The Critical Role cast explores big wins and hard decisions on Vox Machina season 3

The third season of the animated series The Legend of Vox Machina is now streaming in full, and the Critical Role role-playing team is ready to talk about it — without digging into spoilers just yet.

At the annual Fantastic Fest film festival in Austin, Texas, Polygon sat down at the table with Legend of Vox Machina writer-producer Travis Willingham (the voice of goliath barbarian Grog Strongjaw) and writers Marisha Ray (half-elf druid Keyleth), and Liam O’Brien (multiclass elf Vax’ildan) to unpack their personal “regerts” and wins from The Legend of Vox Machina season 3 — and consider how their approach to the show has changed over three seasons of growing involvement and growing confidence.

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

Polygon: By the time you started making season 3 of Legend of Vox Machina, how had the process or your level of input changed in terms of making sure the show got your characters right?

Marisha Ray: We are deeply, deeply in the weeds — especially Travis and Sam Riegel, leading the charge every step of the way. The rest of us have full control over our character voices. A lot of times, we’ll go into the writers room — we start every season being like, These are the moments that it would be a dream to hit, with acknowledgement that we might not get there, but trying to honor a lot from the campaign as much as possible.

I do feel like it’s gotten smoother, in the sense that the wheels are greased now. It’s much more seamless. The writers we work with, the artists as well, they’re getting to know these characters as deeply as we have. So I think the process has become a lot more of a well-oiled machine.

Liam O’Brien: I think that Sam and Travis especially have layers and layers of experience now doing it, so nothing throws them. [To Travis] Well, I don’t know if things threw you — but you just are so experienced with it now that it’s that well-oiled machine Marisha talked about. Marisha and I have joined the fold as writers on the show, so we’ve just gotten more involved in that way. [Marisha and Travis applaud lightly]

Travis Willingham: [Whispers] Golf clap. Golf clap.

O’Brien: And we’ve looked for ways which you’ll find in this current season — after the Vox Machina campaign ended on our channel, we continued to tell stories, and the world and history just ballooned outward and became more dense. And we’ve enjoyed finding little elements from other places to enrich the Vox Machina story. That history exists, so it makes sense that it would be in [the show].

Willingham: Yeah, I think in seasons 1 and 2, we were trying to figure out how we would squish 25-plus hours of gameplay down into six hours, and we’ve figured that out now. So that’s good. And the cast — they are planted in the writers room like snipers. It is great to see them listen to ideas that are being thrown out, storyline changes that are being entertained, and then coming up with dialogue on the fly and other ideas. [It’s great] just watching that creativity spark back and forth across the room.

But as Liam said, I think what’s most interesting about season 3 is that we’re starting to pull in other things from different parts of the universe, to really tee up where the new version of the story can go. I think season 1 and 2 were about delivering the Briarwood arc and setting up the Chroma Conclave arc in a way that was very close to faithful to the canonical representation from the livestream. And now we’re trying to unsettle our audience a little bit, trying to make ’em guess about where things are going.

Can any of you think of anything you sniped? Have you pointed at a change or a line of dialogue and said, “Oh, I don’t think my character would do that, or say that”?

[All three, overlapping emphatically: “Oh yes / yeah / definitely”]

Willingham: All the time. All the time. I would say everyone is so dialed into their characters that as we’re exploring these things — it can be as small as a dialogue tweak or change. Taliesin Jaffe is probably one of the best at making his lines be as Percival de Rolo as possible. But we’ll also give arc notes, emotional notes, we’ll ask questions, give suggestions. We give action suggestions, sometimes: “My character wouldn’t fight up close like this, they’d want to stay farther away.” “Don’t forget about this thing that I used a lot in the game.” All sorts of stuff.

Ray: Yeah, I think we’re in a very unique situation — and the writers will tell you the same thing. It’s not often when working on an adaptation that you get not only the executive producers and creators of the story in the room, but also the people who created the characters.

I think early on, there was probably a little bit of nerves from some of the writers on that, and being like, [long, nervous groan] I don’t want to mess this up. How much freedom do I have?? There was a learning curve for us as well, to know that some things that were very nuanced, or took an incredibly long amount of time to develop in the campaign, you kind of need to nail in one act of an episode.

Willingham: And now [the writers are] just irreverent. They don’t care what we think!

O’Brien: It was a learning curve. I remember early in the process of making the animated shows, going, Nnnnng! I’m holding my baby so tightly! But at this point, it’s proven, and the heart and the essence of the story is so beautifully wrought that I think all of us were able to relax into it. On the flip side, with the writers, I multiple times remember writers besides us saying, “It’s so great to have—” Well, at first it was, Oh my God, the creators are here. If you’re writing Snow White, you don’t typically have Snow White in the room going, “That’s not what I would do.” So it’s like having a creative Clippy in the room, which you can either listen to or—

Willingham: Or “Shut up!”

Ray: That [reference is] so 2005 of you.

“You seem to be trying to write a romance between these two characters!”

O’Brien: “Have you considered dying instead?”

In the spirit of killing your darlings, is there anything your character did in the campaign that you were sorry to lose in the adaptation?

Willingham: We haven’t touched on it, and I don’t know if we will, but — Grog’s bag of holding from the campaign at this point had accumulated a grotesque number of body parts. There were orc limbs, there were all sorts of monster appendages and guts, different rocks for no reason, pieces of armor. And, y’know, it’s not refrigerated in there. So things would come out in, as Matthew Mercer likes to say, a slaw. We never quite found the right moment to make that bag as disgusting as it possibly could have been. It’s just an 80-gallon bucket of clam chowder.

O’Brien: Because things are so condensed, there have been many guest players at our table over the years that we haven’t found a way [to get onto the show]. Like, Felicia Day as Lyra the wizard stands out in my memory. We’ve pulled in a few of those people, but there just is not a lot of real estate, so we’ve had to be economical with everything.

Ray: Yeah, that’s probably the biggest tragedy. Same with NPCs. You can’t always fit all of ’em. Sometimes we try to combine NPCs, or moments, even. We haven’t gone into anything with the Trickfoots with Pike, and how they kind of came out of nowhere, and were not great people. So there’s stuff like that. Maybe we’ll see if we can honor it down the road. There are even lines — I was actually just talking about this with one of our writers the other day. There are a few lines, especially of stuff that Taliesin had said in-game, where you’re like, “We’ve gotta get that in there.” And sometimes even with individual one-liners, you’re like, “But how?” [Everyone laughs] “It’s not relevant!” You try to find it, though.

O’Brien: Sometimes we try to capture something that took a couple of episodes or games to get through, and it’s just a single frame of animation. I’m just trying to give a nod to it.

What’s the flip side of that? What did your character gain in this season that you were excited about?

Ray: I mean, I think the beauty of what we’re doing is, you can show a lot of perspectives or things that might’ve happened that we didn’t really act out in the game. In campaign one, there was a time where we kind of took an in-game yearlong break where the characters went off, did other things, accomplished some personal drives that they had, and we get to see that. So with Keyleth, you get to see her journey to the Earth Ashari, and go through her Earth Ashari trials.

That was something in the campaign that we just kind of went, This happened! Now she can turn into an Earth elemental! Isn’t that cool? So I think being able to flesh out — when you’re playing Dungeons & Dragons and you level up, a lot of times, it’s picking a spell out of a book and writing it down and you’re like, I can just do that now. But the show allows us to explore how those characters get those abilities and grow. I think that’s always fun.

O’Brien: I just like Vax’s continuing evolution in his relationship with the Matron of Ravens, and where he ends the season, where it’s less of a cat being dragged kicking and screaming into a bathtub, which was kind of season 2 for him, and more coming to terms with it.

Willingham: The thing I love isn’t necessarily for Grog. But for Pike Trickfoot — Ashley Johnson wasn’t around very much [in season 2] because of her shooting on a show in New York. And so she was constantly in and out, and she would miss parts of the storyline. So we took an opportunity to pad her storyline [in season 3] and really bring her more into the way season 3 develops. In future seasons, we really tee her up nicely for a bit more of a meatier bone to chew. And she’s such a force of nature that putting the screws to Ashley is always going to be really fun to watch. So I think that’s the thing I like the most.

O’Brien: I’ll also toss in that what I love about season 3, is the progression of the romantic threads, where they go, how they relate to each other. Where they end in this campaign is pretty incredible.