The Legend of Vox Machina is an outstanding animated series for Dungeons & Dragons.

I finished watching the Legend of Vox Machina on Amazon, and I decided to talk about it on my blog. Lucky you, right? So, if you are unfamiliar with this work, it is an animated series based-on Matthew Mercer's Dungeons & Dragons campaigns that are aired on his YouTube channel called, "Critical Role." Matt Mercer is kind of a B-List or maybe even C-List celebrity. He's a handsome guy that has talents in voice acting, and an obvious love of D&D. And he plays with people who are equally talented, like Felicia Day. But he's not the kind of actor that headlines movies like Tom Holland does. Rather, he's several pegs down the chain of Hollywood, mostly filling in on projects here and there (kinda like Joe Manganiello who may be a slightly bigger celebrity due to his wife Sofia Vergara and his obvious connections to powerful nerds in Hollywood, like the producers of the Game of Thrones series and being friends with Zach Snyder). Matt Mercer isn't "big" like that, but maybe more on the lines of Wil Wheaton. But that doesn't mean he isn't well connected and that he doesn't have millionaire friends with some measure of influence in the entertainment industry. Obviously, he's got an excellent agent, and they were able to get Amazon to put up the money to make Legends of Vox Machina into an animated series. That's a pretty major achievement.

Legends of Vox Machina was super entertaining, and I'm so glad that a person like Matt Mercer is pushing my hobby of many decades into the mainstream. There are many things I loved about the first season, so I'll try to boil it down. First, Legends of Vox Machina took the subject matter seriously (fantasy is nothing to laugh at folks), while still making it crazy fun by playing on tropes that real players do with their characters in tabletop games all of the time. If you don't understand what I'm saying, let me put it this way. When people ask me the question: what is playing Dungeons & Dragons like? I usually respond with, "It's like really bad improv but with dice rolls."

My favorite character by far was the bard, who was so over-the-top with his character that he wore a rainbow colored codpiece in one part so as to "distract" the crowd enough for his teammates to perform an important action. I also loved the LGBTQ representation, and the world seemed very woke without making it come across as heavy-handed. It managed to bring fantasy into the modern world, giving the old epic fantasy genre a much-needed update by supporting inclusion, diversity, and adopting our modern way of saying things. The F-bomb gets dropped a lot, while the series progresses as a kind of "greatest hits" on the well-known monsters of Dungeons & Dragons (starting out with a literal dragon that is badass). I'm also sure that it will have its haters from the community, mostly those people who are stuck in the mud, and who believe that things should never change from the way they were represented in the 1980's. They are wrong, of course. But it won't stop them from airing their opinions in any way possible while they watch reruns of M*A*S*H and other shows from that same era.

I suppose at its most basic level, what I appreciate most about The Legend of Vox Machina is that it is a perfect vehicle to showcase how a game like Dungeons & Dragons can make you a better storyteller. Anyone who likes to write fiction should consider getting into a game, creating a character, and then exploring a world. Sure, there are dice rolls to represent the heavy-lifting mechanics of combat, and there are many pages one has to read before one is ready to play. However, the investment is worth it because it forces you to pay close attention to the motivations behind characters. Great characters are never one-dimensional. There is a reason why they do a thing, and when you play a game, you are forced to figure out how A connects to B which then connects to C long before you even do anything. This is how you breathe life into a character and make them believable to an audience.

I also like that there are many more opportunities for people to interact with others in the "business" of Dungeons & Dragons. Here in the Salt Lake valley, I know a guy who paints miniatures for Joe Manganiello, which is honestly kind of cool. They are on a first name basis with each other. I also participate in Kickstarters for new D&D products, and I even sent a monster in last week to a contest to see if it will get printed in the next Tome of Beasts. I'm kind of excited by that, because if my monster gets picked (I won't know the results until mid-March) there's a chance that they may ask me for more details about the world in which the monster came from, and thus, I might get some other ideas published. But all of the above is possible, in part, because Critical Role has garnered such a huge online following.

Anyway, long story short, you should give The Legend of Vox Machina a try. Who knows? You may really like it.

I've decided I'm going to post some of the vignettes the players in my D&D game have emailed me regarding their characters.

With the permission of some of my players in my weekly Dungeons & Dragons game, I'm going to post the fiction vignettes that they've been inspired to write about their characters. I think you may enjoy them. I plan on doing the first one Friday, but first, there's a little housekeeping in that I want to share with you how I started them all out adventuring in my homebrew world (homebrew is a term that means it is not an official product; rather it is one of the author's imagination).

I started them off by actually having them create roleplaying personas of people who are alive in modern Salt Lake City, year 2021. I told them that the only restriction on this was that they couldn't be a famous person. My friend Jed decided that he would be a thirty-five year-old man living in the basement of his parent's house, bitter that he cannot get a girlfriend, and watching anime porn/hentai all day long on Wi-Fi while trolling people on message boards. My friend Jake decided to be a sixty-five year old business man who got drunk a lot because his wife of 25-years left him for the son of a local billionaire. My friend Jesse decided that he wanted to play a guy that was in his eighties who was super rich. My friend Jordan decided he would play the son of Jake's sixty-five year old character. And my friend Sasha decided that he would play the son of the billionaire responsible for breaking up Jake's character's marriage. There wasn't a whole lot of originality, as most people just wanted to be either rich or to make a character that mocked and/or teased Jake in some aspect. Jake has diagnosable levels of narcissistic personality disorder, so it may have been a kind of passive/aggressive response to build characters linked to his background. Additionally, Jake may also have encouraged it as he very much wants things to be about him. But I digress...the table was set for these characters to make their first appearance on my game world, which I call "Wynwrayth."

Now, all of them were friends with a guy they called Milbar, and I always had in my head that Milbar looked like the actor Paul Giamatti. So, I told them that in this fictional Earth, Paul Giamatti didn't exist as an actor because I was going to use him as Milbar. They were okay with that. Milbar in the Wynwrayth universe is the very powerful god of magic. And I stole an idea from the movie, Jumanji (Dwayne Johnson not Robin Williams), to get them to Wynwrayth, only it was a bit more "colorful."

I told the group that their characters all knew Milbar (that was their common link). He was some skeezy guy that always had the hottest women hanging off his arm. He was the friend that always asked for favors, borrowed money, and never paid any of it back. He was kind of a slovenly pig, very well-spoken, but also arrogant. When he was at a party he would be wearing those 70's style open shirts with the big collars, displaying lots of chest hair and gold chains, with a cigar in one hand and brandy in a shot glass in the other. He'd just blatantly tell people, "I'm the god of magic," and then do cheesy card tricks while womanizing.

Anyway, for one reason or another, they all ended up at his house which wasn't in the nicest neighborhood one sunny afternoon in mid-July. With the pandemic raging, they were there to collect on money he owed them (or various other reasons). They arrived and saw in the driveway an adult maid service Kia was parked. I described it as bright pink, with fake eyelashes around the headlights and dominatrix stuff in the backseat. They knocked on the door, but Milbar didn't answer. They heard noises which caught their curiosity, and they walked in. That's when I played a cut scene from the show Billions. I'll link it below.

View it to just after Paul Giamati's character is getting the "golden shower" and that's where I stopped it. Needless to say, my group of players was shocked and laughing out loud. That's when I said, "Suddenly, Milbar notices you and in a fit of shock and embarrassment, he yells, 'Uhh! Uhhh! THIS ISN'T WHAT YOU THINK!" and he's gesturing wildly with his hands when "BAM" they get hit by something that flares out of him, and the next thing they know...they are hurtling through space and time in a wormhole of colors and images that are both terrifying and beautiful. And then everything goes black. When they wake up, they are in a field on top of a hill, and they are no longer in their original bodies. Jed's character (the man that lived in the basement and loved anime porn) is in the body of a super hot half Drow teenaged girl of seventeen (so he's now essentially transgender), and the others have similar and shocking discoveries of their new bodies. Furthermore, just like in the show Jumanji they can slap their upper chest at any time and view their character sheet. However, no one in the world can actually see it. Oh and each one of them has something useless that came from Earth. Cell phones with no signal, paper money and a money clip, one even had the steering wheel to their parked car (but the car wasn't there). One person had a laptop with no signal, etc. And that was the first day for their characters visiting my world, and we've been playing for a little over a year now.

So now, with that background, maybe the vignettes I post will have more meaning (and hopefully you will enjoy them).