![]() They’re also struggling with their grim backstories, with that of bespectacled gunslinger Percy de Rolo (Taliesin Jaffe) taking center stage in the first handful of episodes. Vox Machina is the name of the eponymous group of mercs at the center of the show’s story, a down-on-their-luck crew of murder hobos whose immediate concerns include an astronomical bar tab and poor local reputation. (Nothing! Let it fly!) The Legend of Vox Machina takes the setting and characters from the Critical Role show, removes the inconvenience of dice, movement restrictions, and spell slot limitations, and turns it into a proudly R-rated cartoon. If, like me, you believe it should be less about overblown lore and more about the feeling of getting together with a bunch of your pals to mainline pizza and crack jokes while you collaborate on how to best the monsters in a friend’s bespoke adventure (that is peppered with references to whatever books or movies they’ve just watched), then The Legend of Vox Machina’s first six episodes available for review (out of 12) could serve as a proof of concept for that approach.Ĭritical Role is an “actual play” experience, a web show (or oftentimes a podcast) which gives the viewer a tableside seat as a group of people play through a tabletop roleplaying game, complete with all the nail biting over what to do when the group encounters a door, and delays when one of the participants needs to look up what you need to roll to use magic missile. ![]() I’ve pondered the challenges of adapting something like D&D to a film or TV format before. ![]() While the show doesn’t have any official connection with the game, Critical Role-the web show the characters and world are based on-is transparently grounded in the storytelling of the tabletop roleplaying game that game master Matt Mercer is running, and the characters his group of professional voice actor pals are portraying. It’s amid conversations exactly like these within the wider consumer and fan base of tabletop gaming that Amazon Prime Video’s The Legend of Vox Machina arrives, just as D&D’s corporate owners are also making moves to bring the property back to the big screen. (This is all a world away from the controversies the pastime contended with when it first came out.) That’s not how it is in real life, right?”ĭungeons & Dragons comes from a lot of things, some of them deeply problematic, and it has diverged from them so fundamentally in its nearly 50 years that the entire industry and the many people who enjoy the hobby are in the midst of reexamining basically everything about it. “It’s not a good thing to say all people of a certain culture are evil. One kid who seemed like he’d read a lot of the books and knew all sorts of stuff about the game’s decades of lore paused on the option to create a dark elf and acted confused, because they’re supposed to all be evil. This involved walking them through the hundreds of pages of character creation options, trying to figure out what they wanted to play, and why it probably shouldn’t be six paladins. Before the pandemic hosed it completely, I was running a Dungeons & Dragons game at a local game store aimed specifically at introducing tweens to the game.
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