Critical Role's Campaign 4 Opens With a Funeral and Plenty of Intrigue

Critical Role's new campaign features a new world, a new DM, and new players, but the charm and storytelling intrigue of the longrunning Actual Play show remains the same. Campaign 4 of Critical Role officially launched last night with a four-hour episode that featured new DM Brennan Lee Mulligan expertly managing a cast of 13 players while also establishing a layered mystery involving the public execution of a firebrand revolutionary on trumped up charges. Despite the long runtime (which is typical for Critical Role), the episode moves surprisingly fast, in part because players moved in and out due to scene demands.

The debut episode kicks off with the execution of Thjazi Fang, an adventurer turned revolutionary in the city of Dol-Majkar. Fang's execution is witnessed by numerous people from his past, including former adventuring partners, family, and shady associates. Although Fang is charged with being an arcanist (magic appears to be heavily regulated in the new setting of Araman), him and several associates seems to have worked out a means of escape, but the magic ward meant to aid his quick escape fails and he dies in the first fifteen minutes of the episode.

The rest of his episode slowly introduces the large cast of players involved with Thjazi over the years, as well as brief glimpses as to why he was killed on fake charges. Liam O'Brien plays Halandil Fang, brother to Thjazi and the person responsible for organizing his funeral. Various well-wishers from Thajzi's past arrive at the funeral, starting with Halandil's ex-lover Thaisha Lloy (Aabria Iyengar), former subordinate Azune Nayar (Luis Carazo) and timid necromancer Occtis Tachonis (Alex Ward).

The episode mostly focuses on Thjazi Fang's funeral, with various players making sometimes welcome and other time hostile entrances. Old acquaintances attempt to track down why Fang's escape from death failed, including Teor Pridesire (Travis Willingham) and tracker Kattigan Vale (Robbie Daymond) and discover Fang's longtime pixie partner Thimble (Laura Bailey) on the brink of death. Thimble was attacked in a flophouse owned by Fang while crafting the ward meant to help him disappear, meaning that Thjazi was betrayed by someone close to him and who knew of the conspiracy to help him escape execution. Meanwhile, various arcanists seemingly involved with Fang in recent years also arrive, including the masked warlock Bolaire Lathalia (Taliesin Jaffe) and dwarf wizard Murray Mag'Nesson (Marisha Ray). Both were named in Thjazi's final words, although the manner of their shared conspiracy is unclear as of now.

Araman is a place where the gods were driven out or killed 70 years prior, but religion still plays a major part of the intrigue of the show. Sam Riegel plays Wicander Halovar, a noble turned priest who attempted in vain to stop his family from executing Fang. Whitney Moore played Tyranny, a demon turned aspirant who serves Wicander. Both worship "the Light," a sort of guiding force upholding morality but lacks a metaphysical presence like traditional fantasy gods. Meanwhile, Vaelus (Ashley Johnson) arrives at the funeral in a state of perpetual mourning for her lost elven god, searching for a stone stolen by Fang and Thimble. At the mention of Thimble's name at Fang's funeral, a mysterious shattered mask retrieved by Thaisha on Fang's behalf begins to re-form upstairs, a mask that looks suspiciously like the one worn by Bolaire.

The biggest surprise of the episode was Matthew Mercer's character Sir Julien Davinos. Davinos was a rival to Thjazi Fang and bested the rogue during his failed rebellion twelve years prior. While the other PCs are mourning Fang's death, Davinos seems to celebrate his old foe's final defeat and even spits on Fang's body at his funeral. Interestingly, Davinos is also a childhood friend of Fang's estranged wife Aranessa. The other characters all seem to have reasons to stick together in the episodes to come, but Sir Julien seems to be at natural odds with the other characters, although a curse seems to follow him from the funeral that could entangle his path with the other characters.

Although much has changed with Critical Role's new campaign, the dramatics and deep roleplay remained the same. Despite the large cast, table chatter was kept to a minimum and everyone seemed to get a spotlight to showcase their character. To the credit of the everyone on the cast, there was very little stepping on of toes, despite the many moving parts and the deep heapings of intrigue introduced over the first few hours of the campaign.

I also enjoyed that the worldbuilding of Araman, a brand-new campaign world, largely took place without Mulligan's exposition. There are lots of intriguing teases of what this world was like, but it was mostly left for the players themselves to introduce. An elf mourning their fallen god and arguments over a newly formed religion highlighted the tension of a world without gods, while natural rivalries between houses teased out the political intrigue of the world. We know very little of Araman's geography or ways, but the world feels very lived in thanks to how immersed each of the players seemed into their respective characters.

Of course, a four hour commitment for any piece of media is going to be a hard pill to swallow, although those wanting to jump into Critical Role will find no better place than this first episode. Critical Role hasn't lost a step despite its changes and I for one can't wait to see how this new campaign plays out over the coming years.

 

[Charlaquin]

Matt's character is such a douche - I am really wondering what that arc is going to look like.

Being so wildly antagonistic towards the character whose death brought the party together is a very bold choice. I don’t think I’d have ok’d the concept if I had been the DM. But I’m very curious to see how it develops.

 

[Mort]

I don't think Laura Bailey is going to make those types of choices.

Probably not, but she does love to sow some chaos.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Being so wildly antagonistic towards the character whose death brought the party together is a very bold choice.

Forever DMs going full chaos monster when they get to play is really common in my experience. (I may have been guilty of it myself at times.)

 

[TiQuinn]

I recognize this a basically a session .5. a setup session to get everyone in place for the actual game.

It may or may not be how the actual sessions go.

And since the tables will be set up to have very different preferences (combat, exploration, intrigue), l'll certainly give the various tables a look to see if they're more to my preference.

Personally I think it’s very unlikely to be how the regular sessions go. Here they’ve got the whole cast present and are cutting around between scenes with a few of them at a time, whereas the regular campaign is more likely to have only 4 or 5 players involved in any given session. It’s also currently focused on introducing the setting and the PCs to the audience, which obviously won’t continue to be the priority after the first few sessions. Also, if the campaign really is west marches as advertised, I would expect typical sessions to be highly focused and player-driven. It’s possible they may just be using the term “west marches” to mean more players involved than are present in any given session, but the original west marches campaign was designed with the primary goal of getting the players to take a more active role in driving the action, instead of showing up each week expecting to passively receive a plot. The idea was for players to schedule sessions themselves, and have something specific in mind they wanted to accomplish in that session. I’m hoping this is also part of what Brennan is trying to convey by calling campaign 4 “west marches style,” that while it may still be happening weekly, the intent is for the players who are going to be present for a given session to come to him with what they want to do that week. Maybe that’s overly optimistic of me, but it’s what got me most excited for the new campaign.

I saw a Q&A with Mulligan and Mercer were they confirmed that the first four episodes would involve all the players and effectively be a prologue to the main campaign where the players would split into much smaller groups going forward. Then they said, the groups would be dynamic with people switching in and out most likely.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

The first episode seemed like an awesome game for everyone involved but not likely to be something I watch much more of.

"Other people playing D&D" is something that has to be at least partially a second screen activity for me or I'm just never going to find the time to get through a whole campaign. I tried to second screen this while playing Crusader Kings III, a game which, when there's not a war or a very high stakes event chain is about as low in attention demands for me as any activity I might try to watch this during, and I couldn't follow any of it. I had to find a youtube video to walk me through who the characters were afterwards. The actual show seemed like the opening chapter of a novel artfully introducing characters through scenes and interactions, which I appreciate when I'm reading or sitting to watch a movie or prestige television drama, but my relationship with liveplays is more like throwing on a sitcom. I don't want to do the work of unteasing whom these folk are, I just want obvious trope characters getting into situations. It's not that I don't love some well earned moments of drama or character development, those are, of course, amazing. But it feels like Critical Role has hyperfocused on the moments of earned drama that used to be highlights as a light seasoning on a fight monsters and get into hijinks show, and are just dumping a drama spice jar's entire contents onto every episode. Yes it began with a funeral, but I'm in a Daggerheart group that started with a funeral the other day, but that just meant about five minutes of melodrama before we were killing monsters, dropping one-liners, and getting into shenanagans. In other words, exploring characters' grief in depth is a choice and while I can see how it is a rewaring choice for an actor or for an attentive viewer, I'm not always an attentive viewer when the "show" is a four hour D&D session.

I don't know quite why it is that I could get all the way through campaign 1 but bounce off all the subsequent Critical Role efforts (I did get like 40-some episodes in to campaign 2 and enjoyed it but then lost my place and haven't been back to it, and I only managed 4 or 5 episodes into campaign 3). I think it's partly just that I was still learning to play and run the game when I started campaign 1 and so the mechanical gameplay side of things engaged me more at first and I was invested by time my interest in that stuff diminished. But if the "excited new D&D player jazzed to see how the game is supposed to be played" variant of me from a decade-ish ago encountered this opening he also would have probably bounced off of it because there was so little gameplay involved. I am actually a little confused now why they didn't just play Daggerheart if they are only going to bust out actual game mechanics once in a blue moon in the midst of their strange semi-improv theater show, but I assume the first episode (with characters to introduce and most the unexpected things for the players arising from their interactions) isn't really representative of how most of it will play.

Anyway I'll give it another chance, but don't have high hopes for it becoming part of my regular entertainment diet. If a show is going to make this level of attention demands of the audience episodes need to not be 3 hours long. Hopefully I'll catch it in scripted, digestible cartoon show form in like 5-7 years.

 

[OB1]

So, one of the old rules of film and television was that you should be able to enter a show at any point and within 10 minutes understand what's going on. That was largely because the old film reels were about 10 minutes in length (a feature film being made up by many of those reels) and if you came in late or a theatre were missing a reel, you could play still understand the movie. TV did the same thing with the commercial breaks being the guidepost, with the idea that you might switch channels at commercial and get drawn into another program.

But the point is, because of that rythmic conflict/resolution loop that made the above possible, because if you clearly show a conflcit and have it resolve in 10 minutes, your audience can follow along even if they don't know the shape of the entire plot line. That's a skill that has been unfortunately lost in the era of streaming (and one of the many reasons why, for example, Marvel films don't seem to land recently) but I think that BLeeM has a great feeling for that with his Liveplay, and it may be the single biggest reason his DMing has become so popular.

I'm really feeling that with Worlds Beyond Number, but the same structure was in place in Ep1. You could probably jump into any 15 or 20 minute stretch, get invested in a conflict going on at that point, and figure out a least a little of what the whole concept was. Perhaps the biggest issue effecting late C2 and all of C3 of CR were overly extended, repeated or poor conflict/resolution loops that resulted from, IMO, far too much improv and not enough substance for the players to work off of (like an overly long SNL skit).

Weirdly, with RPGs, you get better pacing by relying on emergent storytelling and not following a rigid plan and letting the story emerge as the DM constantly gives conflcits for the PCs to solve with dice. DMs create the conflict, PCs and dice resolve it. Repeat. If PCs don't resolve it, the world has to end the conflict so that it can move onto the next one.

Sorry for the long rant, just got on a tear.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Anyway I'll give it another chance, but don't have high hopes for it becoming part of my regular entertainment diet. If a show is going to make this level of attention demands of the audience episodes need to not be 3 hours long.

Most actual play podcasts have episodes about one hour long, if it helps. Strong recommendations for Not Another D&D Podcast, Nerd Poker and Dimension 20 (although they mostly emphasize their streaming version on Dropout now).

Hopefully I'll catch it in scripted, digestible cartoon show form in like 5-7 years.

That too.

 

[Charlaquin]

The first episode seemed like an awesome game for everyone involved but not likely to be something I watch much more of.

"Other people playing D&D" is something that has to be at least partially a second screen activity for me or I'm just never going to find the time to get through a whole campaign. I tried to second screen this while playing Crusader Kings III, a game which, when there's not a war or a very high stakes event chain is about as low in attention demands for me as any activity I might try to watch this during, and I couldn't follow any of it. I had to find a youtube video to walk me through who the characters were afterwards. The actual show seemed like the opening chapter of a novel artfully introducing characters through scenes and interactions, which I appreciate when I'm reading or sitting to watch a movie or prestige television drama, but my relationship with liveplays is more like throwing on a sitcom. I don't want to do the work of unteasing whom these folk are, I just want obvious trope characters getting into situations. It's not that I don't love some well earned moments of drama or character development, those are, of course, amazing. But it feels like Critical Role has hyperfocused on the moments of earned drama that used to be highlights as a light seasoning on a fight monsters and get into hijinks show, and are just dumping a drama spice jar's entire contents onto every episode.

I don't know quite why it is that I could get all the way through campaign 1 but bounce off all the subsequent Critical Role efforts (I did get like 40-some episodes in to campaign 2 and enjoyed it but then lost my place and haven't been back to it, and I only managed 4 or 5 episodes into campaign 3). I think it's partly just that I was still learning to play and run the game when I started campaign 1 and so the mechanical gameplay side of things engaged me more at first and I was invested by time my interest in that stuff diminished. But if the "excited new D&D player jazzed to see how the game is supposed to be played" variant of me from a decade-ish ago encountered this opening he also would have probably bounced off of it because there was so little gameplay involved.

That makes sense to me. This first episode was definitely a piece of entertainment media that demands your full attention, and I completely understand people not wanting that out of an actual play.

I am actually a little confused now why they didn't just play Daggerheart if they are only going to bust out actual game mechanics once in a blue moon in the midst of their strange semi-improv theater show, but I assume the first episode (with characters to introduce and most the unexpected things for the players arising from their interactions) isn't really representative of how most of it will play.

Yeah, I suspect that this episode was an outlier in terms of the usage of game mechanics. Brennan Lee Mulligan is a 3.5e guy, he loves detailed, crunchy mechanics. The way he puts it, he’s a story-focused GM who prefers D&D over more “story-first” systems, because he’s comfortable enough with storytelling and improv not to feel the need for a bunch of game mechanics to abstractly resolve those parts. On the other hand, he wants that heavy mechanical abstraction when it comes to combat, because that’s the part he doesn’t feel comfortable doing on his own. So, I would expect that going forward, there will be plenty of use of the game systems, but mostly in combat and maybe exploration/travel/survival contexts, whereas the roleplaying will remain mostly freeform with the occasional dice roll. This first session was necessarily almost all roleplay, because they had a world and a cast of characters to introduce. I think starting from episode 5, we’re likely to see a lot more action and a lot more mechanics than the overture is going to deliver.

Anyway I'll give it another chance, but don't have high hopes for it becoming part of my regular entertainment diet. Hopefully I'll catch it in scripted cartoon show form in like 5-7 years.

I really hope that you and the other folks who feel this way strongly consider waiting until the overture is finished before giving it that second chance. I get it if this heavy roleplay session was not to your liking, and I wouldn’t count on that changing much within the next three episodes. But, I do think a typical session of this campaign is likely to be more what you’re looking for, once they’ve broken into the smaller groups. I strongly suspect that when all is said and done, the overture will be regarded as like the pilot episodes of a lot of shows (and the first season of some) - where you can see the seed of what the show would grow into, but it isn’t really reflective of what the show is really like, and therefore isn’t necessarily the best place to start, if you want to know if it’s going to be your kind of show.

 

[Baron Opal II]

There were a lot of characters to introduce. At least two characters don't really care why the rebel died, so I can see Matt and Ashley's characters splitting off to find the stone. I can see a couple of others want to resolve that before personally chasing Thajai's killer. The other 8 or so characters will split up to discover what's up with Wicander's grandmother (?) versus who the traitor was.

There were some interesting questions asked that lead towards an intrigue heavy game. I'm not sure what would lead to a delving path. One of the things that caught my interest is that there is still a specific afterlife for the elves, seemingly unlike the rest of the mortal races. The stone is the key to that, apparently. Since there are souls and were gods, and at least one kind of afterlife that would be interesting for me to pursue.

 

[Mallus]

Damnit.

Brennan is going to get me to watch an entire season of Critical Role. Which I do not do because each episode runs longer than a Tarkovsky film.