Amazon's big bet — Critical Role's breakout nerdworld animated series — is back for another wild season

• Amazon made a big bet on nerdworld when it decided to back Critical Role's animated series.
• In 2019, the crew's Kickstarter broke records with a $11.3 million fundraising round.

In 2019, a group of eight voice actors in Los Angeles was best known for playing "Dungeons & Dragons" on Twitch. But what seemed like niche internet fame at the time soon snowballed into something far more lucrative.

A moonshot fundraising campaign to make a short animated series based on their "D&D" campaign ended up breaking Kickstarter records at the time. The "Critical Role" fandom gave the crew more than $11.3 million to get to work, and they later secured Amazon's backing to take their pitch on at the Prime Video streaming platform.

Five years on, the cast of "Critical Role" is nerdworld business royalty — and three seasons deep in "The Legend of Vox Machina," the animated series based on their first "D&D" campaign. The eight cofounders now run the company of the same name. It's serious business: They are selling out arenas, expanding into the audio drama business, and running their own game publishing arm.

In teasers for "The Legend of Vox Machina's" third season, the adventuring party — all voiced by the CR cofounders — travel to hell and back to find a way to save their world of Exandria.

The first three episodes of "The Legend of Vox Machina" will be available on Prime Video on October 3. This season has twelve episodes, which will be released weekly in four tranches.

During interviews with Business Insider in early August, the cast teased that this upcoming season would be all kinds of heartbreaking, a tragic tonal shift from the jam-packed action of the first two seasons.

Speaking to BI again before the season's launch, CR cofounder Liam O'Brien said this third season will cover some "incredibly rewarding, heartbreaking, and inspiring moments" from the first CR campaign.

"These stories were deeply personal when they spilled out of our mouths at the table all those years ago," O'Brien said.

"And we only know each other better, have only performed with each other longer, have only become more important to each other over the years," he said of his friends, the CR cofounders. "Getting to bring this level of structure, polish, love, and care — and animation and art too — is beyond surreal."

O'Brien also teased that despite all the trials his character, Vax'ildan, goes through this season, there's much more in store for his half-elven rogue.

"If we are lucky enough to tell the entire story — that we hope to, knock on wood — I think he's just getting started," O'Brien told BI.

"The Legend of Vox Machina's" third season will also see the druid Keyleth — played by CR creative director Marisha Ray — getting more powerful. According to the sneak peek fans have gotten of the season, this season will also show how Keyleth falls deeper in love with O'Brien's Vax'ildan.

"She's in her girlboss era for sure. It's been so fun to explore again and to see it play out in concert with everything else going on in Exandria," Ray said.

There's more Amazon-backed animation work in the pipeline, CR's cofounders say

Critical Role is also working on "Mighty Nein," another Amazon-backed animated series based on the team's second long-running "D&D" campaign.

No word yet from Prime Video on an official release date, but the CR said in a June 7 X post that the recording process was underway.

"The Mighty Nein definitely is its own beast. And you can look at the two series side by side, and with the knowledge of them sharing a world, you can see where that connective tissue is," Critical Role chief creative officer Matthew Mercer said. "But the second campaign that it's based on had an entirely different vibe and an entirely different story, with a very unique mix of different characters."

Mercer — who's also the crew's regular game master — added that with the "Mighty Nein" series, viewers will see the broader world of Exandria, the world he crafted, and in which all of Critical Role's campaigns to date have been based.

"We'll get to see the perspectives outside of the Mighty Nein and how the rest of the world is also wrestling with the rising tensions," Mercer said.

Cast member and CR cofounder Laura Bailey told BI that in "Mighty Nein," the cast is getting to explore their characters' origins more, and in a way that they didn't get to with Vox Machina.

"You get to see them, their backstories, and them coming together," Bailey said.