If you know Dungeons and Dragons, then you’re probably familiar with Critical Role. What started as voice actors playing a home game turned into a live stream, then a media phenomenon. Through multiple years-long campaigns and hundreds of four-hour episodes, the series has transformed improv gameplay into innovative fantasy storytelling.
In November 2019, the series evolved with an animated adaptation of its first campaign, The Legend of Vox Machina. The Amazon Prime Video animated series, which began as the most funded TV Kickstarter project ever, was recently renewed for a fifth and final season, but Critical Role isn’t stopping there. An adaptation of their second campaign, The Mighty Nein, is on the way, but its new trailer reveals a huge change from the original story. Check it out below:
The trailer notes the campaign’s most confusing element. The group is called The Mighty Nein, but there are only six members: Caleb Widogast (Liam O’Brien), Nott the Brave (Sam Riegel), Beauregard Lionett (Marisha Ray), Mollymauk Tealeaf (Taliesin Jaffe), Jester Lavorre (Laura Bailey), and Fjord Stone (Travis Willingham). But to long-time fans, the issue isn’t that there aren’t nine members, but that there aren’t seven.
Yasha Nydoorin, the soft-spoken barbarian played by Ashley Johnson, is missing from the group, only showing up in standalone shots. Johnson told Entertainment Weekly that Yasha is coming, just in a different way than fans are used to. “Our barbarian lady is gonna be in there,” she said. “We just want to honor her story a little bit more now that we have the time and the space to do it. I feel like now we finally get to tell the story that our soft barbarian lady deserves.”
Travis Willingham added that this new approach means we’ll see more of Yasha’s backstory. “There were a lot of things that happened to her before our livestream campaign started,” he said. “This is a really interesting chance to see some of those backstory elements affecting her in real time.”
Yasha’s role in the original story suffered due to Johnson’s travel commitments — she was busy filming NBC’s Blindspot at the time — so we’ll get to see a more deliberate version of her tale in animation. She may not appear in the trailer much, but what we have to look forward to with Yasha might be too juicy to reveal just yet. These animated series can do more than just introduce new viewers to this story in fewer than 550 hours; they can even reveal something new to hardcore fans.
