Critical Role Mighty Nien heads to Amazon Prime!

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Also I want to go on record and say Vox Machina and The Mighty Nein are terrible names for groups, and this one is particularly bad because there appear to 7 of them!

All of their group names are terrible. The current team is Belles Hells, which feels like they got 75% of the way to coming up with a good name, broke for lunch, and never came back.

That said, campaign two is the good stuff. Jester is easily the best Critical Role character -- come at me, everyone! -- and Nott's story will be great to see played out on screen.

We'll see if they include some of the goofier high level stuff that happens later on in the campaign, which feels a lot like an object lesson/warning for DMs thinking of high level play.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

300 Spartans, my aunt Fanny!

So 301, then?

 

[CleverNickName]

I thought they were saying a Mighty No!

It's also "nein," which is German for "no" rather than "nine" which is English for..."nine".

Short version: They call themselves "The Mighty Nein" because it's a really bad pun.

Long (and bullet-list) version:

• Caleb, the wizard in the group, speaks with a German accent and occasionally sprinkles German words into his dialogue. Liam is a talented voice actor and he pulls this off without drifting into farce.
• In the first dozen episodes or so, Liam kept rolling the number 9 on his d20, for all sorts of reasons. He would announce it in his character's German accent ("Nein!") to the table.
• Soon, everyone else was mimicking him every time they rolled a 9.
• This happened A LOT, several times an hour for many episodes....a lot more often than you'd think.
• Fast-forward a few more episodes, and an NPC asked Caleb what the name of his adventuring group was. He said something like "We are the mighty Nein, but that name is still being workshopped." Everyone at the table (and in the Twitch chat) absolutely loved it, because everyone loves a good pun.
• And thus, their characters all came to be known across the realm as "The Mighty Nein."

 

[Reynard]

7/9 will make sense in the end.

Is this a Star trek joke?

 

[jgsugden]

Is this a Star trek joke?

You didn't listen to/watch Campaign 2, did you? They make the joke there.

 

[SkidAce]

Ok so non-Critical Role follower - do I understand correctly that this is the second Critical Role campaign (Vox Machina being the first), with presumably mostly the same VA, but playing totally different characters in a totally different campaign in the same approximate setting?

Also I want to go on record and say Vox Machina and The Mighty Nein are terrible names for groups, and this one is particularly bad because there appear to 7 of them!

Still, hopefully it's as good as or better than Vox Machina, which I've been mostly enjoying on Prime (I wish they'd use more actual spells and fewer generic energy blasts though).

I am sure by the time I replied to this, someone has mentioned that that was the long running in character joke concerning the Mighty Nein.

In context it was a great name for an adventuring group.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

Also I want to go on record and say Vox Machina and The Mighty Nein are terrible names for groups, and this one is particularly bad because there appear to 7 of them!

I am a fan of the livestreams, and came to accept both names in their original contexts. From the perspective of marketing their "all professional voice actors" gimmick in the early days of the livestream, Vox Machina was a solid name, even if said meta reference in Latin made no in-world sense. Mighty Nein was one of those stupid in-jokes that makes no particular sense but that you have a certain loyalty to if you were there for. But I still agree that as names to brand their cartoon shows with they are sub-optimal (even with a cool logo).

It's a long-standing tradition to misnumber things. It goes back at least to the Battle of Thermopylae. 300 Spartans, my aunt Fanny!

It was 300 Spartans. The perpetual failure to mention that there was also 700 Thespians, and a substantial number of the Spartans' quasi-slave heliots, who died just the same alongside them, does not change the number of Spartans which, to my recollection, the historical sources and other evidence generally agree on.

 

[DarkCrisis]

I really wish I could get into the new tabletop show. Belles Hells. I dont know what about it turns me off of it unlike the previous 2 shows

 

[Azzy]

Awesome. I don't follow Critical Role, but I've been enjoying Vox Machina. So this is good news.

 

[overgeeked]

I really wish I could get into the new tabletop show. Belles Hells. I dont know what about it turns me off of it unlike the previous 2 shows

Agreed. I still watch…most episodes. For me it’s that everyone went with a joke character with a tragic backstory, except Liam. Like they all got together and decided that Jester and Caleb would be great templates and everyone made a kinda-funny, kinda-tragic character. The result just doesn’t come together as a whole.