The Evolution of the Pre-Stream Vox Machina Adventures | Critical Role Demystified 

Which story arc from the pre-stream game do you most wish we could see, either as a streamed game, in a comic book, or on the animated series?

Always remember: Good DM's borrow. Great DM's steal.

I love how they started their campaign fighting a still-born god (probably an atropal scion btw), and ended it by fighting an actual newly risen god.

Hey I just wanted to point out how awesome it is that you include full non-autogenerated subtitles in your videos and even include a voice to text display on your livestreams. It's something I don't see even large content creators with editing teams do consistently. So seeing it here is frankly amazing and I really appreciate it.

Interesting how the campaign went full circle in regards to bosses

If I refused to mix stuff from different games I'd never have seen what happens when the PCs of an modern horror game had to purge a mimic infestation from their local Ikea.

That incoming dragon music from the anime is just so perfectly tense and ominous. I love it

I came into the CR fandom with the first episodes of the VM cartoon, and I still have to say, naming a bad guy General Krieg (Krieg means war in german) is so on the nose it's still one of the funniest things ever.

Looking in retrospect knowing how much focus Exandria's pantheon would get, Crysa-Thul fits the ''early installment weirdness'' trope perfectly. A stilborn deity would be a massive deal within the lore, but since at the time with was just a one shot, it didn't matter. Really shows how much this world expanded.

Small point of consideration: according to a tweet Matt or one of the other players made about their D&D campaign, they started out at third level instead of first. So the battle against Crysa-Thul was at third level, and the encounter with the lich might have been at third or fourth (depending on how much XP the party obtained from a fetal god).

Would have been really neat for them to have a Fireside Chat about the pre campaign but its so long ago itll never happen lol.

It's incredibly important to always say that DMs can mix and match lore as they want. I love how WOTC are saying this more and writing it in their books

i just had a curious thought: the first real session of their campaign would have been "a search for grog" and they also do just that in the last episode. Of course that's not the full search and they eventually play it out in a one -shot. But it is a very nice coincidence

My party and my DM didn't like 4th edition at all so we continued 3.5 but we wanted to try 1st edition Pathfinder. We found out that they were pretty similar, so we combined them and just called it 3.75. We'd take gods, lore, monster, etc from both and just had a blast! Dnd and tabletop games are just fun so just do what makes sense for your group!

I love how Matt is the master of a long game plot... as demonstrated even more with the C3 story arc pulling in elements from way back in C1

Book of Vile Darkness was such a great supplement. Damn that book had great ideas.

Mike says stealing is a good option. I'll visit the nearest bank then.

In hearing that next CR Demystified involves the "most boring" D&D fight, I would love to hear your thoughts on how to live change combat to re-engage your players if you see that they're not having fun.

He probably used a lich. One of 4e's best features was being able to take any monster of any CR and dynamically adjust it's CR and stats via an app.

I recently did something with "crossing games" like this. I constructed 5e stat blocks for Purple Dragons (in 5 different age stages) based upon several different ones I found online. They have not officially been in the game since 3e, so bringing them over requires some tweaks be made.

This is a good channel. This is a good series. I like Mike.

I've had the dead fetal god monster thing as a low level encounter for a long time since before watching Critical Role back when Campaign 1 was coming out lol And then I see their callback vid to the prestream adventure and I was like "God damn it!!" Now whenever I do it there's a solid chance my players might think I just got it from Mercer.

I personally use D&D as a basis to build my own world and lore, and I take influences from multiple game systems or fantasy worlds, so I strongly I agree about your point on using non dnd things in dnd

It's so awesome that you mentioned Fantasy Age! I was not expecting that.

The dark horse comics actually do tell a story set in Stilben, but from what I remember, it was a bit different than the one mentioned in this recap.

Hello Mike! Create video, as always. Hope we can have this série becoming weekly since it is your best série IMO. Keep going, you are great!

When it comes to incorporating new sources and systems from other games besides DnD into my homebrew, I've taken up the policy that the items/spells/monsters/subclasses/races are either new to the world, very old, from another plane of existence, or currently being created in order to make those things extremely rare. Since I'm not familiar with those things just yet and haven't firmly decided on what to do with them, that's basically what they are going to be. Such examples are fairies and harengeon, which solely inhabit the Feywild; echo knights, chronurgy, and graviturgy mages which are either ancient and forgotten schools of magic or from another plane of existence and therefore haven't be (re)introduced into the material world; monsters from Grim Hollow or Explorer's Guide to Wildemount are rare and could be introduced into the world piecemeal and at a later date; spells such as sangromancy-type are extremely rare and made illegal due to their usage of blood (similar to how to the school of necromancy requires fresh corpses in many of their spells and is also made illegal in many parts of the world); and various magical items and artifacts are introduced slowly and on a case-by-case basis depending on their rarity. I've also looked to CR and Matt for inspiration on how to slowly introduce subplots throughout the main plot. In my homebrew campaign, there is an anti-dragon cult that is working to destroy all dragons of the world, and are taking multiple steps to achieve that end including disrupting the Dragon Tournament that is taking part to celebrate the hatching of bronze and silver dragons within a kingdom. Alongside this campaign, I have introduced a subplot where an infestation of giant insects and arachnids are spreading from a province and just now, my party has discovered that this infestation is hastening its spread by transforming people into insectoid-hybrids. There is also another subplot where beings from the Far Realm are slowly invading the material world, acting as heralds before more monstrous creatures arrive. This was initiated by one of my players having their origins within the Far Realm and so their actions have alerted others. I'm also sprinkling in other call-backs to other players backstories, some of them less drastic and smaller in scale while also having connections to either the main plot or some of the other subplots.

I first started adapting magic items from Diablo (prefixes/suffixes/uniques) in 2E. Every edition since I have tweaked or outright changed the way those items were represented, due to mechanics changes. I have also maintained my world's lore from campaign to campaign, typically advancing things by several years. It's definitely interesting to watch and learn how Matt handled things in the beginning. "Show, don't tell", indeed. Thanks for the video, Mike.

The way I had a physical reaction to the sound at the end of the video. Terrifying.

I find learning all this super useful not only as cool backstory but some of my favorite fanfics reference pieces of this lore. Five Things Vox Machina Learned about Percy and one thing Vex’ahlia suspects he doesn’t know himself by Nenia458 on AO3 has a section where Keyleth discovers Percy is good with kids during a mission in a tower and hearing the background of that mission (even if the fic goes off from there) is really cool. Really enjoy these vids in general. Always gets me thinking cool, nerdy contemplations and love how this time made a bunch of other great material gain more significance and reflection.

The comics technically did adapt the undead god arc... as one page at the start of Series 2. They just wanted to get it in there. One thing I've always found fascinating about the pre-stream adventures is according to All Work No Play and a few other sources, Taliesin played a Silver Dragonborn Paladin in the first oneshot. I've always wondered who this character was, what happened to them, and if they're still canon. (Since Taliesin was one of the few there who had significant experience playing TTRPGS, he apparently acted as a sort of mentor character both in and out of universe) According to a lot of interviews, Matt loves tinkering with the stats of iconic monsters. If he wants the players to encounter something cool early, like the Lich here or Brimscythe later on (who was apparently "somewhere between the young and adult stages" in terms of dragon stats), he'll lower their stats. If he wants an iconic monster to be more of a threat for a bigger, stronger party, he'll buff them. (The Chroma Conclave, especially Thordak and Raishan, were well above Ancient level) Both Eskil Ryndarian and Grimthorne the fighting ring dwarf were apparently based on Matt's old Everquest characters. The thing with "not throwing the players into fights they can't win" (yet) still applies on-stream. The Briarwoods fight in Episode 25 was potentially winnable, in fact the group nearly killed Sylas in that first encounter. (Although Matt had an easy out in case they did: he'd turn into mist and there was probably a coffin in the carriage to regenerate him, while Delilah could probably use some Vecna shenanigans to come back if she died there)

For my own campaigns - each of them started with a wilder premise than the previous one. First? Cave wirh some spiders, on their way to a city where they wanted to get some jobs for adventurers. Second? Hints from an otherworldly fey patron and chasing a necromancer all over the continent. Third? We started in Sigil, I killed a god on session one and left the lev1 PCs holding a Book of Keeping.

That last bit was amazing

mike, thanks so much for this video! i love that we got to appreciate how matt constructed and shifted the early campaign to make it not just a heroic adventure but adding subplots and different themes so it would feel real! also, would you make a video tackling the challenge raiting system? i cant nailed combat encounters, dont know if because my players are a glass cannon party, if am too dumb to understand it or isnt well design

I have a long running campaign cooking up... Starting at Lv1... The first fight and boss is a literal god. The idea for the fight is partially inspired by Shadow of the Colossus. So the god is very much unkillable. But definitely killable.

I think a big cause of that "This is a different system I shouldn't use it" idea is the mentality that, if it exists in the system I'm using, it will be easier to use since it's already designed to "fit", and that if it comes needing mechanics for some story thing, there might even be mechanics for it already. Also, in reverse, I do sometimes fear bringing something in with the idea that I'm simply missing the game world's "version" of whatever I'm taking.

4e did NOT have quick character creation 😅😅 it took AGES but I LOVE it

Great video! I’d love to hear your thoughts on Kith and Kin too if you’ve had the chance to finish reading it 😊

I don't often steal lore as I mostly Write and worldbuild my own settings, but I do often steal Pathfinder gods and add them into DND or vice versa I really like Apsu as the husband of tiamat and dahak as their son and how that works with the Bahamut faith of dnd.

I have no problem crossing the streams in my own game. I've stolen so much content from everywhere I find interesting that I just made it a multiversal campaign where anything from anywhere can and probably will happen

really excited

I don't have a problem taking ideas from other games (or anything else!) to put in my games. I do have an issue with repeating content. Like I don't know that I can ever run Tomb of Annihilation again. Not because I didn't love that adventure, I like it a lot. But it already happened in my world, and I have a lot of trouble investing in games I run *not* set in my world. (I have repeated content, but I always have a resistance to it, and it messes me up.) Also, the one thing that can mess with me taking ideas wholesale and sticking them in my game world, is that I also write novels in the same setting, and some of those I'd like to publish in some way, and it can become an issue when I have to go "Wait, did I come up with this, or did I rip this off to show it to my players?" It's actually to the good, because it means I have to really mess with the idea and put my stamp on it, and make it my own, but it can be tiresome to have some foundational thing that I reference all the time and remember that it's actually from some movie or whatever that I'd completely forgotten about. I am also hugely in favour of throwing high powered enemies at low powered PC's (as long as you make sure to front load the level of danger, and really communicate that this could be an unwinnable fight).

My last game was the AD&D 2E boxed set Dragon Mountain using the Pathfinder 1E rules. So what game was I playing? We just called it "D&D" too, even though it wasn't the current Dungeons and Dragons ruleset.

bestie i need a bookshelf tour sooooooooooooooooooooo bad!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"None of us saw the gameplay for any of these sessions." Some of us remember Vines...

This is how so many campaigns start. The first dventure is free. and the GM builds on it.

I don't have a resistance to taking ideas from one game and porting them into another, but using established settings that are more detailed than the fairly sketchy setting present in Wanderhome's Hæth setting, because of the similarly ridiculous notion of 'but what if I get it wrong?' Within that context, I'll happily borrow and steal stuff from any source that takes my fancy (though also I'm not entirely sure a lot of stuff for your standard high fantasy campaigns would really make sense with the sort of games I tend to default to running so it tends to be non TTRPG media rather than other TTRPGs) But for an example in an AP context of clear borrowing from different game systems - Oxventure set their Blades in the Dark campaign in the setting of their D&D campaign with a few hundred year time skip to explain... Well... Blades is a Victoriana ghost punk setting rather than a faux-renaissance era fantasy one (I think a lot of us were surprised when their Deadlands setting turned out to be a more normal Weird West setting of alternate universe cowboy era America instead of Geth after another time skip)

So Keylith killing a kid is kinda close to the kick start for Critters? Crazy!!!

Ah so the comics did skip over the undead god. Though they did adapt the adventure against the Myriad in some way. Framing it as the story where the group first came together.

4:20 I still tell people I play DnD no matter what system I'm playing lol especially to the uninitiated (I'm really enjoying Exalted 3e rn but not many ppl know about that game)

Tbh, "the legend of the sh*ts" would have been legendary as a title

Where do the audio clips, of the cast reading the origin story, come from?

The SHITs! XD That is such a CR thing.

Whats the video of Matt pitching the show ? I dont think i ever saw this one

To be fair when they first started there was very little difference between DnD 3.5 and Pathfinder.....maybe just one or two minor adjustments at the time.

22:25 why do i hear boss fight music? 🤔

I still hope for "Jaw Jaw's bizzare adventure" oneshot one day.

1:28 Just for clarrification here... D&D 4E had an extremely streamlined character creation process...as has been noted by many, it was designed and inspired by the success of World of Warcraft and the like. Pathfinder, was based on D&D 3.5, and while its character creation process has more in common with 5E then 4E, it has alot of floating numbers that new player(s) can struggle with, if they dont understand the system... I know, I started playing in a 3.5 game last year, and it took me a few months to master the system (the HeroForge system helps alot, btw); also, making 6-odd characters too. But thats a long story... Suffice to say, for a one-shot, yes... 4E was probably Matt's better choice. But once level ups happened and what not, the system would quickly begin to show its fangs, and thats probably why he then switched the game to Pathfinder after they decided to turn this into a campaign. 4:29 ...as explained, there isn't a real difference between Pathfinder and 3.5 D&D... But, to just lump all TTRPG's together? As "D&D"? Well, I unsubbed from Bob for that, so Im unsubbing from you...

I gotta say that stealing from other systems absolutely improves whatever system you are playing in. For example, I'm running a Dungeons and Dragons campaign and a Call of Cthulhu campaign and those are two wildly different systems in terms of tone. But take a classic DnD monster like a mimic and throw it into a CoC game and watch all hell break loose. Conversely, bring in some investigative elements which are how a lot of people view a game like CoC and suddenly the game world can feel much more involved. Also, just rip the chase mechanics from CoC into whatever system you're running and rip out the entire chapter on chase scenes from the DMG and throw it in a fire. You'll thank me later. Basically, more people should play Call of Cthulhu.

Don't steal rules once OGL is officially replaced. Can come back to bite you.

I thought that VAX was the one that made the deal with the hag for some of his "luck"?

Tiberius lost his luck? looks like we finally know why he got booted off lol

I wish they'd adapt the whole campaign in the animated series... (Dread Emperor especially'd be really cool imo. Also Kraghammer and maybe first session :P?

My players are brand new to DnD, I gave them their first deadly encounter recently and rolls were not going well. Since they're new players I will give them a lot of grace so I made a point to tell them "Not every encounter needs to result in you killing the enemy" to try to move them away from the more video-gamey mindset of "If you get into a fight you have to win." The idea that retreat is an option just didnt occur to them until I said that, they started to back away from the enemy slowly while still trying to fight them off, they managed to kill the little guys and get the 'boss' into its second phase (I gave him a potion that healed him and made him stronger) so if the dice had favoured them they would have been fine. The encounter ended with the enemy screaching at them from the mouth of his cave in fury. (He's gonna come back at some point to try to get revenge)

Ah yes... the semi hemi demi semi lich :)

Maybe a Litchlette instead of semi-litch?

22:33 Yeah... 😂 Only once. Twice at most. He should really stop after the 3d.... 😅

Hi

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I wish the shorthand for this stuff wasn't D&D to be honest. To me it's like saying Scrabble in place of a Board Game Night or like, asking someone to play call of duty as short hand for all video games? Like, I dunno, it just feels frustrating but at the same time it would be weird to get like actively upset at someone for just thinking it's all DnD. It just shows how frustrating of a stranglehold WotC has on this hobby.

Stealing from other media is a DM's best friend.

I realized recently that we haven't seen a FULL Critical Role campaign. We missed two years of Vox Machina, and Mighty Nein was ended early due to Covid.