Prime Video’s animated show The Legend of Vox Machina Returns for season 3 on October 3, and the Dungeons and Dragons-style adventures take a darker turn than ever before. The project, which blossomed as part of a series of Critical Role live streams, has ballooned into a phenomenon that expands far beyond the tabletop role-playing circles where it originated. Matthew Mercer’s fictional world of Exandria now has countless fans worldwide breathlessly waiting for the next chapter and anticipating the final destruction of the Chroma Conclave.
The Legend of Vox Machina Season 2 saw Vax give his life for his sister, Vax, and become the champion of Ravens after she brought him back to life and he left his mortal form. Meanwhile, Vox Machina joined forces with Raishan the Green Dragon, and the alliance will test more than their strength in the new batch of episodes. As the larger mission of saving Exandria unfolds, fans will have the opportunity to get to know both their favorite characters even better and visit previously unseen locations in animated form.
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Screen Rant Interviewed Matt Mercer, Sam Riegel, Laura Bailey and Taliesin Jaffe about their favorite aspects of The Legend of Vox Machina Season 3. The team teased highlights of their character arcs, important expansions on Critical role Lore, and even some of their most cherished Easter eggs.
Even fans of Critical Role will break new ground in The Legend of Vox Machina Season 3
“We get to tweak and add and change and make it the best version we can for animation.”
Screen Rant: Matt, we get to explore some of these Vox Machina NPC backstories in a way we weren’t able to in the original campaign. What was your favorite part of getting to dig into some of the characters?
Matthew Mercer: My favorite part was being able to really express the stories, finally. A lot of the bits I have to talk about in wrap aspects of the post-campaign or refer to panels and stuff, but never have to really experience and meat. And now that we get to go back and adapt the stories for this medium, we get to take the time to see other perspectives of the world and the story.
Along with Vox Machina, we can go back and divide the group into places where it allows space for some of the secondary characters to step into the light and learn more about them and live with them and travel with them. And it’s one of my favorite facets of the fact that we’ve gotten to be able to adopt this. We get to take all the best parts of it, and we get to tweak and add and change and make it the best version we can for animation. Yes, I love it.
Break down the character journeys in The Legend of Vox Machina Season 3
Everyone can agree that “it’s a beautiful journey to go on this season.”
Screen Rant: Sam, I’m loving Scanlan’s arc this season. Can you talk to me a little bit about how knowing he has a daughter has impacted his motivation, not only as a person, but as an adventurer?
Sam Riegel: I think it changed everything about his outlook. The first season, he is just looking for a good time. The second season, he realizes that he needs more than that. And now the third season, he realizes why. I think he realizes that none of his relationships have actually been relationships, and he just is now [having some].
Also, by knowing his friends in Vox Machina, he has seen what a real relationship and real family can be. And so, he wants to see if he can have one of these for himself. It’s a real personal journey for him, and it definitely affects him until the end of the season. He makes a lot of mistakes along the way, but he’s trying to do it for all the right reasons.
Screen Rant: Taliesin, I love that we see Percy striving for hope and happiness instead of revenge. Can you talk to me a little bit about this change in direction for Percy, and how he has to fight against the instinct to seek revenge with aspects of his past still not put to bed?
Taliesin Jaffa: He was a character who was so specifically motivated by all this anger that when it finally – I will say it didn’t disappear, but it spread for a while – he then had to look around. And see the damage he has done to everything. Then he spent a season continuing to make a mess, trying to figure out his leg.
It was nice to actually get a hold on it and start rebuilding. And, since we’re talking about how things move, he has the opportunity to really get a dark reflection of where the road might have gone. at least, [he’s] Trying to create grace that might have saved him and trying to talk to himself like this regardless of the outcome.
Screen Rant: Laura, I love Vex’s journey, especially because she has to face all the family dynamics and feelings she doesn’t want to deal with. What, to you, is the most interesting part of Vex’s interpersonal relationships in Vox Machina? While he has to deal with not only her past with her father, but the fact that her brother has chosen to realistically sacrifice himself for her.
Laura Bailey: There’s a lot of grief, right? What’s really beautiful is Vex’s walls and her need for her to make people believe that she has it all together and she really doesn’t need them. For Percy to be the one to help her shed that layer—in more ways than one, baby—and to help her realize that it’s okay to be vulnerable, it’s okay to show that part of yourself. And then realize that too late and what that means and that regret and found that in itself of going, “I can not stop the people because things are finite, and they need to know what they mean.” Yes, it is a beautiful journey to go on this season.
Answering the age-old question of why Vox Machina’s Vex senses dragons
Sometimes the answer is really just, “It’s on my character sheet.”
Screen Rant: Can you tease if we get into the origins of Vex’s connection to the dragons and her ability to sense when they’re around?
Sam Riegel: We’re just saying why, I think. Is it this season? I can’t remember. Maybe it’s the time where you say, like, “I’ve studied dragons. That’s why I can sense them,” or something.
Laura Bailey: Yeah, but I said that the first dragon fight. She just has an amazing ability.
Matthew Mercer: Yeah, it’s one of those fancy hand waves. Like, “There are reasons, but you get it.”
Laura Bailey: “She taught them, she knows.”
Taliesin Jaffe: “It’s on my character sheet.”
More critical role Easter eggs and Exandria expansion await in Vox Machina Season 3
“The whole hell sequence is basically all my sketchbooks growing up.”
Screen Rant: I love that we get to visit so many more locations in Exandria this season. Do you each have a favorite place to explore that we haven’t seen before?
Sam Rigel: I really like to go to Angel’s Market. We were only there for a short time, but we really got a glimpse of the other continent, and we wrote a language for the area. ; For all the words that the guards speak. We hired a linguist to write the language, so it’s like its own translation language, which is pretty cool.
Laura Bailey: I mean, I wasn’t there personally, but I love the Hells.
Matthew Mercer: It was so much fun working out the designs for this one. The design language, the creatures, the architecture, the mood… the whole hell sequence was basically all my sketchbooks growing up, so I was so excited to be a part of all that.
Screen Rant: Matt, is there a character that you haven’t been able to fully delve into that you really want to in the future, or even in some other medium?
Matthew Mercer: In Exandria, we’ve only touched on them so much in the campaign, but d’Artagnan is such a delightfully complex, funny, mischievous little bastard. Hopefully, if we have future seasons, maybe we’ll get a chance to see more of him. Other things in development may also have the opportunity…so, yeah, he’s always a fun character to come back to.
Screen Rant: There are so many great Easter eggs this season. Do you have a favorite?
Laura Bailey: My absolute favorite is Matt’s “Ruby of the Sea” song. love it love it It blows my mind every time I hear it. It’s so good.
Matthew Mercer: Even just singing and recording it the first time, it was in my head for two weeks afterwards. It still, every now and then, will creep in very first thing in the morning.
Taliesin Jaffe: Our professional cameo in Hell is pretty great.
Sam Riegel: I think seeing a short of Keyleth as a goldfish was my favorite.
Screen Rant: What, for each of you, was the most surprising element of returning to the stories of Vox Machina Still so much time off? Were there pieces where you maybe even gained a new understanding of the characters?
Laura Bailey: More understanding of the world than what we have when we’re playing. As we progress through even Campaign 3, things are revealed about the world that affect Campaign 1 and the way we viewed it, so it’s really cool to get to incorporate some of that into the animated series in ways that we would have not been. Can if we didn’t expand the world like we did.
More about The Legend of Vox Machina Season 3
Everything is at stake in the long-awaited Season 3 of The Legend of Vox Machina The Chroma Conclave’s path of destruction spreads like wildfire as the Cinder King hunts down Vox Machina. Our beloved band of misfits must rise above inner (and outer) spirits to try and save their loved ones, the Tal’Dorei, and all of Exandria.
Check out our others The Legend of Vox Machina Season 3 interviews here:
Source: Screen Rant Plus