The new animated series adapts Critical Role’s next campaign, unfolding twenty years after The Legend of Vox Machina.
Critical Role’s team is gearing up for the premiere of The Mighty Nein — an animated retelling of their second Dungeons & Dragons campaign. This isn’t their first attempt: the studio’s debut series, The Legend of Vox Machina, premiered in 2022, and three years on the creators say they’ve learned how to avoid earlier missteps.
Turning a tabletop role-playing campaign into a full-fledged series proved challenging. Critical Role co‑founder and executive producer Travis Willingham told Polygon at New York Comic Con 2025 that the charm of D&D lies in the “anarchy of the table” — a freedom that can’t be fully replicated on screen. He said that experience taught the team how to craft an adaptation without losing the spirit of the original.
Back in 2019 Critical Role launched a Kickstarter to fund a 22‑minute Vox Machina special; the campaign reached its goal within an hour and raised more than $4.3 million in a day. That success turned the short into a series, with Amazon Studios acquiring the rights and ordering an additional 14 episodes. However, Willingham admitted the second season was produced in haste.
“We didn’t know if we would get renewed after the second season, so we tried to cram everything in at once. That hurt the pacing. Now we’ve decided to take a different approach — not to rush and to begin with a ‘zero session’.”
In Dungeons & Dragons, a “zero session” is a meeting held before a campaign starts where the Dungeon Master and players agree on rules, boundaries, and character backstories. For the show, that means The Mighty Nein will unfold at a more measured pace, with greater focus on character development, atmosphere, and detail.
Each episode of the new series runs roughly 44 minutes — almost double the length of Vox Machina installments. That extra runtime gives the creators room to expand the plot and deepen emotional beats. It’s already been confirmed the show will include scenes that were previously only referenced during live sessions, including Fjord and Jester’s first encounter.
At the same time, Critical Role co‑founder Laura Bailey cautioned that the entire campaign can’t be preserved intact.
“A three‑year campaign made up of four‑ or five‑hour sessions contains too much material. But trimming it lets us add depth to the moments that remain. We can make scenes more resonant, even if they play out a little differently.”
The series premiere of The Mighty Nein is scheduled for November 19, 2025, exclusively on Prime Video. The trailer is available at this link.
Source: iXBT.games