Critical Role’s co-founders are in the fourth quarter of a bumper 10th anniversary year. They’re fresh off their latest stops on their international live show tour, and weeks from releasing their next Amazon-backed animated series.
After a monthslong hiatus, they’re bringing back the part of their business that made them famous a decade ago: a weekly live-streamed “Dungeons & Dragons” campaign.
CEO Travis Willingham told BI that now is the “perfect time” for new viewers to try watching their content.
“It can be quite a daunting thing to try and jump into 10 years of lore and thousands of hours of content. And now we have wiped the slate clean,” Willingham said.
CR’s longtime GM Matt Mercer is a player at the table, and his friends are excited
Critical Role
The CR team announced in August that its chief creative officer and longtime game master, Matt Mercer, would cede control of the long-term campaign to Brennan Lee Mulligan of “Dimension 20” fame.
Mulligan, whose crew at Dropout’s “D20” this January sold out Madison Square Garden for their own live show, has created a new world to play in, Aramán. It’s a departure from Mercer’s Exandria, in which CR’s first three campaigns were based.
“The first game I ever played was with Matt, so I started with a pretty awesome game master, and now I am playing under another amazing game master,” CR cofounder Ashley Johnson said. “So I’m very excited to do some role-playing with a different direction.”
There’s also a different vibe at the table now that Mercer’s in a player seat. CR cofounder Liam O’Brien, for one, said he loved watching Mercer “settle into” his character’s skin, instead of switching roles at game master.
“Over the last 10 years, we’ve tried to develop a knowledge of Mercer’s tells, in any sort of style or where he’s going,” Willingham said. “And with Brennan, we’ve been thrown to the sharks anew.”
Fresh faces on the main cast
The eight founding cast members will be part of a 13-member player cast split across three rotating groups.
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Yes, that means over a dozen fresh “D&D” campaign characters, some played by newcomers to the main cast like Luis Carazo and Whitney Moore.
While they might be relatively fresh faces at the table, cofounder Taliesin Jaffe describes the duo as “old friends.”
“The community has just been so welcoming to us, and as someone who is objectively more of a new player, I am really excited to show audience members who might be newer to ‘D&D,’ or at least comparatively to my friends who have been playing for a decade, that they can learn too,” Moore told Business Insider.
A hot slate of new characters
Business Insider asked O’Brien what it was like constructing his new campaign character’s “tragic backstory” — all three of his previous characters have had sad pasts.
Critical Role
“Is it tragic? The audience will have to be the judge. I don’t know! He’s smiling at the outset,” O’Brien said. “We’ll see what Brennan does to him.”
And for the campaign viewers yearning to find out more about these new characters, Business Insider asked the cast to describe their characters in one word. Make of them what you will:
- Willingham: “Loyalty.”
- Moore: “Devotion.”
- Jaffe: “Layered.”
- Carazo: “Lineage.”
- O’Brien: “Babymama.”
- Johnson: “Deadly.”
And to sum it up, Mulligan sums up the campaign kickoff with one word: “Time.”
Campaign 4 premieres on October 2 at 7 p.m. PT. It’ll stream on CR’s in-house streaming platform, Beacon, as well as the team’s YouTube and Twitch channels.
