The Legend of Vox Machina

 I'll be honest, I wasn't sure whether to post about this on this blog, or Altoholism, my gaming blog.

Yesterday saw the launch of The Legend of Vox Machina, an animated series adaptation of Critical Role, which is a prominent Dungeons & Dragons "actual-play" stream. For almost seven years, this group of voice actors has livestreamed their D&D games, first through Geek & Sundry and later as their own company on Twitch and YouTube.

Unlike streaming, say, a video game, D&D is a highly narrative-focused game, with many (most in my experience) groups inventing an original story that they play through.

For those unfamiliar, here are the basics:

Using the game's rulebooks, players each create a character that they will play as - picking things like race and class, so you could be a Half-Elf Rogue or a Gnome Cleric. These choices determine the various abilities a character can use while they adventure as part of a party (i.e., the other players) in a fictional fantasy world, generally engaging in heroics and, just as often, shenanigans. The rest of the world is run by another player, referred to as the Dungeon Master (or Game Master, the term used more broadly for other, similar games). This player doesn't have their own character exactly, but tries to draw narrative threads, describe the fictional world, arrange for exciting monsters for the party to fight, and plays the many other "non-player characters" or "NPCs" that the party comes across.

In most cases, the game is designed to tell ongoing narratives that could last years, with players meeting together for a few hours once a week (Critical Role's Thursday night sessions tend to go 3-4 hours).

In effect, it's part strategy game and part group improv exercise. And, as such, when you have talented actors playing like the folks at Critical Role, you can get a really entertaining narrative to watch through - and one where the outcomes aren't predetermined, but instead rely on the roll of the dice.

Critical Role is currently in the early stages (eleven episodes in, if memory serves) of their third campaign - a new narrative with new characters, but set within the same fictional world of Exandria, dreamed up by Dungeon Master Matt Mercer. The Legend of Vox Machina is built out of the events of the first campaign.

As someone who has watched (or rather listened to it in podcast form) the first campaign, the characters in the Legend of Vox Machina are very familiar to me. In a way, this is a bit like watching an adaptation of a book I've read - though instead of a bunch of prose, it's been hundreds of hours of D&D gameplay. I'm fairly invested here, so I'm simultaneously disposed to like this in large part for the joy of seeing these characters on screen, but also I think more primed to be hesitant in my praise because... well, I guess I'm an anxious person?

Campaign one actually started a bit in media res - the game had begun as a home game among friends, even using a different game system (Pathfinder, which is similar to D&D). As such, the first two episodes of the animated series actually adapt events that happened before the game was being streamed for the public. With the third episode, though, the series skips forward through some of the early content of the campaign to get to the "Briarwood Arc," which is generally considered the point at which Critical Role got really good.

I'd heard the series described as having a tone and style like "an R-Rated Avatar: the Last Airbender," and that seems fairly accurate so far - the show has some graphic violence, adult language, and even a little nudity. But it also has moments of absurd levity that feel of a piece with the on-set banter of the players during the campaign.

With seven central protagonists, the show has a lot of work to give each of them a reasonable characterization, and here as someone deeply familiar with these characters, I'm curious as to how a newcomer to the story would feel they succeed at this.

Another thing that's interesting is seeing how to adapt a game of Dungeons & Dragons without getting bogged down in the intricacies of the rules. The only direct reference to an actual game mechanic is the half-giant Grog shouting what was technically his player's invocation of a rule, but what became his catch-phrase: "I would like to rage!" (In D&D, the Barbarian class is built around going into a state known as a Rage, which increases the damage they do while decreasing the damage they take, but Travis Willingham would generally declare this in-character while they were playing.) A seasoned character will recognize the players casting familiar spells, but my sense is that they've worked hard to communicate the idea of the spells and abilities the characters use without getting lost in the weeds and alienating anyone.

The animation here is top-quality, with a lot of subtle "acting" from the characters and gorgeous backdrop vistas. I would definitely caution parents considering showing this to their kids, though, as the violence can get pretty hard-R.

In addition to just being a memorable and good part of the campaign, the Briarwood Arc that begins with episode 3 (and pretty faithfully adapts what happened in-game, I'll note) also has the benefit of focusing on one of its central characters - the prim and proper gunfighter, Percy, lost his home when he was a child to a couple of evil usurpers, and when they show up in his life again, he sees an opportunity for revenge, but also has to deal with some of the dark deals he's made to get that revenge.

Anyway, so far, I think the show is living up to the high expectations that Critical Role fans had.