The Legend of Vox Machina’s journey from Kickstarter darling to one of the best animated fantasy shows on TV. Now, four years after the ultra-popular animated adaptation of Critical Role’s first Dungeons & Dragons campaign, the series is set to release its penultimate season on June 3.
There’s no question that Critical Role’s campaigns (and adaptations of those campaigns) are exceedingly popular. While Prime Video doesn’t share viewing numbers, both The Legend of Vox Machina and The Mighty Nein boast perfect scores on Rotten Tomatoes. With that in mind, we couldn’t help but ask if the team at Critical Role plans to adapt all their other campaigns in a similar style.
“I think we’ve shown that we are very interested in the next development step of livestream into animation,” Travis Willingham, executive producer of The Legend of Vox Machina, tells Polygon.
Willingham is also the voice behind Vox Machina‘s Goliath barbarian, Grog Strongjaw.
“We believe we’ll be playing these characters and telling these stories for the rest of our lives,” he says. “So, if we have our druthers, we will absolutely be doing any and every story that we ever get our hands on.”
Willingham also pointed out that it wasn’t just animated cartoons that Critical Role was looking to explore, but video games too. It was previously revealed that Critical Role had partnered up with Dispatch’s AdHoc Studios to develop its own video game set in the world of Exandria, which is where the first three campaigns of Critical Role take place.
However, if Critters want more animated adaptations from Critical Role, they’ll have to show up and show the TV series’ publisher, Amazon, that investing in the multimedia company’s tabletop role-playing game campaigns is the right thing to do.
“It’s important to press that viewership and the audience’s voice speak volumes. Your view matters,” says Marisha Ray, executive producer of The Legend of Vox Machina and voice of elven druid Keyleth. “So if you want more, the best thing that you can do is spread the word, show your friends, get views, because obviously our partners at Amazon are paying attention to all of that.”
Any TV watcher out there has a story about something they’ve loved not being picked up for another season, leaving the story unfinished. For Critical Role, whose adaptations are of finished stories from their tabletop campaigns, the problem instead lies in having enough eyes on them for an adaptation to be worthwhile enough to make it to TV in the first place.
Over the years, it’s become clear that making TV is hard, and it’s difficult to predict what the entertainment industry will look like in the future. Even so, it’s hard to imagine that, with Critical Role’s popularity, Campaign 3: Bells Hells and even the latest Dungeons & Dragons’ actual-play, Campaign 4, won’t be considered popular enough not to warrant some level of adaptation. When that’ll happen, however, remains to be seen.
Vox Machina season 4 premieres June 4 on Prime Video.
