for years.
"The sheer knowledge of character development that we have for these people is completely different when you grow them from your own mind and your own heart," said Bailey. "There's just so much more you can bring to it. You can know the history of a character you're playing, but when you created that history, it's different."
"I've never felt more prepared," Jaffe noted.
"We really got to create the path and the story that we've all been dying to play together," said O'Brien. "Nothing quite like it."
The first three episodes of The Legend of Vox Machina hit Prime Video Jan. 28, with three new episodes every week.
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