The Legend of Vox Machina S1 (Amazon, 2022)

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shevek
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Went looking for something new-ish and interesting to watch, and ploughed through all 12 episodes of the first season today.

So, as Damselbinder says, if I got a little bit of "what I want" in Avatar 2 (although a lot less than he implied, since that movie wasn't worth its time),
it looks like I got a bit more in the casting of The Legend of Vox Machina animated series,
which is based on the first D&D campaign called the "Briarwood Arc" that the Critical Role cast did on their Geek & Sundry
channel on Twitch and Youtube.

The campaign group is called "Vox Machina" (although it's not fully explained why in this series) because it consists entirely of voice actors.
And the same voice actors portray each one of the campaign members in their animated forms, as well.
(except for Matthew Mercer, who plays several villainous characters instead of being a Dungeon Master)
You actually get to see the animated characters basically looking like they did in the live campaign (no swapping or flipping), and I assume that this
is because all the actors themselves are indicated as being producers of the show - they didn't have the top-down Amazon executives telling them
to change this and that.

If you're looking for sexiness, you won't find much - objectification is tamped down and although there's plenty of rated-R expletives and sexual innuendo, the references are very random and mainly directed towards some incidences of promiscuity, pansexuality, and dick jokes. That's just how writers often roll nowadays. Also, there are some references to how collectivism is preferred over the power of the individual, and some quirky messaging about gun control (if you use a gun, you are possessed by an insane evil demon of revenge, whereas killing people with swords and arrows and magic spells is somehow just fine). Plus the ruler of a kingdom cedes his power to a quasi-democratic "council", which seems a bit out of sorts with the setting of the tales. There's also a fair amount of dialogue that comes straight out of millennial speak.

Every character is well-developed and has a worthwhile backstory. My favorite is the elven Ashari girl known as Keyleth - she is charming and self-effacing, and her confidence grows over the course of the season. She's the one who is furthest to the right in the group shot below - she has a cute superheroine-esque costume that might be worth cosplaying. It will be interesting to see how her story develops further, as she is apparently on some kind of magical rumspringa to prove her worth to her tribe as a potential leader.
vox machina character lineup.jpg
vox machina character lineup.jpg (3.56 MiB) Viewed 848 times
I'm not an overall fan or player of D&D (haven't played a campaign since high school), so it's not often that I watch an RPG-themed fantasy show
like this one. But this was enjoyable enough. If you like D&D and well-constructed sword-and-sorcery, you might enjoy this - but make no mistake, this is not at all a kids show like the 1980s "Dungeons and Dragons" series. Vox Machina is more along the likes of a current adult animated series with lots of gory violence, like Primal or Invincible, but maybe with the goofiness of Ghostbusters.

Has anyone else checked this out yet?

Season 2 drops on January 20, 2023.
Last edited by shevek 1 year ago, edited 1 time in total.
Damselbinder

Okay this time I think you've made some more valid criticisms. The fact that this was based on a D&D campaign that was set up to be fun, entertaining and amusing to the people originally viewing obviously has bled into a lot of the tone of this show... but the show also seems to want to be taken semi-seriously as a fantasy series? If they took away the modernisms it wouldn't really feel like the 'source material' (the campaign), but given the show's other ambitions, it means it's a little at war with itself. But there are worse sins.
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Indeed. Having started following Critical Role from some point mid campaign 1 on the advice of a friend that it could give me some ideas for how to run my own campaigns, I can say with some degree of 'expertise' (if such a thing can be said about a thing like this) that the show does a fairly adequate job of capturing the tone of what it actually feels like to play a 'serious' D&D game in that no amount of severity of plot and narrative that you cook up will ever fully permeate the group at any one time. On occasion you can suck your players in enough that they're all wide eyed, invested and forget to hide their insecurities behind a torrent of quips and jokes... but the other 90% of your serious campaign is going to be permeated by the antics of your players whom, if you are very lucky to have a seriously invested player base, are only ever going to be working with you to a point, and who are going to consistently and near constantly devolve into hysterics until you (the DM) drag them back to the game.

The show is what it is, and I'd recommend anyone who wanted to give it a try, enter with the understanding that they are watching (for the first time) a D&D campaign brought to life... for the show to be anything else would not be true to where it comes from or the people its made fore...

in other words, the show is as serious and focused as its possible for it to be when its also pulling double duty acting as the first really good representation of what it actually FEELS like to sit down and play a TTRPG... if nothing else, you could just watch this show as a primer to paying TTRPG with some friends to figure out if it's something you even want to engage with... That's not to say its a perfect parallel, you'd be tricked into thinking combat in D&D is fast paced and swift in D&D when it's ANYTHING but, but still... with season 2 coming out the most I can say that the campaign grew a little more focused and serious as the game progressed and the players started to take the game much much more seriously as the plot arcs became steadily more dire. C1 at least does the best job of all the campaigns of actually boiling down to a primary villain and the 'quest' to stop them. C2 does a lot of things better, I think the characters of C2 were much better developed and defined, but the players were already PROS by this point and as such I feel they tended to just slaughter any attempt by the DM to build and seed a 'greater threat' over the course of the campaign.
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shevek
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Femina wrote:
1 year ago
The show is what it is, and I'd recommend anyone who wanted to give it a try, enter with the understanding that they are watching (for the first time) a D&D campaign brought to life... for the show to be anything else would not be true to where it comes from or the people its made fore...

... with season 2 coming out....
Right, but still it's heartening to see how true they've stayed to the show and the game considering what's been going on in the RPG scene for the past few years. [cough cough] WotC [cough cough]

Season 2 apparently drops tomorrow! So I'll be checking it out over the next couple weeks. I especially want to see how Keyleth's character develops - as she matures in the story, will there be glimmers of hotness and peril?
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Femina
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shevek wrote:
1 year ago
Femina wrote:
1 year ago
The show is what it is, and I'd recommend anyone who wanted to give it a try, enter with the understanding that they are watching (for the first time) a D&D campaign brought to life... for the show to be anything else would not be true to where it comes from or the people its made fore...

... with season 2 coming out....
Right, but still it's heartening to see how true they've stayed to the show and the game considering what's been going on in the RPG scene for the past few years. [cough cough] WotC [cough cough]

Season 2 apparently drops tomorrow! So I'll be checking it out over the next couple weeks. I especially want to see how Keyleth's character develops - as she matures in the story, will there be glimmers of hotness and peril?
It's really only the past like... two or three weeks that WotC has really been scheming to stick it up TTRPG players buts... and it looks like they're failing xD.

Keyleth's probably the single most important character of campaign 1 oddly enough, the actress got a LOT of undeserved flak from viewers about how she tended to play Keyleth and got a lot of outright HARRASMENT for it as if the way she played a character was who the actress was in real life or something. Luckily most of that sort of crap went away shortly into season 2 when it became crystal clear that all the players were very good at creating characters... and then sticking to those character traits and stuff... even more ironically, the sorts of character behaviors said folk typically found 'irksome' from Keyleth in the campaign are exactly the sorts of character traits that are kind of endearing in a tv show. Keyleth was always probably the most classically 'beautiful' and ladylike of the C1 crew as well.

As to hotness and peril...... eh? Hard to say? It always depends a bit on what actually gets adapted... a lot falls through the cracks as 'fluff' that just doesn't NEED adapting.............. a great example of something we surely WONT see in the cartoon, is the time they dropped an important relic off the side of a very tall cliff, Keyleth stroked her chin and went 'I could jump down there and get it?' the rest of the party said 'that's not a good idea?' and she went 'we're basically gods?' and jumped off the cliff promptly to her death when the animal she tried to transform into on the way down into the ocean was a goldfish... and required an emergency resurrection. Or the time that Vex, legendary for her treasure lust and greed, HAD to be the first to open a coffin with suspected treasure in it and was killed instantly by a death cloud trap, ALSO requiring emergency resurrection. xD when you're playing a game, this sort of thing happens a lot.

Hilarious antics... not gonna make the cut when you've got six hours to adapt hundreds of hours of a story arc.
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shevek
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Femina wrote:
1 year ago
It's really only the past like... two or three weeks that WotC has really been scheming to stick it up TTRPG players buts... and it looks like they're failing xD.

Keyleth's probably the single most important character of campaign 1 oddly enough, the actress got a LOT of undeserved flak from viewers about how she tended to play Keyleth and got a lot of outright HARRASMENT for it as if the way she played a character was who the actress was in real life or something. Luckily most of that sort of crap went away shortly into season 2 when it became crystal clear that all the players were very good at creating characters... and then sticking to those character traits and stuff... even more ironically, the sorts of character behaviors said folk typically found 'irksome' from Keyleth in the campaign are exactly the sorts of character traits that are kind of endearing in a tv show. Keyleth was always probably the most classically 'beautiful' and ladylike of the C1 crew as well.

As to hotness and peril...... eh? Hard to say?
jumped off the cliff promptly to her death....
...killed instantly by a death cloud trap, ALSO requiring emergency resurrection.
I wasn't referring to WotC's most recent scheme to try to force every other game that uses the D&D system to conform to their rules and inform them in advance of any new developments, etc. Yes, that's new, and it's quasi-totalitarian. At this point, it's like the descendants of ancient Phoenicians suing anyone who uses an alphabet.

I was talking more about the ideological push in RPGs in the past few years, led mostly by WotC (I'm pretty you know the instances, but I just don't want to get specific and cause a kerfuffle). Which (last I checked) is only opposed by the sons of Gygax (GaryCon, etc.) and by Troll Lord Games (although I might be wrong, and there could be others holding fast to the ancient ways). What makes tabletop different, of course, is that unlike with video games which are mostly puppeteered online by big corporations these days, you can't be forced to do or believe anything in the privacy of your own gaming space at home. And creating a roleplaying campaign to get yer ya-ya's out is a lot cheaper than spending thousands printing a comic (which I've done) or millions producing a movie, just so you can have your own "parallel economy".

Dying and getting resurrected isn't peril, but I'm assuming you realize that, and that you were just approximating.
Hey, if there's isn't peril, there isn't any, I was just hoping.
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