The cast of Critical Role explores big wins and tough decisions in Season 3 of Vox Machina

The third season of the animated series The legend of Vox Machina is now streaming in full and the Critical Role roleplaying team is ready to talk about it – without delving into spoilers yet.

At the annual Fantastic Fest film festival in Austin, Texas, Polygon sat down Legend of Vox Machina writer-producer Travis Willingham (the voice of goliath barbarian Grog Strongjaw) and writers Marisha Ray (half-elf druid Keyleth) and Liam O’Brien (multi-class elf Vax’ildan) to share their personal “reigns” and wins from The legend of Vox Machina season 3 – and consider how their approach to the show has changed over three seasons of growing involvement and growing trust.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Polygon: By the time you started making Season 3 Legend of Vox MachinaHow had the process or your level of input changed to ensure the show did justice to your characters?

Marisha Ray: We’re deep, deep in the weeds – especially Travis and Sam Riegel, who are leading the charge every step of the way. The rest of us have complete control over our character voices. A lot of times we go into the writers’ room – we start each season with something like: These are the moments it would be a dream to hitwith the acknowledgment that we may not get there, but we try to honor as much of the campaign as possible.

I do feel like it has become smoother, in the sense that the wheels are now greased. It’s much more seamless. The writers we work with, as well as the artists, get to know these characters as well as we do. So I think the process has become much more of a well-oiled machine.

Liam O’Brien: I think Sam and Travis especially now have layers and layers of experience, so nothing is throwing them away. (To Travis) Well, I don’t know if things confused you, but you just have so much experience with it now that it’s that well-oiled machine Marisha talked about. Marisha and I joined as writers on the show, so we just got more involved in that way. (Marisha and Travis applaud softly)

Travis Willingham: (Whispers) Golf clap. Golf clap.

O’Brien: And we have looked for ways that you will find in this current season. After the Vox Machina campaign ended on our channel, we continued telling stories, and the world and history only evolved outward and became more compact. And we enjoyed finding little elements from other places to enrich the Vox Machina story. That history exists, so it makes sense that it would be in (the show).

Willingham: Yeah, I think in Seasons 1 and 2 we were trying to figure out how to squeeze 25+ hours of gameplay into six hours, and we’ve now figured that out. So that’s good. And the cast – they’re planted in the writers’ room like snipers. It’s great to see them listen to ideas being thrown out, storyline changes being entertained, and then immediately coming up with dialogue and other ideas. (It’s amazing) just watching the creativity sparking around the room.

But like 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 determine 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 canonical representation of the livestream. And now we’re trying to unsettle our audience a little bit, by keeping them guessing where it’s going.

Can any of you think of something you cut? Have you pointed to a change or a line of dialogue and said, “Oh, I don’t think my character would do or say that”?

(All three emphatically overlapping: “Oh yes / yes / certainly”)

Willingham: All the time. All the time. I would say that everyone is so in tune with their character that as we explore these things, it can be as small as a dialogue adjustment or change. Taliesin Jaffe is probably one of the best at making his lyrics as Percival de Rolo as possible. But we also give arc notes, emotional comments, we ask questions, give suggestions. We sometimes give action suggestions: “My character wouldn’t fight so close, they would want to stay further away.” “Don’t forget this thing I used a lot in the game.” All kinds of things.

Ray: Yeah, I think we’re in a very unique situation – and the writers will tell you the same thing. It’s not often that when 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 there was probably a little bit of nerves at first among some of the writers, like 🙁long, nervous moans) I don’t want to screw this up. How much freedom do I have? There was a learning curve for us, too: knowing that some things that were very nuanced, or that took an incredible amount of time to develop in the campaign, had to be incorporated into one act of an episode.

Willingham: And now (the writers are) just disrespectful. They don’t care what we think!

O’Brien: It was a learning curve. I remember thinking early on in the process of creating the animated shows: Nnnnn! I hold my baby so tight! But at this point it’s proven, and the core and essence of the story is so beautifully developed that I think we could all relax into it. On the other hand, as far as the writers are concerned, I remember several times when writers other than us said, “It’s so great to…” Well, in the beginning it was, Oh my God, the creators are here. When you’re writing Snow Whitenormally you don’t have Snow White in the room saying, “That’s not what I would do.” So it’s like having a creative Clippy in the room that you can listen to or…

Willingham: or “Shut up!”

Ray: That (reference is) so 2005 from you.

“It looks like you’re trying to write a romance between these two characters!”

O’Brien: “Have you considered dying instead?”

In the spirit of killing your darlings, is there anything your character did in the campaign that you were sad to lose in the adaptation?

Willingham: We haven’t talked about it yet, and I don’t know if we will, but – Grog’s bag of belongings from the campaign at this point had accumulated a grotesque number of body parts. There were orc limbs, there were all kinds of monster appendages and entrails, various rocks for no reason, pieces of armor. And you know, it’s not refrigerated there. So things would come out as, as Matthew Mercer likes to say, a slaw. We never found the right time to make that bag as disgusting as it could have been. It’s just a 35 liter bucket of mussel soup.

O’Brien: Because things are so compressed, there have been a lot of guest players at our table over the years that we haven’t found a way for (to get on the show). For example, Felicia Day as Lyra the Wizard stands out in my memory. We’ve attracted some of those people, but there just isn’t a lot of real estate, so we’ve had to be frugal with everything.

Ray: Yeah, that’s probably the biggest tragedy. Same with NPCs. You can’t always fit them all. Sometimes we try to combine NPCs, or even moments. We didn’t discuss anything with the Trickfoots and Pike, and how they came from nowhere and weren’t great people. So there are things like that. Maybe we’ll see if we can honor it along the way. There are even rules – I was talking about this recently with one of our writers. There are a few lines, especially about things Taliesin had said in the game, where you’re like, “We’ve got to get that in.” And sometimes even with individual one-liners you think: ‘But How?” (Everyone laughs) ‘It’s not relevant!” Still you try to find it.

O’Brien: Sometimes we’re trying to capture something that took a few episodes or games to get through, and it’s just one frame of animation. I’m just trying to give it a nod.

What’s the downside of that? What did your character win this season that you were excited about?

Ray: I mean, I think the great thing about what we do is that you can show a lot of perspectives or things that may have happened that we didn’t really portray in the game. There was a time in the first campaign where we kind of took a year-long break from the game, where the characters went out, did different things, fulfilled some personal drives that they had, and we get to see that. So with Keyleth you get to see her journey to Earth Ashari, and go through her Earth Ashari trials.

That was something in the campaign that we just went to: This happened! Now she can turn into an earth elemental! Isn’t that cool? So I think when you’re playing Dungeons & Dragons and you level up, you often pick a spell from a book and write it down, and then you think: I can just do that now. But the show allows us to explore how those characters gain those skills and grow. I think that’s always fun.

O’Brien: I just love Vax’s continued evolution in his relationship with the Matron of Ravens, and where he ends the season, where it’s less of a cat being dragged kicking and screaming into a bathtub, which was kind of a season 2 for him, and more are coming. agree.

Willingham: What I love isn’t necessarily for Grog. But for Pike Trickfoot, Ashley Johnson wasn’t around as much (in season 2) because of her taping at a show in New York. And so she was constantly in and out, missing parts of the storyline. That’s why we took the opportunity to expand on her storyline (in Season 3) and really involve her more in the way Season 3 develops. In the coming seasons we’ll really dress her up for a bit more meaty bone to chew on. And she’s such a force of nature that Ashley will always be a lot of fun to watch. So I think that’s what I like the most.

O’Brien: I will also say that what I love about season 3 is the progression of the romantic threads, where they go, how they relate to each other. Where they end up in this campaign is pretty incredible.