Critical Role and Prime Video’s The Legend of Vox Machina have been well-received by fans, garnering three seasons so far. A fourth season is coming out soon, but before that, the animation studio is adapting the first season for Critical Role’s second campaign. The Mighty Nein show is based on campaign two of Critical Role and is set 20 years after the events of the previous Critical Role animated series. Like its predecessor, The Mighty Nein will adapt—rather than recreate—the source material.
More specifically, The Mighty Nein follows a group of misfits with troubled pasts and secrets who find themselves drawn together by circumstance. They become entangled in a larger conflict and “must work together to save the realm” after a “powerful arcane relic known as The Beacon falls into dangerous hands.”
Viewers and returning fans will recognize the core voice cast, such as Laura Bailey, Marisha Ray, Taliesin Jaffe, Ashley Johnson, Liam O’Brien, Travis Willingham, Sam Riegel, and one of the most famous Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters, Matthew Mercer—alongside guest roles from recognizable voices like the already-announced Lucy Liu as Empress Leylas Kryn, the Bright Queen of the Kryn Dynasty.
CGMagazine had the special privilege of speaking with The Mighty Nein showrunner and executive producer, Tasha Huo; art director, Joseph Martinez; and character and layout supervisor, Jess Lackey, at SCAD AnimationFest 2025. The team members also brought a special screening of episode 1. We discussed various topics related to the show’s characters, art, story translation, and overall production.
What are some of the challenges and benefits of adapting a D&D livestream format of Critical Role’s campaigns to an animated series format?
Tasha Huo: Besides, of course, the challenge of adapting 600 hours of a live show, if anyone has played D&D, they know how completely off course every episode usually goes. Your DM may work like hell to point you toward a big bad or a core story, but the players can just decide to go shopping for 2 hours—then wander into a side story that was never intended to even be there.
So the first challenge was to put aside for a moment the hundreds of amazing side quests we all loved from the livestream, and narrow in on the core central story of these characters, then fill out the world with all those amazing side stories, maybe the exact same way they were presented in the campaign, or sometimes reskinned to make more sense. While the benefit of adapting such an extensive campaign is that there is no shortage of incredible moments of action, humour, tears, and drama to pull from and to fill out the world.
Another benefit that will never exist on any other show is that I got to actually sit down with the characters of the show and say, ‘Tell me how you felt in this moment’ or ‘Tell me more about your decision here.’ It’s not like adapting something that’s scripted, where the actors were simply given words to say; this was Liam O’Brien as Caleb or Marisha Ray as Beau inventing their characters’ moments from their own crazy brains and emotions. I can actually sit down with that character, essentially, and ask them questions. It’s unbelievable.
From a production standpoint, what improvements or changes can audiences who have followed The Legend of Vox Machina expect to see in The Mighty Nein?
Tasha Huo: Story-wise, I think definitely going bigger. We now have 44-45 minutes to tell our story, whereas The Legend of Vox Machina was [around] 22 minutes. So there’s a lot more room for more character development; we’re elevating the story a lot. We wanted to make the show grittier and more adult. Vox is adult, and there are a lot of genitalia bad jokes, and this has that. But also, [it’s] more adult than just the storytelling.
The characters that they created for this in the live show for season two or for Campaign Two had these really elaborate backstories and really intricately thought-out relationships with each other. So we want to do honour to that in the show. So I would say the short answer is it’s a kind of a grittier, more elevated version of Vox.
“The benefit of adapting such an extensive campaign is that there is no shortage of incredible moments of action, humour, tears, and drama to pull from and to fill out the world.”
Joseph Martinez: We’re kind of the sister show [to Vox], but we’re also making ourselves pretty distinct in our style and the way we’re composing things. A lot of what we talk about, especially when we’re finishing these episodes, is injecting a bit more cinematography and more muted palettes—a bit more mature in that sense. Vox was very colourful. There was a lot of bright magic on our show; there’s a bit of a nuance. There’s more attention to camera focal length. So a lot of what we’re doing is kind of like a refinement and an exploration of how to push the world of Critical Role into this more cinematic space. That’s been the fun part.
World-building-wise, it’s a different world. It’s a lot more grounded. On Vox, we did castles on the hill, very idyllic, high fantasy stuff. Here, we’re very much exploring the idea of our heroes on the ground, what kind of environments they’re living in and experiencing, and how do we make that a bit more tense?
Jess Lackey: As a character supervisor, my job is to pay really close attention to the relationships that these characters are building. And because there’s a lot longer run time, and we’re going with a grittier vibe for everything, there’s a lot more room for lingering of emotions and the way that these characters are interacting with each other. So I’m paying really close attention to the way each character feels about one another in our layouts, and making sure the animation shows that, and honouring the script in that way.
Yes! And that makes me want to know which of The Mighty Nein characters was the hardest to translate from the live-action Critical Role series to the animated series?
Jess Lackey: They’re really fun! Everyone is unique. Essek [Thelyss] has so much political weight on him, and the way he acts is very ignorant of that—and still it’s very in tune with his more familial relations. It was more [myself] leaning into that for him, versus leaning into let me start over.
Everyone is pretty self-absorbed in a very different way. Leaning into that and understanding the things they’re struggling with is actually really fun to explore—letting that show on their faces and the way they react. Characters have been a pleasure because they’re so varied, and I’m never bored.
That’s always a good sign!
Tasha Huo: I would say Jester [Lavorre] probably seems to be the hardest, from my non-drawing perspective—just because she’s so big with her emotions. But she can also be the emotional heart of the team. She can be really small, dramatic, and intimate. So poor Jess has to do really big, crazy things for her. That has to be just right, not too anime because that’s not quite our style. But also bring her down since she has the biggest range, she feels, from an outside perspective, like the most difficult character.
Joseph Martinez: I have to mention one of our main characters, Caleb [Widogast]. We’re all in these meetings where we review animations, and we see what comes back. A lot of what we’re talking about is that, and I love seeing and hearing feedback—and problem-solving for these characters. Whenever Caleb does an action [or says something] between two characters, we’re talking subtlety. Jess is supplying these layouts to show that subtlety; the slightest hint of a line is going to change his expression in relation to other characters.
Jess Lackey: Yeah, Caleb is definitely the most on lockdown. He doesn’t emote nearly as much as everyone else. I actually think that’s right, he’s probably the hardest, just because we’re trying to emote with pixels. When Caleb breaks, it’s so shocking.
Oh man, I can’t wait to see that. On top of those fine details, were there any iconic locations that were difficult or fun to bring to life (ie. The Gentleman’s Chateau, Eiselcross, etc.)?
Jess Lackey: I could go on for hours about the characters that make up Wildemount, but if I had to choose one location to talk about, our biggest feat as a team was absolutely Gustav’s Fletching & Moondrop Traveling Carnival. It was the heaviest load our character design team had to tackle by far. Trapeze flyers, taro-card readers, stage hands, game operators, people who hold snakes, musicians, and obviously clowns—if [something belonged] at a carnival, we had to dream it up.
Combining that with the wonderful environments our background & paint teams came up with, we had a great foundation to really get down and dirty. The Carnival structures and wagons were given an old-world rustic patina, using lots of natural materials and sun-bleached dyed fabrics to flesh out the setting. Things felt very stacked and scattered in a very charming way, as if it were organically built over time. In the scripts, I noticed that money was a major point of stress for Gustav Fletching. I found it endearing that his desire for ticket sales wasn’t purely for selfish reasons, but instead was for the preservation of this whimsical safe haven he had built over the years.
“It’s not like adapting something that’s scripted, where the actors were simply given words to say; this was Liam O’Brien as Caleb or Marisha Ray as Beau inventing their characters’ moments from their own crazy brains and emotions.”
We made sure both the big picture and the nitty-gritty details were really reflected in Gustav’s carnival ensemble. To ground everyone to this place, their clothing generally had plenty of patch-jobs and open-face stitching to suggest heavier fabrics that require more reinforcement. Moulded leathers were perfect for horn shapes that would last through many shows. Face paint went unrestricted and ranged from cute to creepy. These details helped them feel just as weathered as their environment.
To push it to the next level, we took the extra second to really think about what any given background character’s actual job was and let that influence both the aesthetic and function of their outfits. Acrobats required flashy and skin-tight, flexible clothing for their flips & tricks, the strongman required oil for his exposed muscles, the person who holds a snake requires a friendly snake, and the musicians definitely needed to read as a pre-Victorian boy band. The goal was to make every entertainer feel unique in both their roles and their attitudes, pushing a very wide range of emotion and personality in the model sheets.
Most importantly, characters were crafted with the influence of love that Gustav and Molly had for everyone there! We were designing the world’s silliest family. I wanted it to feel like he provided the space for every single one of them to fully express themselves, and that he never let the money stresses influence the way he treated his employees’ individualities. This is what truly unlocked our ability to go all out and draw such a fun and exciting range of background character designs for Gustav’s Fletching & Moondrop Travelling Carnival.
Joseph Martinez: The look of Rexxentrum and the Kryn Dynasty were the first locations and my favourite to design. With the help of our colour Supervisor, Alice Yang, we were able to establish the look and rules of the show.
Rexxentrum started out as the opposite of the city of Emon from Vox. Rather than an idyllic castle on a mountain top, we have a brutalist two-towered castle—nestled between eight imposing towers, adding to the feeling of divided power. A flat landscape lined with large boulevards, allowing a large army to move through the city, brought the original Eastern European Twist that Mathew Mercer first used to describe Wildemount.
On the opposite spectrum entirely is the Kryn Dynasty. An open-borders city, naturally carved out of the landscape, built using subtractive methods as if Dunamancy played a role in its creation. Although intended as a place of peace, the Kryn’s sharp architecture gives it an imposing, formidable look that can match the Dwendalian Empire.
After establishing the visual language for these two main staples of the show, we guided our artists in designing the rest of the locations the Mighty Nein would encounter. From the Mediterranean feel of the Lavish Chateau to the Art Nouveau inspiration of the Invulnerable Vagrant, each location was thoroughly explored by our talented team of artists. This approach gave every location a sense of uniqueness and purpose, helping the audience connect with the show.
Lastly, which parts, or were there parts from the livestream campaigns that you all knew had to be included in The Mighty Nein series?
Joseph Martinez: Ooh, that’s a tough one. That’s going into spoiler territory! So many things!
Tasha Huo: A lot of things made it, I feel like.
Well, that’s amazing.
Tasha Huo: Yeah, I was a fan of the show well before ever getting the job. So for me, it was really important to be like, ‘No, as a fan, we loved this moment’ and ‘This has to be in there.’ In fact, I remember more about those weird details that fans know than Critical Role remembers sometimes. So sometimes I’ll be like, “No, it has to be this.’ And they’re like, ‘What, we don’t even remember that.’ Then, I have to say, ‘Trust me, the fans will want this.’ There’s a lot of [those moments behind the scenes].
Awesome. Well, thank you so much again for your time!
The first episode dropped early on Prime Video and their YouTube channel, with the rest of the series scheduled to premiere on November 19, 2025.
