Critical Role Signs First-Look Deal With Amazon, 'Mighty Nein' Animated Series Greenlit
Roleplaying Games are having a moment right now. We've got a very silly and fun-looking "Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves" movie on the horizon that seems to embrace all the absurdities and wild swings a typical campaign brings to basic stories of plundering and battle and then there are the folks at Critical Role who have long had a deal with Amazon that just got significantly better.
If you're not familiar with "Critical Role," it's a web series that has a fun group of people (including many well-known voice actors, like Ashley Johnson of "The Last of Us" fame and Sam Riegel who voiced Donatello in the 2003 "Ninja Turtles" series) gathering together to play out multi-year "Dungeons and Dragons" campaigns.
In January of 2022, Amazon released an animated adaptation of their first big campaign "The Legend of Vox Machina" and today we found out thanks to the good folks at Variety that Amazon is all-in with "Critical Role" and will be developing a new series based on another campaign they did called, "The Mighty Nein," which follows an adventuring party of ne'er-do-wells who become key to preventing a powerful ancient artifact from falling into the wrong hands and destroying the kingdom.
This is on top of the continuing seasons of "The Legend of Vox Machina," by the way. Season 2 of the series just debuted and a third season was recently announced at the New York Comic-Con.
The creative storytelling at the heart of RPGs is a natural fit for adaptation
For anybody that has ever played a Tabletop RPG like "D&D" before, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that whole storylines are being seen as rich fodder for film and TV producers. The way these games work is forced creativity. The players are given total freedom to make choices based on whatever traits they decide their characters are going to have and the DM sets them on a path where they can royally screw up or pull off miraculous successes based on strategy, smarts, and the luck of the dice roll.
Shows like "Critical Role," "The Adventure Zone," and "Nerd Poker" have all grown armies of loyal fans who are as hooked on following along with the adventure as the players themselves and Amazon seems to be the first studio to recognize there's a whole, untapped fanbase out there that will follow their favorite campaigns and characters away from web-series and podcasts to a more traditional venue like TV series.
I wouldn't be surprised if you see an uptick in streamers or even more traditional cable channels looking towards these actual play tabletop RPG shows. There's a whole wide world of creative storytelling going on out there and the fantasy "D&D" side of it is just the most visible at the moment. There are sci-fi, western, and horror RPG systems out there as well.
It's a good day for "Critical Role" fans and hopefully just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to future animated or live-action adaptations of these wild, raucous kinds of campaigns.