The Legend of Vox Machina


The Legend of Vox Machina is an American adult animated fantasy television series produced by Metapigeon, Titmouse, Inc., and Amazon MGM Studios, which premiered on Amazon Prime Video on January 28, 2022. The series is based on the first campaign of the Dungeons & Dragons web series Critical Role. It stars Laura Bailey, Taliesin Jaffe, Ashley Johnson, Matthew Mercer, Liam O'Brien, Marisha Ray, Sam Riegel, and Travis Willingham, reprising their roles from the campaign.
The first season consists of twelve episodes, the first ten of which were funded via a Kickstarter campaign. In November 2019, ahead of the series premiere, it was renewed by Amazon for a second season which premiered on January 20, 2023. In October 2022, ahead of season two's premiere, Amazon renewed the series for a third season, which premiered on October 3, 2024. It was renewed for a fourth season the same month. In July 2025, Amazon announced that the fourth season is scheduled to premiere in 2026; they also announced that the show was renewed for a fifth and final season.
The series received widespread acclaim from critics and audiences, with praise for its animation, humor, voice acting, action sequences, writing, and faithfulness to the original game campaign. A spin-off series set twenty years later, The Mighty Nein, premiered on November 19, 2025 and adapts the second campaign.

Premise

Setting

The series is set on Exandria, a fictional world created by Matthew Mercer in 2012 for his personal Dungeons & Dragons campaign, which then launched as the actual play web series Critical Role in 2015. Most of the story takes place on the continent of Tal'Dorei in locations such as the metropolis of Emon and the city-state of Whitestone.

Synopsis

The first two episodes of the series depict "an all-new story about the seven-member Vox Machina team at D&D Level 7 on their first 'grown-up' mission, which occurs prior to Critical Role's first RPG show". The series then adapts the Briarwood arc from the original web series, "in which the Vox Machina crew avenge the murder of the rulers of the town of Whitestone and most of their offspring by the evil Lord and Lady Briarwood". In the second and third season the series also adapts "other classic Vox Machina story arcs", such as the Chroma Conclave arc.

Cast and characters

The members of Vox Machina are the following seven characters :
  • Laura Bailey as Vex'ahlia "Vex" Vessar, a half-elf ranger and the twin sister of Vax'ildan. Their mother was killed by a dragon before the events of the series, so Vex has studied dragons in the hope of eventually finding the one responsible; she feels a pain in her head whenever a dragon is close by.
  • Taliesin Jaffe as Percival "Percy" Fredrickstein von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III, a human gunslinger whose family were once the rulers of Whitestone, a city-state within Tal'Dorei. He barely escaped alive from a coup d'état led by the Briarwoods, and during the first season he sought vengeance for the murder of his family. Jaffe also voices Percy's father Lord Frederick de Rolo.
  • Ashley Johnson as Pike Trickfoot, a gnome cleric of the goddess Everlight who initially struggles to harmonize her faith with her love of violence and other vices.
  • Matthew Mercer as Trinket, a grizzly bear who serves as Vex's pet and companion. Mercer also voices the vampire Lord Sylas Briarwood, the shadow demon Orthax, the black dragon Umbrasyl, and various other background characters throughout the series. A character based on Mercer's likeness appears in every episode of the show as an easter egg.
  • Liam O'Brien as Vax'ildan "Vax" Vessar, a half-elf rogue and the twin brother of Vex'ahlia, the two being very protective of each other. O'Brien also voices the white dragon Vorugal.
  • Marisha Ray as Keyleth of the Air Ashari, a half-elf druid. She is currently undergoing her Aramenté – a quest which acts as the Ashari trial of leadership.
  • Sam Riegel as Scanlan Shorthalt, a gnome bard and raunchy hedonist whose most frequently useful spell is a giant purple floating hand.
  • Travis Willingham as Grog Strongjaw, a goliath barbarian and the best friend of Pike, known for his incredible might and slow wit.

    Episodes

Development

Background

As part of a sponsorship deal between Critical Role and D&D Beyond in 2018, an animated ad spot for the platform was produced which featured the Mighty Nein characters in combat. The advertisement, which was animated by Kamille and Kevin Areopagita, "opened doors" for The Legend of Vox Machina to be produced.

Kickstarter

On March 4, 2019, the Critical Role cast launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for a 22-minute animation called Critical Role: The Legend of Vox Machina Animated Special. The animated story was to be set just before the streaming portion of the campaign started—when the players were around level seven—during a time when, canonically, there is an in-game period of roughly six months when the members of Vox Machina were not all together at the same time. The cast projected a cost of US$750,000 for a single 22-minute animated short, fulfilling the other campaign rewards, and the fees associated with a crowdfunding campaign. Not knowing how long this would take to raise, the campaign length was set at 45 days.
Within an hour of launch, the Kickstarter had reached more than $1,000,000. At the end of the first full day, all of the announced stretch goals had been unlocked, and the total had reached more than $4.3 million. With four 22-minute episodes funded in the first 24 hours, additional stretch goals were added, expanding the project into an animated series. The first two episodes would cover the pre-stream story arc. The subsequent episodes would adapt the Briarwoods' arc, also from the Vox Machina campaign. By March 18, 2019, eight 22-minute episodes had been funded. Finally, on April 4, 2019, the last published stretch goal of $8.8 million was reached during the airing of episode 57 of campaign two, pushing the total length of the animated series to ten episodes. A "secret" $10M stretch goal of Willingham being filmed going around a haunted house was reached April 16. The final total raised by the Kickstarter when it closed on April 19, 2019, was $11,385,449 with 88,887 backers. When the campaign closed, it was one of the most quickly funded in Kickstarter history, and was the most funded Kickstarter for TV and film projects.
A number of the Kickstarter tiers offered production credits. Backers at the $2,500 and higher tiers were given a "crowd funding associate producer" credit in the end credits of the first ten episodes of season one. Those who pledged more than $20,000 were listed as "crowd funding executive producer" on those episodes.

Production

The Critical Role cast reprise their respective Vox Machina roles, with the exception of Orion Acaba. The animated series was written by Jennifer Muro and others with Brandon Auman as the showrunner; the series was animated by Titmouse, Inc with character design by Phil Bourassa and other animation renderings by South Korea's Production Reve. Willingham told Inverse that "it took outsider perspectives to make the stories they told in tabletop comprehensible for newcomers and fresh for existing fans"; Willingham said that "the Briarwood Arc was around 35 hours. We had to squish that down into about six". The music for the series was primarily composed by Neal Acree, with Sam Riegel and Mr. Fantastic contributing to Scanlan's songs.
In November 2019, Amazon Studios announced that they had acquired the streaming rights to The Legend of Vox Machina, and had commissioned 14 additional episodes. The cast went with Amazon as it "gave them the most freedom" in developing the show such as keeping it as an adult animation project. Ray, in an interview with Polygon, said "we lucked out with Amazon. There were other potential distributors that we were talking about that were more interested in making it maybe a children's show, or wanting to go a different direction, or more serious political fantasy, a la Game of Thrones". The project was originally slated for release in late 2020; however, in June 2020, it was announced that the debut would be missed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The release was delayed to 2022.
The show was renewed for a third season before the season two premiere. Riegel stated that while pitching the series, the team felt that the show could comprise five seasons and had always intended for five seasons.

Changes from the campaign

Cori McCreery, for WWAC in 2019, highlighted that Orion Acaba and his character Tiberius would not appear in the animated series "despite his being present for some" of the original adventures since "the Critical Role team had a falling out with" Acaba which led to the actor and his character "leaving the game pretty early on into the stream". McCreery wrote that "part of the beauty of adaptations is that you can change things that no longer fit the story you want to tell". On adapting hundreds of hours of a live streamed actual play, Riegel explained that "Vox Machina as a group" was altered the most. He noted that during the third season, the party goes "to different places in different orders" and split up and "reunite in different ways" so "the whole linear arc of the season differs from the campaign a lot". Ashley Johnson highlighted that they were able to weave her character Pike into the adaptation in places where her character did not appear in the original campaign due to Johnson's scheduling conflicts when filming Blindspot.
Mercer commented that "hindsight" and the expansion of Exandria's history since the original campaign allows them to incorporate later developed aspects of the lore at earlier moments in the animated adaptation. Petrana Radulovic of Polygon highlighted the "impactful" inclusion of Zerxus Ilerez, played by Luis Carazo, who was originally created for Exandria Unlimited: Calamity – in the canon, the Calamity occurs "centuries before the events of The Legend of Vox Machina", however, Zerxus as a character "didn't even exist till five years after the original Vox Machina campaign ended, so the entire interaction with Pike is new to the show". Radulovic noted that "the current story can now more directly seed in bigger world-building and overarching plots that will come into play down the line" since it can take the original "unscripted moments" and turn them into "more deliberate foreshadowing". Harvey Randall of PC Gamer noted that The Legend of Vox Machina "hasn't been a stranger to narrative departures from its source material, obviously, but those changes have mostly been in the service of efficiency" until the third season which featured more impactful narrative changes.