The Legend of Vox Machina’s third season will deliver more animated Critical Role this fall

Tucked inside a fairly glowing profile in the Washington Post of Critical Role’s growing Dungeons & Dragons actual play empire was a morsel of new information regarding The Legend of Vox Machina. Fans of the animated series will only need to wait until this fall for more rowdy adventures from Critical Role’s first adventuring crew.

We knew The Legend of Vox Machina was set for a third season back in 2022, when Amazon MGM Studios (sigh, corporate mergers) greenlit more adaptation of Critical Role’s inaugural actual play series alongside teasers for the then-unreleased second batch of episodes. Based on the titular party that launched Critical Role’s ever-growing grasp on livestreamed tabletop RPG, The Legends of Vox Machina has already distilled 170 hours of actors rolling dice into a produced story with raucous and bawdy (and also dramatic) storylines.

Fans have received two seasons full of Grog, Keyleth, Pike, Scanlan Shorthalt and the rest of Vox Machina with the same passion they show their live-action counterparts. It retains Critical Role’s often irreverent sense of humor (something plenty of kitchen table games can attest to) and their self-admitted penchant for cursing up a blue streak, as my grandmother would describe it).VID

Others - like our own Alex Meehan - were less kind to the animated adaptation, pointing at its uneven tone that veered wildly between dick jokes and emotional gravitas like a runaway vehicle and a frenetic pacing as if the showrunners were never confident they could meet their own 25-minute episode deadlines.

Critical Role CEO Travis Willingham confirmed the season three news on Twitter, adding a teasing “Y’all it’s so good…” to keep fans on the line for another handful of months. Yesterday proved busy for the creators-cum-multimedia business owners. Critical Role launched a dedicated membership service, called Beacon, that will host ad-free videos of the main campaign and several other supporting shows behind a monthly subscription. YouTube and Twitch streams won’t be disappearing anytime soon, but the crew is apparently antsy to decouple their efforts from third-party streaming platforms.

Critical Role’s at-the-table storytelling recently hit a bit of a snag when the main Season 3 story (focused on the misfit cast of Bell’s Hell) switched mid-stream to Aabria Iyengar’s ongoing Exandria Unlimited: Kymal campaign - fans felt the transition was messy and left them with narrative whiplash. Candela Obscura’s fourth season of spooky investigation swung the other direction, taking six hours to wrap up its finale.