Critical Role streams a private D&D game — fans fund a record $11.3M animated series

In 2012 a circle of voice actors — working on games like Overwatch and The Last of Us — began a private Dungeons & Dragons campaign around a friend's kitchen table. In March 2015, encouraged to share it, they started livestreaming the game on Twitch under the name Critical Role, with Matthew Mercer as Dungeon Master and the players staying fully in character.

The bet was that a raw, unscripted tabletop session could be entertainment. Episodes ran three to six hours and the cast treated them as theater: handmade sets, miniatures, in-character banter, and no safety net of edits. The show found an audience that kept growing — first campaign alone ran 115 episodes — and in 2018 the cast left their hosting network to form Critical Role Productions.

In March 2019 the company asked fans to fund a 22-minute animated special, setting a goal of $750,000. The campaign met that goal within minutes and closed on April 19, 2019 with $11,385,449 pledged by 88,887 backers, making it the most-funded film or television project in Kickstarter history at the time and the fifth most-funded project on the platform overall.

The windfall turned a special into a ten-episode series, The Legend of Vox Machina, produced with Titmouse. Amazon Studios then picked it up, ordering 24 episodes across two seasons; the show premiered on Prime Video on January 28, 2022, and Critical Role expanded into a full media company with multiple campaigns, games and a subscription streaming service.