Critical Role is a popular web series in which professional voice actors — Travis Willingham, Marisha Ray, Taliesin Jaffe, Ashley Johnson, Liam O'Brien, Laura Bailey, Sam Riegel, and Matthew Mercer — play the classic tabletop role-playing game known as Dungeons and Dragons.
Last year, the cast launched a Kickstarter campaign in an effort to raise money for an animated special, which would retell the events of the first Critical Role campaign/season. The goal was to crowdfund $750,000 across the span of forty-five days. Little did the cast know, donations would exceed $1,000,000 within the first day of the crowdfunding campaign.
By the campaign came to an end, $11,300,000 had been raised. Rather than a single animated special, a full-blown animated series (including two seasons) was funded. Critical Role: The Legend of Vox Machina will be animated by Titmouse Inc. and distributed via Amazon Prime Video (Amazon acquired the streaming rights to the series back in November).
Being professional voice actors, as mentioned, the cast will all reprise their roles. Get it? Roles? Anyway. Critical Role: The Legend of Vox Machina was set to debut in Fall 2020. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case. You see, production has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The animation team and other aspects of Critical Role have been forced to work from home — as they explain in their update post over on Kickstarter.
Pandemic response. Like every business around the world, we are still assessing the challenges that coronavirus has created regarding resource management, scheduling, and future planning. While our teams reacted very quickly and began working from home to help alleviate the spread of the virus, adapting to our new environment has cost us a bit of time.
Localization. Many of you have asked about localization and accessibility for The Legend of Vox Machina. The series will be dubbed, subtitled, and otherwise localized for our very much global audience. This process takes time and just like other aspects of the production process, we are still figuring out how the challenges created by coronavirus are impacting the overall delivery timeline.
Thus, production isn't quite as efficient as it would usually be, and the show has been indefinitely delayed. No additional information, such as an updated release date, has been revealed just yet. Still, Critical Role ensures anticipating fans that they will let them in on such information as soon as they can.
And also, as a final note, our revised timelines are generally vague to allow us breathing room, should we need it, to finalize rewards and also put the finishing touches on the animated series.
As we march closer to release and shipment dates, we’ll be sure to provide further instruction and detail so that you are completely informed along the way.
Of course, if we encounter further delays, we’ll be sure to let everyone know right here on Kickstarter.