Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to get back to the adventures of The Mighty Nein, the second long-form campaign of those devious dice-dealers over at Critical Role. After the relatively straightforward high fantasy questing of Vox Machina, this second adventure has seen Critical Role’s players embrace thornier characters with far less straightforward ambitions, some of which seem directly at odds with the goals of others. It’s a natural progression for authors and tabletop players alike; after putting your own spin on comforting genre templates, one often feels a yearning for drama that offers no easy solution, and protagonists who never quite fit a hero’s mantle.
Our last episode certainly exemplified that complexity, while also demonstrating the aggressive adaptive philosophy that has made this production so compelling. The story of Caleb Widowgast proved a harrowing expedition into wizardry’s dark side, as his master Trent guided him towards the brutal murder of his own family. And rather than elucidating this history through fragmented exposition across dozens of episodes, The Mighty Nein chose to visually contrast it against the interrogation and execution of his former accomplice, a choice that embodied this adaptation’s willingness to make big structural changes in order to best utilize its new medium’s strengths. That episode was likely the strongest adaptive sequence of Critical Role altogether, and leaves me all the more excited about how this production will continue to improve this group’s best pre-Brennan campaign. Let’s get to it!