The Cast of Critical Role Talks: ‘Vox Machina’ Rocks Socks, Season 2 Locks It All In
We had a chance to talk with the cast of The Legend of Vox Machina about Season 2 in all its glory. Here’s what they had to say!
In other, less on-fire gaming news, Critical Role’s massively successful animated series, The Legend of Vox Machina gears up for Season 2 tomorrow! By now you’ve seen the fearsome dragons of the Chroma Conclave.
You might even have seen how it’s not just thick thighs that save lives, but in fact, a juicy round mound can save you from the hard ground.
This is why so many are excited to see what else is in store for Season 2. Fortunately, we had a chance to talk with Critical Role themselves about what lies in store. Some of the challenges and secrets you want to keep an eye out for. What’s the most unfilmable arc? How challenging was it to capture the majesty of one of the most legendary live-play arcs? What’s the best boba? We found out!
BoLS Talks to Critical Role
At the heart of Season 2 is one of the more epic arcs in Critical Role’s first campaign. It kicks off with the Chroma Conclave, a group of four dragons (formerly five, but Vox Machina killed one before they could be a problem) that have banded together for their own nefarious ends.
And in the trailer above, you can see them as they attack the city of Emon. As it turns out, there have been some fairly tricky challenges bringing that part of the story to life. Here’s the cast weighing in on some of the challenges.
Sam Riegel:
The Chroma Conclave arc was tricky from a technical standpoint: those dragons are hard to animate—they’re big CG assets, and it takes a lot of computing power and animation tricks to get them to look great.
But from a story perspective, the world is so big and there’s so many characters to keep track of, it’s been challenging to drill down and figure out what are the moments that mean the most.
How do we make it seem as big, shocking, and horrific as it did to us at the table. And in the first episode, I think we hit it pretty hard.
Matt Mercer:
From my standpoint, some of the exciting challenges have been figuring out how to convey what we had in our imagination to these teams and watching how they do it justice. We’re very lucky that the teams we work with at TitMouse Animation and Studio Rev, have continuously said: “don’t worry we got you fam.” And knocked it out of the park.
It’s a challenge to say “we want it to be this epic, but we don’t want to destroy you.” And them going “how about if it’s this cool.” It’s always better than we’re expecting.
Bringing four dragons to the forefront to destroy an entire city is a huge ask. Especially to make it memorable and make it dangerous on a scale that really sets the tone for the next two seasons.
So I’m very grateful that we have good people who are not just passionate but super talented to take these ideas and make ’em fly.
Travis Willingham:
From a player perspective, the thing I remember most is going “oh no….oh no…OH NO” as it kept going on and realizing we had to get out of there.
And in that first episode, people are going to see that attack on Emon and if they feel that way, I’ll feel like mission accomplished.
Taliesin Jaffe
I feel like we’ve hit that right balance of drama, horror, action, and humor, occasionally comedy. It’s one of those things that any tabletop game you play—any time you get a group of people roleplaying together—feels like real life.
A lot of times when people talk about realistic fantasy it’s always grim and dark. I’ve never met anybody who is grim and dark all the time. People are funny and people are scared all the time.
And I feel like this story does it really well.
Liam O’Brien
We also have to cover a lot of geographical ground in the story, and when you have a finite amount of time for them to travel. So getting us from place to place while still keeping the story feeling grounded and connected to what our characters were going through was a big challenge. It took a lot of TLC.
Surprising Discoveries Abound
Even as they recalled their challenges and triumphs, the sheer delight was palpable. It’s clear that everyone on board is really proud of what they’ve managed to put together.
And it’s about as ascended as a D&D campaign can get. Going from a home game to being seen worldwide like never before. While that has its challenges, it also has its surprising discoveries. Which they happily shared with us:
Marisha Ray
I think being able to take some fun liberties with our story [led to some surprising discoveries].
A big part of roleplaying games is the little bit of dungeon crawling little bit of fights. But you don’t wanna spend twelve episodes searching for loot. Some of the adjustments we made involved trying to get one of the vestiges from a certain sphinx. In the campaign, it was a run-of-the-mill dungeon crawl, but for the show, we wanted to mix it up a little and take a different approach that serves the story better.
Ashley Johnson
There’s more singing. Not just Scanlan. That was not necessarily something at the table. For fun time, we’d sing little stuff, but [Vox Machina Season 2] levels up the songs in a big way.
Matt Mercer:
We get to have more Pike Trickfoot around!
Through the process of adapting it, what surprises us is finding the things that we don’t want to lose, moving them around so they still fit and pay homage to the campaign, but still facilitate the story and let us bring in guest characters and NPCs that we want to incorporate.
This medium allows us to kind of move things around and show perspectives that we couldn’t do at the table.
Taliesin Jaffe
We can have flashbacks! We can have cutaways to characters that aren’t us! We get to see what villains are talking about.
Sam Riegel
If we keep following the story, eventually it becomes cosmic, with gods and traveling to other dimensions and stuff. We get a little taste of that in Season 2. But as we keep going, we’re getting into cataclysmic cosmic battles.
[The end game of campaign 1] involves cities being carried on the backs of titans.
Travis Willingham
If we’re allowed to take the story to completion, that’s exactly what we wanna see. Maybe if we keep going, and people keep watching, we can go all the way. That’s the hope, that’s the dream!
‘The Legend of Vox Machina’ Season 2 premieres January 20th on Amazon Prime Video!
