The Exandria setting is high magic, grand level fantasy. It’s those new to the player/actors of Critical Role and the story of Vox Machina who may need a little help navigating. There’s a lot more than meets the eye to this challenge, the dragon itself, and Emon’s High Council (voiced by Game of Thrones ’ Indra Varma, Khary Payton of The Walking Dead, and Doctor Who ’s David Tennant!) However, one of the twists is that Vox Machina is also greater than they seem and succeed (or merely survive) by improvisation and a little dumb luck.įans of the streaming games will notice some deviations from the original plots, but that’s to be expected for the sake of accessibility and brevity as multiple 3+ hour episodes of gameplay easily translate within a standard 25-minute episode. Desperate for coin, they answer the call to adventure from Ye Olde Job Board in town looking for souls brave or foolhardy to track down a huge, lightning-breathing blue dragon cutting a swath of destruction throughout the land. We first meet the eponymous mercenary company during the classic D&D trope of a tavern brawl, which they arguably win but outright fail to properly pay for. The opening episodes (three in all) introduce us to the world of Exandria, the characters, and their adventures in and around the city of Emon.

That is the origin of the Amazon Prime Original, The Legend of Vox Machina. The result was adapting the one-hour special into a series. They broke $1M in the first hour and over $10M by the close. When the idea came to create a one-hour animated special, they sought $750,000 on Kickstarter with a 45-day window. Official D&D publications were based on their dungeon master, Matt Mercer’s, original campaign setting. What resulted was a viewership on Twitch and YouTube that reached over one million per episode for Critical Role.

A group of renowned voice actors (if you’ve watched cartoons, English-dubbed anime, or played video games in the past 20 years, you’ve heard their voices) decided to start streaming their weekly Dungeons & Dragons game. It is an anomaly of anomalies: A television show that broke records before it was ever produced.

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