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!
Episode 6
We open on what appears to the frontier edge of the kingdom, as soldiers dig trenches while ravens circle overhead. The soldiers take these birds as a sign of the “Orphan-Maker’s” approach
It’s fun seeing the variant ways both Vox Machina and the Mighty Nein’s adaptations grapple with Ashley’s frequent work-necessitated absences from the DnD table. For Pike, they basically kept sending her off on vision quests, a solution that never felt particularly graceful – for Yasha, they’re actively building her up as an unknown, antagonistic force, using her textual absence to create a sense of anxious anticipation for her arrival
We get an absurd demonstration of Yasha’s strength as she cuts straight through a horse, followed by a dozen or so hapless soldiers. The choreography does a fine job of emphasizing her exceedingly brute force-based combat style, as she flings swords like kunai and rips out throats without effort
A quick flashback contextualizes her journey as efficiently as possible: she’s clearly still mourning for a lost lover, but some mage has bound her to his bloody service, utilizing a crest on her back to force her to seek the Kryn beacon
Some lovely establishing shots as our crew finally arrives at Zadash. This show continues to make sure each city has a distinct visual identity, with Zadash defined by its tall, isolated round towers and sharply angled orange-tiled roofs. A couple key defining details go a very long way
Molly chides Nott to “never steal from happy people,” a moral axiom that makes about as much sense as anything else about his character
Jester finds a copy of “Tusk Love,” one of Exandria’s apparent premiere romantasy fables. A fun gag in its own right, and one that Jester’s player Laura rightfully ran with as a reflection of how much of Jester’s worldview is constructed out of the stories she’s read, given her extremely sheltered upbringing. Basically any worldbuilding detail can be used to texture your player character, if you can find some way it resonates with their history or personality
Beau finally gets her message to her contact, who unlocks it and reveals Trent Ikathon is the traitor. A nice scene for emphasizing Beau’s fundamentally honorable nature, as she actually stands up for Caleb in the face of her contact’s accusations
Meanwhile, being back in the academy city has Caleb understandably jumping at shadows
“Space… reality… how far can it go?” The beacon is essentially this narrative’s central MacGuffin, and I’m curious to see how precisely they intend to clarify its power. The players never really got to closely examine it in-campaign, which was likely for the best, as that allowed it to maintain a certain mythic aura. However, having Trent consistently testing its limitations means this adaptation will likely have to define those limitations at some point
They’re also defining Essek as something of a romantic, bumbling fool, which is quite a divergence from his more calculating original incarnation. I’m a little dubious about that shift – I don’t think making him more innocent makes him more interesting, or even necessarily more sympathetic. If this story can handle Caleb’s moral ambiguity, it should leave similar room for Essek!
Mollymauk leads the party to the Evening Nip, where Beau rejoins them. Caleb questions her on where she’s been, which actually feels like progress for those two – like he’s giving her a chance to explain herself, rather than just assuming the worst
After being nearly accosted by the bar’s guards, Jester’s comment jogs Molly’s memory regarding the passphrase. A tidy adaptation of a DnD staple: earning your way into the thieves’ guild/pleasure district/gambling hall back room, where the presumed mastermind will either fight you or offer a quest. A classic scenario both because it happens all the time in fantasy fiction (even Fellowship’s first meeting with Strider is essentially a version of this sequence), and also because “you’re in a tavern where a lot of different things are happening, use whatever skills you think are relevant to earn a local’s trust/fear/admiration” is a setup that allows players to flex their creativity and apply whatever skills define their character
Meanwhile, Trent is at last confronted by the leader of the Cobalt Soul
Given their successful infiltration, Jester floats the idea of starting a detective agency to Nott. This was one of their recurring paired beats during the tabletop campaign, and a fairly strong, bond-defining one at that – good enough that my own playing group basically poached it wholesale for our current campaign, as one of the links connecting my character and our bard. As I’ve said before, creating unique shared links between specific members of your party really helps bring their distinct relationships to life, and avoid the feeling that everyone’s just sort of equally vague friends with everyone else
Mollymauk then bumps into Cree, a panther woman who apparently knew him from before he lost his memory. She speaks of rituals and betrayals, stacking mystery atop mystery regarding his true nature. Beyond making it exceedingly difficult to effectively bond with your fellow players, amnesia backstories also possess this tendency to sort of keep piling expectations for a reveal that can’t necessarily bear that kind of weight. And if things play out in an unexpected way, it can become all the harder to tether that backstory reveal to the story’s ongoing drama – all pitfalls that Molly’s journey ends up exemplifying
Then at last we meet the Gentleman, who is clearly being played by Nathan Fillion. Man, they got some names for this season
Ooh, some fun rough-sketched illustrations for the Gentleman describing their quest, employing some art deco-adjacent minimalism to convey the ambiguity of his descriptions
They are tasked with retrieving an old pirate lord’s arcane compass, presumably by prying it from his cold, undead hands. An exceedingly straightforward “go retrieve the treasure from the trap-filled dungeon” quest, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. DnD is a loose enough template to allow for all manner of ambitious original designs, but its mechanics are most immediately applicable to facing challenges like, well, dungeons and dragons, and if your campaign doesn’t feature any equivalent hurdles, you’re likely using the wrong game system
The three pillars of the game’s design are essentially exploration, socialization, and combat, and I personally try to design both individual quests and larger groupings of quests to provide a rotating bounty of all three
Another clear pin placed in Fjord’s development, as he reluctantly agrees to this adventure that he clearly feels is beyond him. While it’s fun to play a chaos gremlin like Jester, campaigns generally also need sturdy traditional arcs to rally around, and “reluctant would-be adventurer comes to believe in their own strength” is about as traditional as it gets. If everyone’s just doing wacky bits, the campaign can eventually come to feel like something that’s just happening to the party, as opposed to something they are guiding and growing through – one of the many problems that derailed Critical Role’s third campaign
The Gentleman then requests samples of the party’s blood, to track them if they betray him. Certainly a big ask for the party – that’s the sort of thing you basically know from the start will bite you in the ass, given the basic rules of storytelling. Be careful with forcing your players to make obvious mistakes; sometimes the course of their journey will make that inevitable, but players don’t generally enjoy being punished for things they can’t control, since the alternative here is just “well, I guess we’re all walking away from the plot”
Splashes of seasoning keep other character journeys simmering as the party begins their quest – a nod to Nott’s fear of water, a rumbling from the deep that only Fjord hears
“If protecting Caleb means getting through this hallway of death, then I got this.” Part of what makes Caleb and Nott’s dynamic so compelling is how they are simultaneously utterly loyal to each other and also somewhat bad for each other. Happy people in healthy relationships are great in real life, but frequently kinda boring in fiction – perhaps your characters might eventually resolve into something like that, but the journey there is most interesting if even loving bonds are tainted with a hint of poison, whether that poison rests in the need that brings them together, or the facets of their nature that their relationship tends to bring out. There’s a reason we gravitate towards the Bonnie and Clydes of the world; poisoned relationships lay the truth of our needs and natures bare, letting stories examine and find humanity in the flaws that make us real
The production does a fine job of pulling off a full Raiders-style trap hallway. In terms of its length relative to overall influence, I feel like the opening of Raiders has probably had the greatest impact on game design of any sequence in cinematic history
Some excellent faces for Nott getting a needle to the butt. The production really does favor her and Jester tremendously
The party then runs into a fun brazier-and-constellation puzzle. Logical puzzles are always kinda tricky in DnD, since you’re asking the players themselves to solve something, not relying on the mechanical problem-solving systems of the game itself. If you don’t want your players to simply role dice and discover if their characters are clever enough to be given the solution, you need to design a puzzle that will challenge but not frustrate – a game design skill set in its own right
This particular puzzle embodies several good rules of thumb for such designs: offering a progression of sub-puzzles that flatter player proficiencies (Caleb lighting the braziers), facilitating fruitful experimentation (the clear feedback of rotating the braziers), and validating the players if they’re on the right track (the room shifting with each part of the puzzle solved). All of these aspects point towards a greater truth: puzzles in DnD should generally be designed as a coherent progression of problem-solving stages, rather than just one core epiphany
Hah, the pirate’s played by Lou Wilson. He’s one of the core Dimension 20 players, and quite possibly the best professional DnD player who wasn’t invited to Critical Role’s fourth campaign (though I could see an argument for Emily Axford as well)
The party then reaches a massive chamber full of towering stone statues. About as clear of a Chekhov’s Gun as DnD offers – you see massive statues in a trap-laden dungeon, you know you’ll be fighting those fuckers soon enough
Meanwhile, Trent’s gamble pays off – the king is indeed more concerned with destroying his enemies than punishing Trent for his lies
An invisible platform puzzle then offers a tidy chance to progress this episode’s main party conflict: Caleb and Beau’s mutual mistrust
Fjord simultaneously dives into the chamber’s deep pool on some fool errand from his patron. Supernatural patrons are handy for driving individual party members forward in ways that actually foment the distrust of their companions, something this story uses for both Fjord and Jester
Love that Caleb immediately directs Beau to start just piling away treasure. They may be here with a purpose, but that’s no reason to put all this gold to waste
As expected, retrieving the compass activates the stone warriors. Different genres and mediums possess different load-bearing assumptions, and for DnD, it’s pretty much expected that dungeons will be peppered with convoluted yet still-working mechanical pitfalls
Solid CG models for these golems, they integrate quite nicely into the compositions
A tumbling boulder offers a chance for Caleb and Beau to put a ribbon on their episode arc, as each saves the other in turn from certain death
And then Fjord gets his own development-affirming moment, as Jester’s faith in his potential prompts him to try and embody it, by pulling the team together rather than making his own escape
We then journey to the war’s frontline, as Essek realizes what Trent intends to do with the beacon. Essek yanks his own close friend out of the blast radius, a choice that basically exemplifies his mistakes so far – whether in terms of this friendship or his mother’s illness, he’s always acting on behalf of his personal feelings, while ignoring the larger political consequences of his actions
Nice utilization of the show’s theme song for this moment of grand tragedy. Sequences like this really exemplify this adaptation’s attempt to correct the course of the original campaign – the war always felt distant and impersonal for the Mighty Nein, so they never really got invested in its outcome. In contrast, this adaptation is working hard to make the consequences of inaction feel visceral and horrifying
And Done
Thus the Mighty Nein at last complete a traditional dungeoneering adventure, braving fiendish traps, murderous golems, and the ghost of Lou Wilson as they work to retrieve a mysterious magical compass. This was actually the first episode of this adaptation to more or less resemble a genuine tabletop adventure, but the show certainly didn’t let that solidity of structure go to waste – forcing the party through shared trials served as an excellent way to strengthen their internal bonds, with the particularly thorny contrast of Beau and Caleb here being reforged into a shared sense of responsibility for their wacky companions. Thus one final lesson reveals itself: every shared struggle is a chance for exploring and furthering your party’s internal dynamics, providing them the essential bonding moments necessary to make the ultimate tests of those bonds feel earned and satisfying. Friction is a resource, so make sure to put it to good use!
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