Campaign One: Vox Machina

The original cast of Campaign One.

**Campaign One**, or **The Campaign of Vox Machina**, is the first campaign of *Critical Role*. It follows a group of adventurers, Vox Machina, first in their adventures across the continent of Tal'Dorei and eventually the larger world of Exandria and other Planes of Existence.

The campaign that became *Critical Role* began in late 2012, with the players beginning the campaign at level 3. They began streaming on March 12, 2015, when the characters had reached level 9. The on-stream events took place in approximately 810 through 812 PD (Post Divergence).

The first campaign is broken down into five arcs on stream, with one arc pre-stream, and four special episodes following the completion of the main campaign, all detailed below.

## **Production**

Before *Critical Role* began, Liam O'Brien and Sam Riegel planned to play Dungeons & Dragons with some friends for Liam's Birthday and share their experience on their podcast. Liam enjoyed the game so much that he messaged the other players shortly after, asking if they would like to start a continuing game. The original cast played a *Pathfinder* campaign together for two years, which started on December 8, 2012. The very first session was played by Liam, Sam, Laura Bailey, Travis Willingham, Taliesin Jaffe, and Orion Acaba, with Matthew Mercer as the Dungeon Master. All the players began the campaign with the same characters they had on the stream, with the exception of Taliesin who played a dragonborn paladin for their first session. Marisha Ray and Ashley Johnson joined the game in later sessions.

In 2014, they were approached by Felicia Day to stream their campaign live on the Geek & Sundry twitch channel. When Matt told the other cast members about her offer, the group's reactions were recorded for posterity. In preparation for the streamed series, Matt converted the game over from *Pathfinder* to *Dungeons & Dragons*, to speed up combat and because *D&D* has more name recognition. When converting their game, Matt had to create a custom fighter's Martial Archetype for Taliesin Jaffe's character, Percy, as the Gunslinger subclass didn't exist in 5th Edition *D&D*. On March 12, 2015 the first live episode of *Critical Role* was aired: "Arrival at Kraghammer" (1x01). Liam and Laura Bailey decided to play twins in Campaign One because they share their birthday, May 28th. Before the game, the two of them spent about two hours at a diner creating their character backgrounds.

The series aired live on the Geek & Sundry Twitch channel and YouTube on Thursdays at 7pm (Pacific Time). The stream began on March 12, 2015 with "Arrival at Kraghammer" (1x01), and after two-and-a-half years and 115 episodes, the adventures of Vox Machina came to an end on October 12, 2017 in "The Chapter Closes" (1x115). After the first campaign ended, the group played three canonical one-shot games featuring Vox Machina, "The Search For Grog" (Sx42), "The Search For Bob" (Sx45) and "Dalen's Closet" (Sx47).

On October 28th, 2015, it was announced live on the Geek & Sundry Twitch channel that due to a mutual parting of the ways, Orion Acaba would no longer appear on Critical Role.

## **Trivia**

* A slideshow of images, accompanied by narration from each member of Vox Machina, served as an opening for the first few episodes of the show. The video was put together by Matthew Mercer, using a combination of stock pictures and art by Kit Buss and various other artists. However, because some of the art was used without permission, and the Twitch border covered some of the artist credits, the slideshow was later blurred when uploaded on YouTube to avoid copyright infringement.
* The campaign was adapted for television in 2022 in the animated series *The Legend of Vox Machina*.
* At one point after the end of the campaign, Geek & Sundry substituted thumbnails for all 115 episodes.

## **References**

1. ↑ Matt confirmed on Twitter that the player characters started at level 3: 1, 2 3.
2. ↑ See "The Fate-Touched" (1x103) at 2:42:58.  The date is given as 12 Misuthar 812.
3. ↑ Liam O'Brien, Sam Riegel, and Travis Willingham all tweeted about their first game session together. Based on the timestamps, the game began on the night of December 8th and continued past midnight into December 9th. (Sources: Liam's tweet; Sam's tweet; Travis's tweet)
4. ↑ See Felicia Day's *Between the Sheets* at 53:11 through 56:22.
5. ↑ See "*The World of Critical Role*", *Foreword* and p.16.
6. ↑ From an excerpt of episode 2 of the podcast allworknoplay at 0:42:16.
7. ↑ See Laura's interview at Nerdist.com ("*Liam and I developed it together over coffee. I think it was a two hour meet up*"). See also Liam's interview at Nerdist.com ("*Laura and I met up at a diner and spent several hours talking everything out, going over every little detail of their past.*")
8. ↑ Matt explained why the videos were blurred on Reddit

**Art:**

1. ↑ Art of the characters before the *Critical Role* stream began.  This image was imported from Matthew Mercer's *Vox Machina Wikia*.