The third season of the animated series The Legend of Vox Machina is now streaming in full, and the Critical Role RPG team is ready to talk about it – without getting into spoilers just yet.
At the annual Fantastic Fest film festival in Austin, Texas, Polygon was at the table Legend of Vox Machina Writer-producer Travis Willingham (voice of Goliath barbarian Grog Strongjaw) and writers Marisha Ray (half-elf druid Keyleth) and Liam O’Brien (multiclass elf Vax’ildan) unpack their personal “remorse” and wins The Legend of Vox Machina Season 3 – and consider how her approach to the show has changed over three seasons as her commitment and confidence grew.
This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
Image: Prime Video
Polygon: When you started production on Season 3 Legend of Vox MachinaHow has the process or your input level changed to make sure the show gets your characters right?
Marisha Ray: We’re in deep trouble – especially Travis and Sam Riegel, who take the lead every step of the way. The rest of us have full control over our characters’ voices. We often go into the writers’ room – we start every season with the thought: It would be a dream to experience these momentswith the acknowledgment that we may not be able to do it, but we are trying to honor as much of the campaign as possible.
I feel like it’s calmed down in the sense that the wheels are now greased. It’s much more seamless. The writers we work with and the artists get to know these characters just as deeply as we do. So I think the process has become much more of a well-oiled machine.
Liam O’Brien: I think that Sam and Travis in particular have a lot of experience now, so nothing can upset them. [To Travis] Well, I don’t know if things threw you off – but you just have so much experience with it now that it’s the well-oiled machine that Marisha was talking about. Marisha and I joined the show as writers, so we became even more involved that way. [Marisha and Travis applaud lightly]
Travis Willingham: [Whispers] Golf clapping. Golf clapping.
Image: Prime Video
O’Brien: And we looked for ways that you’ll find in this current season – after the Vox Machina campaign ended on our channel, we continued to tell stories, and the world and the story expanded and became more dense. And we enjoyed finding little elements from other places to enrich the story of Vox Machina. This story exists, so it makes sense for her to be included [the show].
Willingham: Yes, I think in Seasons 1 and 2 we were trying to figure out how we could condense 25+ hours of gameplay down to six hours, and we’ve figured that out now. So that’s good. And the cast – they’re housed like snipers in the writers’ room. It’s great to see how they listen to ideas that are thrown out, plot changes that are considered, and then come up with dialogue and other ideas on the fly. [It’s great] I just watch how creativity sparkles back and forth in the room.
But as Liam said, I think the most interesting thing about Season 3 is that we’re starting to bring in other things from different parts of the universe to really explore where the new version of the story can go. I think Seasons 1 and 2 were about delivering the Briarwood arc and setting up the Chroma Conclave arc in a way that was very close to the canon depiction from the livestream. And now we’re trying to unsettle our audience a little and keep them guessing about where things are going.
Can any of you think of something you’ve grabbed? Did you point out a change or a line of dialogue and say, “Oh, I don’t think my character would do or say that”?
[All three, overlapping emphatically: “Oh yes / yeah / definitely”]
Willingham: All the time. All the time. I would say everyone is so immersed in their character that exploring those things can just be about small adjustments or changes to the dialogue. Taliesin Jaffe is probably one of the best at making his text as Percival de Rolo as possible. But we also give sheet notes, emotional notes, we ask questions, give suggestions. We sometimes give suggestions for action: “My character wouldn’t fight so close, he’d rather stay further away.” “Don’t forget this thing I used a lot in the game.” Anything.
Ray: Yes, I think we are in a very unique situation – and the authors will tell you the same thing. It’s not often that when you’re working on an adaptation you get not only the executive producers and creators of the story in the room, but also the people who created the characters.
I think at the beginning some of the writers were probably a little nervous, and they said: [long, nervous groan] I don’t want to screw this up. How much freedom do I have? There was also a learning curve for us to know that some things that were very nuanced or took an incredibly long time to develop in the campaign, you have to somehow capture them in one act of an episode.
Willingham: And now [the writers are] simply disrespectful. They don’t care what we think!
O’Brien: It was a learning curve. I remember at the beginning of the production of the animated series Nnnnng! I’m holding my baby so tight! But at this point it’s proven, and the core and essence of the story is so beautifully crafted that I think we could all relax into it. On the other hand, I remember the authors who, besides us, often said: “It’s so great …” Well, at first it was like this: Oh my God, the creators are here. When you write Snow WhiteNormally Snow White isn’t in the room saying, “I wouldn’t do that.” So it’s like having a creative Clippy in the room that you can either listen to or –
Willingham: Or “Shut up!”
Ray: The [reference is] so 2005 from you.
“They seem to be trying to write a romance between these two characters!”
O’Brien: “Have you thought about dying instead?”
In the spirit of “kill your favorites,” is there anything your character did in the campaign that you unfortunately lost in the adaptation?
Willingham: We haven’t addressed it, and I don’t know if we will, but – Grog’s bag of campaign supplies had accumulated a grotesque number of body parts at this point. There were orc limbs, there were all sorts of limbs and entrails of monsters, various stones for no reason, pieces of armor. And, you know, it’s not refrigerated there. So the result would be, as Matthew Mercer likes to say, a coleslaw. We never found the right moment to make this bag as disgusting as it could have been. It’s just an 80 gallon bucket of clam chowder.
O’Brien: Because things are so condensed, there have been a lot of guest players at our table over the years that we haven’t found a way for [to get onto the show]. I particularly remember Felicia Day as Lyra, the sorceress. We hired some of these people, but there just isn’t a lot of real estate, so we had to be frugal with everything.
Ray: Yes, that is probably the biggest tragedy. The same applies to NPCs. You can’t always accommodate everyone. Sometimes we try to combine NPCs or even moments. We haven’t gotten into the Trickfoots and Pike yet and how they kind of came out of nowhere and weren’t great people. So there are things like that. Maybe we’ll see if we can appreciate it later. There are even lines – I was just talking to one of our writers about this the other day. There are a few lines, particularly about things Taliesin said in the game, where you’re like, “We’ve got to get that in there.” And even with individual one-liners, sometimes you’re like, “But How?” [Everyone laughs] “That’s not it relevant!” However, they try to find it.
O’Brien: Sometimes we’re trying to capture something that took us a few episodes or games to capture and it’s just a single frame of animation. I’m just trying to agree with that.
Image: Prime Video
What is the downside of this? What did your character win this season that you were looking forward to?
Ray: I mean, the beauty of what we do is that you can show a lot of perspectives or things that might have happened that we didn’t really do in the game. There was a period in the first campaign where we sort of took a year-long break in the game where the characters went off and did other things and achieved some personal goals that they had, and we can see that. So with Keyleth you can see her journey to the Earth Ashari and pass her trials in the Earth Ashari.
That was something in the campaign that we just did, That’s what happened! Now she can transform into an Earth Elemental! Isn’t that cool? So I think you can flesh it out – when you’re playing Dungeons & Dragons and leveling up, it’s often a matter of picking a spell from a book and writing it down, and you think to yourself: I can just do this now. But the series allows us to explore how these characters gain these abilities and grow. I think that’s always fun.
O’Brien: I just like the continued development of Vax in his relationship with the Matron of Ravens and the way he ends the season less about a cat being dragged into a bathtub kicking and screaming, which was something like season 2 for him, but more about how to deal with it next.
Willingham: What I love isn’t necessarily for grog. But Ashley Johnson wasn’t around for Pike Trickfoot very often [in season 2] because of her filming a show in New York. And so she was constantly on the go and missed parts of the action. So we took the opportunity to add to her storyline [in season 3] and really involve them more in the way Season 3 unfolds. In the coming seasons we’re going to feed her up really well so she has a little more meat to chew. And she’s such a force of nature that it’s always going to be really fun to watch her take on Ashley. I think that’s what I like best.
O’Brien: I would also like to mention that what I love about Season 3 is the progression of the romantic storylines, where they go and how they relate to each other. Where they end up in this campaign is pretty incredible.
