Playing Dungeons & Dragons for a living sounds like a kid’s pipedream. But for the team at Critical Role, it’s a reality.
Critical Role is a web series where a group of voice actors play Dungeons & Dragons on a livestream. The stream started back in 2015, and has led to comic books, novels, and two animated series based on Critical Role campaigns – “The Legend of Vox Machina” and “The Mighty Nein.” The fourth season of “Vox Machina” is scheduled to premiere on Amazon Prime on June 3, and season two of “The Mighty Nein” is reportedly close to wrapping up.
The founding cast of Critical Role, which includes Travis Willingham and Marisha Ray, are stopping by this year’s MomoCon for photo ops and autographs on May 23 and 24, right before they kick off their 2026 Echoes of Exandria Live Show Tour at Gas South Arena on May 26. Ahead of MomoCon, Rough Draft Atlanta spoke to Willingham and Ray about Critical Role and how it has evolved over the years. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You guys are voice actors now, and both cofounders of Critical Role. But what was your relationship to tabletop role-playing games (TTRPG) before getting into Critical Role? Was it something you did growing up?
Marisha Ray: I feel like Travis and I are kind of on the same page on this one. We both grew up in the south where, while the Satanic Panic might have been over, the effects were still lingering. I wasn’t really introduced to it when I was growing up. I had video games, I had Magic the Gathering, but I didn’t really have anyone to play Dungeons & Dragons with until I moved to Los Angeles. My first D&D game was with [my now husband] Matthew Mercer, years before all of us got together – even knew each other. We were just acquaintances at the time. So it was quite a full circle moment. But yeah, I was in my early 20s when I first came to D&D.
Travis Willingham: Yeah, same. I think I saw one copy of “Vampire: The Masquerade” in middle school from one random kid. And I was like, “What is that?” He’s like, “It’s Vampire!” Like I knew what that meant. I think I saw D&D books in hobby stores and comic book stores. But while the outside art looked amazing, I’d open the cover and it was a bunch of text. And I was like, “Nope!” [Laughs]
I heard from a bunch of people that had played D&D and said they loved their Dungeons & Dragons games, that it was such a good time. I was like, “If you guys ever do that, can I come watch a game?” [They said,] “Nah, you shouldn’t come watch. You should come play!” That was certainly not something I was gonna do, until [Liam O’Brian’s] fateful birthday, and we all came together.
Having come to it at such a later age for both of you, what was the draw? You both do this for a living now – what hooked you?
Willingham: Mine was that I heard from people like Yuri Lowenthal and obviously Matt Mercer – we were shooting a video game, the Mad Max video game, after the first movie came out. He was like, “We just co-DM’d this game” and rattled off a bunch of people that I knew. I was like, “They all play? What happens in the game?” And of course, Matt back in the day had this unintentional evangelical pitch that would set the hook for what it meant … I was like, “You tell a story?” And he’s like, “Yeah, we’re telling a story. But then you also jump in.” I was like, “I don’t want to jump in! What the heck does that mean? You just come up with stuff?” He’s like, “Yeah. You come up with absolutely anything, and the story just evolves.”
It seemed like this fringe thing that seemed like it could be cool, but was probably too nerdy – and definitely not something a more mainstream jock, boring guy like myself would enjoy. But man, the more I heard about it, the more it seemed like something I would really be interested in. I think we just had enough of those meetings where enough people were like, I either play D&D and haven’t done it in years, or Laura [Bailey], my wife, was also like, “I love RPGs! I feel like D&D would be awesome. I would be interested.”
Finally, we just got all together to do it. I showed up late to the very first game, and I walked in on my wife, just in full RP accent – just completely embodying some other character and with candles lit around Matt and Marisha’s apartment. And I was like, “Oh God, the sacrifices have started!”
Ray: I think with us having nerdier interests and backgrounds, but also a lot of us being theater kids and actors, and growing up with musical theater – it kind of hits that perfect cross section for us, of being able to be grown adults with the excuse to play make believe. So it definitely scratches that itch for us in that way.
What’s been the most exciting thing for both of you about how the company has grown?
Ray: I think it’s wild, because we keep wondering when we’re going to hit a ceiling, and it just hasn’t happened yet. [Laughs] We’ve always been very interested in seeing how we can take these stories and bring them to different mediums. That’s why we started with the comic books, and then from there, moved to the novels, and the Kickstarter for the animated series, and now exploring other things – slowly starting to dip our toe into interactive … I think it’s just seeing how far that this can go, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down yet.
Willingham: I think as actors in Los Angeles, we were all counting ourselves lucky if we would book roles and other projects that we were excited about. Sometimes it would be a new project, and just the chance for the work was already a huge win. But sometimes we would get lucky enough to land roles in franchises or IPs that we were fans of, and that was like, really doing something – and it is! But then we found this even more rarefied air where we are among the lucky ones to actually create our own IP, manage that IP, perform in that IP, write/direct/executive produce that IP in multiple successful mediums.
Now, in our 11th year of doing this, it’s something that is very normal in our day to day. But five, six, seven years ago, those were all fever dreams – having an animated series, much less two, or a variety of comic books and graphic novels, all the things that Marisha mentioned. Being able to continue to do this, bring new people into the loop and develop new stories, and new characters and have the story reach as many people as it has across so many different parts of the world – I think is just sort of baffling to us. I think there’s an insane amount of pride in being able to be frontier explorers in an area where there really is no roadmap for what we’ve done. No one’s gone before and made a live stream where episodes are three, four or five hours long. They do it every single week, and crank out all this content, and then actually are able to create a sustainable business out of it. So there’s a large amount of pride there.
I’m glad you brought up the animated series. Maybe this works similarly to other adaptive processes, but this is sort of an interesting unicorn, like you said, Travis. What is the relationship creatively between Critical Role and the developer Chris Prynoski?
WIllingham: Chris Prynoski is the owner of Titmouse, which is our animation studio and our amazing partner in the show. The executive producers of the show are all the founders of Critical Role, which is amazing. Sam Riegel and myself sort of helm the day to day management of all those things. It’s incredible, because we’ve cultivated an environment where all of the founding cast members touch every single word of every single line of dialogue and see every single design asset, whether it’s character design, background design, storyboards, animatics, listening to the score, the sound effects – all that stuff. It’s been a learning process since day one of season one of the very first show. But now we’re in season four of “The Legend of Vox Machina.” We have season two coming up of “The Might Nein.” We have so much content available to us in these past campaigns that the adaptation process has really been more of a challenge. How do we truncate and economize all those stories into something that is not just a fair representation of what happened, but is it also interesting? And can we make the stories a little bit better and also appealing to old audiences and new audiences alike?
One of the big impetus moments or reasons for the animated series was there were quite a few barriers to entry [to Critical Role], with having a four-hour episode every week. If you missed the first couple of weeks, that could be hard to catch up on. So a half-hour episode of animation, or now an hour long episode of animation, is, I think, a bit more palatable to people that are wanting to take a chance on this type of story. It’s making something new out of something old that can appease both the old and new fans alike.
I was watching the animated series yesterday, and I found myself thinking – because I’ve seen parts of these long livestreams – I wonder how this manifested in game, with having to roll? It’s an interesting adaptation process.
Willingham: It’s a very unique ouroboros, actually. We’ve found people that have come up to us and are like, “I don’t know what Critical Role is, but I love ‘The Legend of Vox Machina,’ or I love ‘The Mighty Nein,’ I didn’t know this was a live streaming campaign and that there were 400 hours [laughs] per campaign. I’m going back and watching all of it now.” We’re like, “That’s great!”
Obviously, we want the people that sat with us through all those nights to feel rewarded in the show and the realization of those things in an audio, visual, animated medium. But it’s fascinating. And of course, they all find each other in the best way. You find people that have conspiracy theories watching the show for the first time, and then the old schoolers that are like, “No, just wait! You think you know what’s coming!”
You have MomoCon first, and then the new tour is kicking off in Atlanta, right?
Ray: Yeah, our 2026, live show tour, starting with Atlanta. It’s going to be going to the Maelstrom Kingdom, which is a place that Matt has always teased that exists in this world, which is an underwater kingdom that we’ve always been excited about and wanted to explore. We’re going there for the first time in Atlanta, having a little under the sea adventure.
MomoCon runs from May 21-24. Tickets can be purchased online.
