Critical Role’s The Mighty Nein is on the horizon—and I’m quite excited. Based on the company’s second livestreamed campaign, I always figured the deeper complexities and political landscape of Wildemount would make for better TV.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Vox Machina as much as anybody—I was there, weeping my eyes out when Campaign 1 ended—but Campaign 2’s characters are, for lack of a better term, less “trope-y” than their predecessors. The story itself has some better dramatical stakes, too—the follies of corruption and empire, as opposed to ‘there are too many dragons’.
Not helping The Legend of Vox Machina much was the fact it wound up rushing some plotlines. For instance, the Briarwood arc—a compelling gothic horror gauntlet to liberate the vampire-ruined home of one Percival Fredrickstein von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III—was squeezed into a tight-fitting pair of season 1 jeans.
Things only got hastier with season 2, which saw like, five entire story arcs from the livestreamed campaign squished into a season of TV. And to be fair, I think they did a pretty solid job, but as confirmed by Critical Role CEO Travis Willingham in an interview with Polygon at New York Comic Con 2025, it wasn’t necessarily their first choice.
“The thing we learned from making Vox Machina was that we didn’t know, after the two-season order, if we were going to get anything after that. So, we really crammed a lot of stuff into season 2. I think our pace suffered a little bit for it in some places.”
Out of curiosity, I decided to check, and yep—season 2 of TLoVM crunches 16 episodes of the D&D livestream into 12 episodes of TV, though it also introduced a bunch of skipped-over plot points that were tackled in the absent Slayer’s Take arc from earlier in the live show.
Even with the comparatively breakneck pace taken by the animated series already (which is entirely understandable, every episode of Critical Role averages around 3-4 hours and there’s over a hundred of ’em) that’s quite the compression.
We know that The Mighty Nein, in contrast, will be starting with the offscreen sessions then-DM Matthew Mercer used to get the table comfortable with their characters. Willingham tells Polygon: “We’re throwing caution to the wind and taking our time more with these seasons. Hence, the ‘starting from a session zero’ perspective.”
That’s not to say there won’t be changes, though. Laura Bailey, who played Vex in Campaign 1 and Jester in Campaign 2, explains: “There’s not enough time to incorporate everything that happened in a three-year campaign of four to five-hour sessions.”
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though, as she explains: “You can make the scenes have more meaning because of the timing of them. And we still get those moments that we love. They might just happen in a different way.”
I’m inclined to agree, though I do think these departures have been hit-or-miss. In the middle of season 3, the story took some brutal departures that had me really excited. I shan’t repeat them here in case of spoilers, but you can go ahead and click that link if you want my full thoughts.
The season finale, though? I was far more lukewarm on it, especially since it skipped—and in one case, omitted—a lot of the smaller plot points that made the conclusion of the Chroma Conclave arc so compelling in Campaign 1. Here’s hoping a slower pace, unconcerned about the potential woes of season renewals, will do The Mighty Nein a great deal of good.
