- Fans of Critical Role have been waiting for news of “The Legend of the Mighty Nein.”
- Amazon inked its exclusive deal with CR in 2023 after an $11.3 million Kickstarter run.
- Matthew Mercer, Critical Role’s game master, dropped a big hint to BI about what’s to come.
To all the Critters, as members of the Critical Role fandom are known, I come bearing excellent news.
The cast of Critical Role has remained tight-lipped about “The Legend of The Mighty Nein,” their second Amazon-backed animated series. The fandom has been chomping at the bit for more content, but all that’s been revealed so far is a trailer announcing the series’ development.
For the uninitiated, Critical Role is a juggernaut in the tabletop roleplaying game industry. They’re fresh off a sold-out live show at London’s Wembley Arena, and are working on two Amazon-backed animation series right now, both based on the eight-member cast’s long-running “Dungeons & Dragons” campaigns. Now well into its third campaign, the team has roleplayed its way through the fantasy land of Exandria for over 1,300 hours.
And while the anticipation for the new series has reached a fever pitch, the cast has remained very tight-lipped about all things related to plotlines, timing, and characters — until now.
I sat down recently for a video call with Matthew Mercer, Critical Role’s game master, and he dropped two big hints about the plotline fans will see in the series.
“We’re heavy in development on Campaign Two’s animated series right now, and it’s coming along so well,” Mercer told me. “And because it’s in animated form, we get to see other perspectives of the narrative as opposed to just the Mighty Nein’s journey.”
I asked Mercer about beloved non-player characters like Essek Thelyss, a time-bending wizard who became a fan favorite.
“We’ll see story threads that follow members of the Cerberus Assembly, and Essek and the Dynasty,” he said, referring to the key players in the fictional warring nations of the Dwendalian Empire and the Dynasty, a cornerstone of Critical Role’s second campaign.
“Things that we didn’t get to see in the campaign, we now get to explore as part of the animated series,” Mercer said.
Mercer is riding a career high right now, with his wildly popular role as the goth gunslinger Vincent Valentine in “Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth,” a role he told me has been a “white whale” he’s chased for years.
He and his friends also living proof that investing in nerd world brings in the big bucks. Amazon, driven by the team’s $11.3 million Kickstarter fundraising run for “The Legend of Vox Machina,” inked an exclusive, multiyear deal with CR in 2023 to make both animated series happen.
While Mercer’s comments did not reveal details about the number of episodes in the new series or when it’ll drop, it’s a far more substantial hint than what his co-stars have given the fandom to work with. But if “The Legend of Vox Machina” is any indicator, we might see multiple seasons planned, with at least a dozen episodes each.
The first two seasons of “The Legend of Vox Machina” are already out on Amazon Prime, and the third is in development.
I also tried to wrangle some details about “The Legend of the Mighty Nein” out of Mercer’s fellow cast member Liam O’Brien when we spoke in March. O’Brien played the sad but brilliant wizard Caleb Widogast during the crew’s 141-episode-long second campaign, and he told me the animated series is “coming along beautifully.”
“The things that I have seen have blown me away, and I know people are going to love it,” O’Brien said.
