When I first heard of Critical Role from my cousin many years ago, my immediate reaction was "Who has the time for all of this?" 4 hours an episode? Over 100 episodes?? Who could get through all of that!? I eventually did. When I got a job where I could listen to podcasts for 6-8 hours a shift I made my way through all of Campaign 2 over the course of an entire year and I understood the hype. Tabletop is pretty cool! It's fun to share a game with friends where you're able to shape the world around you as you play. I've gone on to listen to other TTRPG podcasts like Naddpod, Adventure Zone, and even more obscure ones that Spotify suggests to me like Dunsparce & Drampas, a Pokemon-based TTRPG podcast. I really want to share my love of these with other people, but the volume of content is so staggering that it's almost impossible to get anyone to engage with An Entire Thing.
HEY LOOK OVER THERE IT'S BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN
Between Campaigns 2 & 3 of Critical Role an anthology series called Exandria Unlimited was started for smaller, mini-campaigns to fill in the gap. Exandria Unlimited: Prime wasn't something I clicked with for a variety of reason, but then came Exandria Unlimited: Calamity, hosted by Brennan Lee Mulligan. Calamity was pulled off so unbelievably well that it surpassed my most positive feelings about The Mighty Nein campaign in the most minuscule fraction of the same time (18 hours vs 500). There's many reasons I could gush about why I liked Calamity so much, from the setting of the Age of Arcanum being the pinnacle of hubris to the amazing characters of Zerxes the godless paladin and Cerrit the eagle-eyed detective, but what it boils down to is one key ingredient: Performance.
Critical Role is fun, but it's not quite a piece of media. Born from the cast's home games, it is still first and foremost a group of friends playing a game for themselves, they just happened to stream it and it certainly exploded in production value, but most of everyone at the table is still playing for the roleplay and less for the game. Players fumble when juggling spells, get things wrong about the story or setting even after being corrected, or try to weasel something into their Bonus Action and ask if they can do something they've never been able to do in their 1000th hour of gameplay against the final boss. For the players playing casually that's fine, but as a listener it's frustrating to have sloppy swordplay drag down the pacing when I want to get more out of the story, and it's frustrating as someone who wants to play one of these!
D&D is a game full of obscure rule interactions that people won't really know until they come up. It's okay for mistakes to happen! However! When they pile up again and again from players not having a complete grasp on what they're trying to do, an issue builds up. The golden appeal of fighting games is that when I see a cool thing I know I can do the cool thing too if I try hard enough. In a tabletop podcast if I see someone do something really cool, but I know that it's a mistake that they're getting away with, I feel frustrated knowing that I can't do that cool thing too. And if I put myself in the shoes of the DM, the impression gradually builds that players don't care enough about the G in TTRPG and that I either have have to do a bunch of work to go along with their mistakes or I have to rain on their parade and tell them they can't do that. It may sound like I'm being a stickler for rules, but I love it when players are able to expand the limits of what they can do with consent and cooperation from their DM, like picking from homebrew (Brennan Lee Mulligan's Reborn Gunslinger in Naddpod's Shadowfell Saga) and Unearthed Arcana playtest options (Emily Axford's UA Spores Druid in Naddpod C1) or reflavoring spells to more properly represent their character (Jester's ice-type Hellish Rebuke in The Mighty Nein). There's a huge difference between that and getting away with unchecked slip-ups like getting half damage on Disintegrate (a spell designed to be an all-or-nothing gamble) or getting to skip Contagion's saving throws (an extremely debilitating spell very unwieldy to use in battle) and winning an encounter off of one spell. It most frequently happens in combat, and combat is such a rich opportunity for self-expression that it's lame that it so frequently becomes the bog of these podcasts.
In comparison, in Exandria Unlimited: Calamity everyone has their shit together! Players were able to jump into the bodies of their 14th level characters and play them better, roleplay and gameplay wise, just as good, if not better, than their characters that they had 400 hours to grow into. Very few moves were made that weren't within the natural limits of the game, and the few that were were consented to by Brennan because it's the Age of Arcanum and the characters are just that good, and the one that I did catch that was unnoticed was close enough to the extra things allowed that my awareness of it didn't undercut that moment. Brennan's narrative style is so good for making such powerful, evocative moments on the fly that it's a perfect fit for the high-power setting of Calamity, not to mention the very beginning starts off with such a high-tension dream sequence that hooks you in immediately. Calamity is far and away the best level of Performance that Critical Role has ever put out, and it's with that backbone of good G that the TTRP becomes even better!
EXU: Calamity is a mini-campaign set in the distant past of the land of Exandria, in the Age of Arcanum imminently before the eponymous apocalypse known as the Calamity. It follows the Ring of Brass, an informal group of influential figures as they catch wind of something nefarious afoot in their flying city of Avalir and seek to stop the conspiracy that threatens them, all the while their flaws of pride and hubris end up contributing to the doom that would befall them. When I say imminently before the apocalypse, I mean that the entire thing takes place on the very last day before it! It's Fantasy Super Titanic! There's so much I love about it, whether it's the city of Avalir and its culture being the height of hedonistic wizardry, the fascinating interaction between a paladin that believes everyone is worthy of redemption coming face to face with the Devil himself wounded in bed, or the simply human struggle of a detective being torn between doing the right thing or running away with his family. But what I love most of all is that it's something I could possibly recommend someone! At 4 episodes of 4-5 hours long each with a break in the middle of each episode, an 8-part movie is much more digestible than an entire campaign that would take longer than watching all of One Piece. With the setting of the Age of Arcanum being far before the other campaigns there's no prior knowledge needed for it, besides possibly the 10 minutes of Exandria's history for better context around the Calamity. I don't need to tell you to jump to the middle of it for The Good Part and I don't need to sell you on clips and highlights first. It is exceptional, it is monumental, and it is some damn good radio drama. I want you to see the story that had me crying in an airplane for 30 minutes straight when I finished it.
Exandria: An Intimate History is available on YouTube here.
Exandria Unlimited: Calamity is available on YouTube here.
