Back near the end of October 2023, my close friend was able to go to the Critical Role live show in London that she had won a ticket for. She was already going to London that same week for the MCM London Comic Con where the cast of Critical Role were also guests, so she pretty much had the ultimate Critter experience that weekend. It was lovely to see how excited she was and how much she enjoyed it.
Though this, hilariously, ended up leading me to fall down the Critter rabbit role soon after.
My friend has been a fan of Critical Role for quite a while and had talked to me about it, but my knowledge only really extended to what she had told me. The only two characters I would've been able to recall by name were 'Caleb' and 'FCG' since those were characters my friend has cosplayed in the past and I knew Caleb was one of her favourite characters.
I knew they had made an animated show called 'The Legend of Vox Machina', I'd heard of the name 'The Mighty Nein' (though had no idea what it actually was), and I was familiar with some of the voice actors within Critical Role through their voicework, but that was about my extent of what I knew about it. I never really delved deeper than that, mainly because I knew the campaign episodes were often around four hours long, so it did put me off watching it myself, feeling I didn't really have the time to commit to it.
That was until my friend came back absolutely buzzing from her awesome Critter weekend.
I admit my curiosity was piqued as she told me and our other friend about the weekend as she experienced it. It was so lovely to see that she was having such an awesome time, but I didn't end up actually delving into anything until the 'Echoes of the Solstice' live show was put up on Critical Role's YouTube channel. I saw the video link pop up on my Twitter feed and I decided I was going to check it out, so I could see and experience what my friend did. I wasn't really sure if I'd get into it or even enjoy it, because I knew so little about everything, but I decided to see what it was like.
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| The 'Echoes of the Solstice' liveshow in London. |
Honestly, I had NO idea what was going on in the story, nor did I really know the characters, but it didn't stop me from actually enjoying watching the show. I absolutely loved watching the cast interacting with each other, which I think was my favourite part and there were so many things that made me laugh. On top of that, it was exciting to watch as the players rolled their dice in a big epic battle and seeing their excitement and reactions to good and bad rolls. You really could just feel the energy, even just watching it in a video.
I was starting to see why people loved this series so much.
After watching this, I was curious about learning more, so I went through the videos on Critical Role's YouTube to find what was the most recent thing they had done that I could check out. I found out their latest campaign was 'Campaign 3' also known as 'Bells Hells' and looking more into it, I realized this was the one that had 'FCG,' the robot my friend had told me about and had previously cosplayed.
I'll admit that it seemed very daunting at first, as that campaign alone was at around 76 episodes at the time and were all four hours long on average, but, despite this, I decided to check out the first episode of Campaign 3 and see what it was like.
I was instantly hooked from that first episode.
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| The main characters of Campaign 3 - 'Bells Hells'. |
Again, I loved the hilarious interactions between the cast. You can tell that they are all really close friends that are just having a good time playing a game, but on top of that, I instantly loved the characters as they were introduced, how they interacted with each other and also just how chaotic they all were. It was fun gradually learning about them and the world of Exandria through these episodes.
I ended up pretty much listening to the episodes almost like it was a podcast, while I did things like drawing on the computer which surprisingly made the episodes go by faster than I thought.
By the time I got to around episode 50-51, and characters like Caleb and Beau turned up, I realized that I was around the timing of when 'Echoes of the Solstice' had taken place. I even re-watched the introduction of that and I suddenly understood everything in it that I hadn't before.
As of mid-January, I had managed to catch up with the campaign 3 episodes (which as of writing this, stands at 82 episodes). It only took around two and a half months for me to get through it all, which was quite surprising! Though it was pretty much the only thing I was watching for those two months, so it's maybe not that surprising. I have a habit of marathoning new shows I get into.
During the time watching this campaign, I also ended up buying two pins from the Critical Role store while they were on sale. One was a pin of Fearne Calloway and the other was a pin of FCG.
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| The Chibi Fearne and FCG pins from the Critical Role online shop. |
Once I'd caught up with Campaign 3, I decided then to check out the first two seasons of 'The Legend of Vox Machina'. It was kind of weird, but also fun, to be watching things a little out of order, because it meant I could watch the series with some familiarity on the characters and the world setting. Granted, I know the animated series has a lot of differences to the actual campaign, but I think I'm happy to experience Vox Machina and The Mighty Nein through their animated series', rather than the actual campaigns.
Since watching all this, it has really increased my interest in Tabletop RPG's and I hope to one day be able to experience playing one with my friends. We've talked about it and have some ideas, but what's against us is the time to be able to do them. We're all very busy and sadly we all work completely different shifts at our jobs, so even meeting up regularly just to play board games is a challenge for us, but hopefully, one day we'll find the time to be able to experience doing a TTRPG.
Until then, I'll just continue experiencing it through Critical Roll.
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| The main cast of 'The Legend of Vox Machina'. |