The beloved Dungeons and Dragons group Critical Role, major force in the entertainment industry, has given an update on its future. The members of the group consist of Matthew Mercer (Attack on Titan), Marisha Ray (4-Sided Dive), Sam Riegel (Turtles Forever), Travis Willingham (Avengers Assemble), Laura Bailey, Liam O’Brien (Naruto), and Ashley Johnson (Last of Us). According to an interview with Rolling Stone, Critical Role’s main focus was set in the high-fantasy world of Exandria, but they recently hinted at exciting new projects that may venture beyond its familiar realm.
The beloved group’s first campaign transformed into an animated series dubbed The Legend of Vox Machina. According to Rolling Stone, the series has been renewed for a fourth season. It will follow where the previous one ended with the group going their separate ways but cuts to a cult reviving the whispered one, Vecna. The group’s third live-action fantasy campaign, Bell’s Hell, is rapidly reaching its climax, and their second one, The Mighty Nein, is getting its animated series.
As many of these live campaigns and other series come to a close, Rolling Stone asked what comes next for the group.
“We are a group that loves to create things, but we’re also a group that are fans of things and fans of creators,” Reigel stated about their collaborative efforts like Tales from the Stinky Dragon and MIDST via Rolling Stone. “And with Metapigeon we’ve been able to develop brand new stuff, ideas that have come from within this group, as well as finding other creators out there who have ideas for graphic novels or TV series or animated series. We have features that are in development, feature films. We also have a live-action series that we recently pitched and another animated series that has nothing to do with the world of Exandria that’s already in development. We have lots of great, cool, amazing ideas. The television and film development game is hard, but there’s eight of us and we have lots of ideas. Odds are in our favor. If we have a 1 percent success rate, we have way more than a hundred ideas. So something is bound to stick.”
This is not the first time the group decided to explore outside the realm of fantasy, with such campaigns as Candela Obscura, which delves into the horror genre and follows a group called the Circle, who accepts assignments to investigate the incursions between two cities. According to Rolling Stone, the group has evolved throughout the years and created new ways for their audience to view their content, such as their new streaming platform, Beacon.
“When you’ve built an established audience, there is an instinct to cling to what’s comfortable, but also we as creators, as artists, as performers, want to perpetually challenge ourselves and surprise each other,” Mercer said via Rolling Stone. “That’s what makes this so fun for us at the table, it’s surprising each other and trying to surprise our audience. And that comes with both how we play the game and how we want to create things that are whole cloth and new. We all have so many weird ideas and inspirations that come out of playing together, that come out of riffing on ideas, dreams we have, and people we get a chance to collaborate with.”
One of those weird ideas is an eventual video game capturing this crazy world they’ve built by hand.
“We’ve been talking about creating a video game since we first started playing together,” Bailey told Rolling Stone.
Willingham added the team has had conversations with partners in that realm along their journey, to see what an endeavor like that would take.
“It’s, you know, it’s an entire enterprise that’s separate from what we do on Beacon, Twitch, or YouTube, it’s separate from the animated series and it comes with its understanding that has to be undertaken,” Willingham told Rolling Stone. “Those are all things that we’ve been actively pursuing. But the concise way of saying it is that we are starting to come to the end of a long road that we’ve been undertaking for the last couple of years.”
While the specific details of these new projects remain shrouded in mystery, the cast has expressed their desire to explore different genres and storytelling styles. Nevertheless, they will leave behind an unforgettable impression on the entertainment world. Fans can watch all three seasons of The Legend of Vox Machina on Prime Video.