The folks at Critical Role talk about the new season of their hit adult fantasy adventure mayhem-fest of a series, from gigantic vortexes of dead bodies to a great Hell beast – ice dragon battle, mixed with a bit of romance; now streaming on Prime Video.
Critical Role’s ‘The Legend of Vox Machina’ Season 3 now streaming on Prime Video. All images © Amazon Content Services LLC.
Season 2 of The Legend of Vox Machina kicked off with what Matthew Mercer recalls as one of his proudest narrative moments in the Critical Role Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Everything the Vox Machina team had worked so hard to establish came crashing down, literally, as Mercer narrated – and Titmouse would later animate – a horde of dragons, the Chroma Conclave, demolishing the city of Emon and a good chunk of the citizenship along with it.
And, in Season 3, which debuted yesterday on Prime Video, October 3, Mercer isn’t done shocking audiences. From gigantic vortexes of dead, wailing bodies to a kaiju battle between a Hell beast and ice dragon, there’s no shortage of explosive action in the latest season of Critical Role’s animated fantasy adventure series.
To get a small taste of the mayhem, check out the Season 3 trailer:
“The way I envisioned the monster fight when it was happening in the campaign was so dynamic, but we're staring at a table of plastic painted miniatures describing it with our imaginations,” remembers Mercer when asked about the Season 3 episode where a monster from the depths of Exandria’s Hell hole and Chroma Conclave member Vorugal, the Frigid Doom duke it out, ripping each other apart from tongue to tails. “To take that to Titmouse and to their wonderful storyboard artists and animation designers and animators and bring it to life on a scale that is even more epic than I could even remember in my imagination is so freaking cool. I'm really proud of it.”
In the latest chapter of the series’ band of misfits’ attempt to save Tal’Dorei and all Exandria, the Chroma Conclave’s path of destruction spreads like wildfire while the Cinder King hunts down any who stand in the way of his rise to power. To save their loved ones, Vox Machina’s seven unlikely heroes – Half-elf ranger twins Vex (Laura Bailey) and Vax (Liam O’Brien), gunslinger Percy (Taliesin Jaffe), barbarian Grog (Travis Willingham), gnomes Scanlan (Sam Riegel) and Pike (Ashley Johnson), and half-elf druid Keyleth – must rise above each of their inner (and outer) demons. And if that means pitting two monsters against each other in hopes each destroys the other, then so be it.
“I seem to recall there was actual gold on the table,” notes Jaffe, thinking back to the monsters’ face-off in the tabletop campaign, where he and his fellow Critical Role founders and Vox Machina executive producers – Bailey, O’Brien, Willingham, Riegel, Johnson and Mercer – were taking bets on which monster, if any, might come out on top.
Bailey, talking about the Hell monster, adds, “We intentionally pulled him through a gate in the actual game in hopes that it would turn into this big battle. Any time we're fighting something that's larger than life, we're trying to figure out ways to overcome it.”
Willingham and Riegel were responsible for guiding Titmouse, and all those who helped set the visual design, through the animation process of scenes like this one. Mercer says they all “knocked it out of the park.”
“Titmouse has incredible ideas and the episodic director of that episode, Young Heller, is a big wrestling fan, so he pitched a bunch of pro wrestling moves,” notes Reigel. “At first, we didn’t know if we could achieve that with computer generated characters. The monsters are CG while all the main Vox Machina characters are still hand-drawn. But it worked out so great, and the art team figured out the technical challenges. It was a lot of fun to look at drawings of wrestling moves for a week.”
Willingham adds, “Young Heller is a beast when it comes to action. His fight choreography is second to none. And, as we were going through the scene in the rough boards, we saw the Hell creature, Stone Cold Stunner Vorugal the ice dragon.”
The Stone Cold stunner, as popularized by WWE pro wrestler Steve Austin, involves an attacking wrestler applying a three-quarter face lock (reaching back and grabbing the head of an opponent, pulling the opponent's jaw above the wrestler's shoulder) before falling to a seated position and forcing the opponent's jaw (but predominantly the opponent's neck) to drop down on the shoulder of the attacking wrestler. Another WWE fighter, Kevin Owens, has also used this variation as a finisher.
“I looked at Young and was like, ‘Did you throw in a Stunner?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, fam. What are we doing if we're not throwing in some wrestling moves?’” remembers Willingham. “And, sure enough, we kept it. Because why the hell not?”
Meanwhile, back in Exandria’s Hellscape, there was another epic scene to perfect.
“In the scripts, we just wrote, ‘Vox Machina sees a tornado of souls,’” says Riegel. “To visualize that and then be able to execute it takes a lot of technical know-how and Titmouse art director Arthur Loftis painstakingly made that whirlwind of souls, and it came out so, so good. It must have taken them days, and hours and hours within those days.”
Amidst the blood-curdling screams, arms being torn off and eaten, faces decaying at rapid rates, and bodies being absorbed into trees, there is, naturally, a swirling mass of distressed souls at the center of Hell. What fortress of endless despair would be complete without that?
“We had multiple art sessions to nail down the specific design of Hell,” says Mercer. “We were bringing in all these different influences and artists who we're all fans of that influenced our interpretations of what that could look like.”
Vox Machina showrunner, Brandon Ahman, was instrumental in how the team approached the look of this Hell. Ahman was inspired by Hans Ruedi Giger, a Swiss artist best known for his airbrushed images that blended human physiques with machines. It’s an art style known as "biomechanical.”
“The visual medium is one that we want to push to its limit,” says Willingham. “When we went to Annecy, some of us got to see Geiger’s work at the HR Giger Museum in Switzerland. That, along with Arthur Loftis’ work, was just absolutely delicious. It’s horrific and disgusting, but you can't look away. You don't want to miss something that they're running by or something that’s growing where it shouldn’t be growing.”
Mercer adds, “We were riffing on architecture, on creature designs, on color schemes, mood, then the post layer of haze and glow and all these different facets that come together to make this one beautiful moving picture. There were so many different layers that went into creating that and contributed to what that eventual design was, and it was amazing to watch it all come together.”
Along with the layers upon layers of visuals, the narrative is also many sheets thick, though one concept kept action fatigue from overwhelming the latest season.
“Balance,” notes Bailey. “We have these huge battles but, conversely, we have these very intimate moments happening throughout the season. And that's a great way to keep our audience from getting exhausted with either one. Those action scenes and battles are important, but they come at an emotional cost. It is rewarding to explore that.”
The new season tackles Percy and Vex’s complicated romance, and Scanlon’s clumsy but sincere exploration into fatherhood, as well as Pike’s tangible anxiety as a pure soul wandering through the most grotesque places one could imagine.
“Tabletop versus animation was very different for all that,” notes Johnson, referring to her character’s time in the underworld. “I didn’t get much time at the table during that part of the campaign because I was working in New York at the time, and how we acquired that particular vestige was a little different. But we wanted to explore something a little more weighty in the animation. Pike going into hell couldn't be a further place from where she would want to be. And so being able to deal with that conflict is so good and juicy.”
And Ray’s Keyleth and O’Brien’s Vax are not exempt from the juice as Vax struggles with his own resolve when it comes to striking up a romance with the red-headed druid.
“We’re best friends telling heart-felt stories together,” says O’Brien. “As performers and actors, we relish the chance to dig into red meat like that and have our characters climb through broken glass.”
It’s that chance the group didn’t experience to the same extent in their tabletop campaign.
“The table campaign had a very different duality between Vex and Percy’s relationship and Vax and Keyleth’s relationship,” explains Ray. “It definitely feels like we hold a mirror up to that this season.”
O’Brien and Ray agree that being able to bounce back and forth between action, amusement, and emotional anguish is one of the strengths of the show. That, and the fact that nothing comes easy. Every victory, every triumph, is earned.
“We have multiple layers of narrative, all weaving into each other between grandiose, world-shattering stakes and very deep interpersonal conflict and emotions and romance and concern,” shares Mercer. “Part of what we think made our original campaign so fulfilling for us, and for the audience who found us, is we can jump back and forth between the two and treat each side of it with the same weight and respect. And we wanted to make sure the animated series definitely spotlighted all that we enjoyed as players and as creators of those moments. Titmouse and everyone at Amazon have been so supportive in letting us drive our emphasis on how important these things are to us and helping us see all that come to fruition in the final series.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
