Critical Role’s founders won’t be making the same mistakes with The Mighty Nein

Streamlining what was originally a tabletop live-play into an animated production is not a simple task. The beauty of D&D is that you can do anything you want within the world you’re placed in, and if the DM and the players are on the same page, a story will unravel. It’s a delicious amount of freedom. Travis Willingham, one of the founders and original cast members of Critical Role, as well as executive producer behind Prime Video’s The Mighty Nein describes it to Polygon during New York Comic Con 2025 as “the anarchy of tabletop.”

Unfortunately, anarchy doesn’t really fit when it comes to producing a story for the silver screen.

But what it can provide is some valuable lessons. In March 2019, Critical Role launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a 22-minute special of The Legend of Vox Machina, their first actual play campaign. Not only did it reach its intended goal within the space of an hour, but within the first day it had already made $4.3 million. What was a special quickly turned into an animated series, with Amazon Studios acquiring the streaming rights and commissioning 14 additional episodes. It was a victory for Critical Role, but it came with caveats.

“The thing we learned from making Vox Machina was that we didn’t know, after the two-season order, if we were going to get anything after that. So, we really crammed a lot of stuff into season 2.” Willingham says. “I think our pace suffered a little bit for it in some places, but we’re throwing caution to the wind and taking our time more with these seasons. Hence, the starting from a session zero perspective.”

Session zero refers to a session before the start of the actual campaign, where Dungeon Masters sit down with their players and speak about rules and expectations. This can be used to discuss the setting of the campaign itself or to explore character background stories. (It’s also often used to set boundaries for what players are comfortable seeing in the game.)

Image: Critical Role/Prime Video

What Willingham means is that The Mighty Nein will have a slower pace compared to The Legend of Vox Machina. This may seem like a risk, since the story being cut off awkwardly if the show isn’t renewed for future seasons. However, considering Critical Role’s history of success, that’s pretty unlikely.

We’ve already seen clips of Fjord and Jester’s first meeting, something which hadn’t been established in the live-play itself outside of conversation, so we can safely assume, as Willingham previously confirmed, that there will be something for both new and returning fans diving into The Mighty Nein this November.

The Mighty Nein’s episodes are also longer than The Legend of Vox Machina (44 minutes versus 22-25 minutes), giving the series more room to explore its characters and setting. The founders have previously teased a new route for characters like Ashley Johnson’s Yasha, an exciting development considering that Johnson’s packed schedule made her miss a good part of Campaign 2.

That being said, a longer run time isn’t infallible.

Image: Critical Role/Prime Video

“One thing we see a lot is comments like, ‘I hope they don’t change anything,’” Willingham says. It’s a hope that Willingham’s fellow Critical Role co-founder, Laura Bailey, tells us is impossible to meet.

“There’s not enough time to incorporate everything that happened in a three-year campaign of four to five-hour sessions,” Bailey says. She adds that by cutting down, more depth can be added to the retained scenes. “You can make the scenes have more meaning because of the timing of them. And we still get those moments that we love. They might just happen in a different way.”

A keen watcher of Critical Role myself, the cast is incredibly entertaining, which is why you don’t mind the meandering that can occur in the live-play episodes. It’s fun to watch, but it lacks the story structure and pacing of a TV show. So, as Willingham describes it, everything that makes tabletop role-playing fun has “to get crammed back into the sausage for this version.” Sounds delicious.

The sausage version of Critical Role’s Campaign 2, The Mighty Nein, arrives on Nov. 19, exclusively on Prime Video.