Critical Role Fixes Vox Machina’s Mistakes — The Mighty Nein Will Take Its Time

The Mighty Nein, Critical Role’s animated adaptation of Campaign 2, arrives on Prime Video on Nov. 19. The show’s founders say they learned practical lessons from turning The Legend of Vox Machina into an animated series, and they’re applying those lessons to make The Mighty Nein’s story clearer and more deliberate.

1. Lessons from Vox Machina
2. Pace and “session zero” planning
3. Longer episodes and character focus
4. What to expect on Nov. 19
5. Sources and links

Lessons from Vox Machina

Critical Role originally funded an animated special for The Legend of Vox Machina on their Kickstarter campaign in March 2019. The campaign hit its goal in an hour and made $4.3 million in its first day, and the special later expanded into a full series when Amazon Studios acquired streaming rights.

However, the team found that expanding one special into two seasons pushed them to pack a lot into Season 2. Travis Willingham said, “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. So, we really crammed a lot of stuff into season 2.” Because of that experience, the founders are taking a different approach with The Mighty Nein: they plan to move more deliberately and avoid rushing the story.

Pace and “session zero” planning

Travis Willingham described tabletop play as “the anarchy of tabletop” during New York Comic Con 2025, and the team says that freedom has to be reined in for a scripted animated show. Therefore, the creators started The Mighty Nein from a session zero perspective, which means planning rules, tone, and expectations before formal production.

The session zero approach is intended to give each season room to breathe instead of cramming plot beats in case the show’s future was uncertain. Laura Bailey added, “There’s not enough time to incorporate everything that happened in a three-year campaign of four to five-hour sessions,” and she noted that cutting some material lets the retained scenes gain more depth: “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.”

Longer episodes and character focus

The Mighty Nein’s episodes run about 44 minutes, compared with The Legend of Vox Machina’s ~22–25 minute episodes. That extra runtime is meant to give the show more space to explore character moments and settings, and the creators have said they’ll use it to occasionally take new narrative routes for characters.

For example, the cast and team have hinted at a new route for Yasha, a character played by Ashley Johnson, who missed parts of Campaign 2 due to scheduling. Still, the creators also caution that a longer runtime doesn’t automatically solve every issue. As they summarized their approach, “everything that makes tabletop role-playing fun has to get crammed back into the sausage for this version.”

What to expect on Nov. 19

The Mighty Nein will aim to serve both new viewers and fans of the live-play sessions. Clips released ahead of the show include scenes like Fjord and Jester’s first meeting, which was previously only described in conversation during the live-play. That preview material suggests the adaptation will both expand on and reshape moments from the original Campaign 2.

Overall, the production team is prioritizing slower, clearer pacing, longer episodes, and pre-production planning so the animated series can tell a more structured story while keeping core moments fans expect.

Sources and links

Background on the Kickstarter and the early funding can be found at this Kickstarter campaign. A short clip of Fjord and Jester’s first meeting is available on Reddit. Reporting that mentions new character routes for Yasha appeared in an EW exclusive.