Critical Role Deliberates on the Adaptation Pace of The Mighty Nein
The team at Critical Role reveals they will take a more measured approach in adapting their second D&D campaign, The Mighty Nein, aiming to avoid the rushed pacing experienced with The Legend of Vox Machina.
Session Zero
Critical Role’s upcoming adaptation of The Mighty Nein aims for a slower pace compared to The Legend of Vox Machina, which suffered from rushed storytelling due to a tight schedule. Travis Willingham, the CEO, mentioned in an interview that they felt pressured to condense a lot of the narrative into fewer episodes, leading to a compromised pace.
“The thing we learned from making Vox Machina was that we didn’t know, after the two-season order, if we were going to get anything after that.”
(Translation: The feedback from the first campaign showed they had to compress the content too much.)
He noted that The Mighty Nein would start from foundational sessions to ensure a proper introduction to characters and narrative arcs.
Laura Bailey, who has been involved in both campaigns, acknowledged the challenges of fitting three years of game play into a concise adaptation:
“You can make the scenes have more meaning because of the timing of them. And we still get those moments that we love. They might just happen in a different way.”
(Translation: The adaptation might look different but will maintain the essence of the original campaign.)
