What do you get when you take eight adult friends — all professional voice actors — who've been playing a home D&D game for years and decide, on a lark, to put it on Twitch? You get Critical Role, a phenomenon now in its fourth campaign, spanning roughly a decade of streaming and somewhere between "a lot" and "an almost unhinged number" of hours of content. Hem Brewster, lead producer at Blighthouse Studio and a Critical Role early adopter, joins Mandy all the way from Iceland to break down The Legend of Vox Machina — the Amazon Prime animated series that took that basement game, ran a Kickstarter asking for a couple hundred thousand dollars, received millions in days, and then somehow turned it into a 100%/94% Rotten Tomatoes-rated show that works equally well for lifelong nerds and people who just showed up for the fart jokes. (Both are valid. The fart jokes are good.)Hem walks Mandy through the full Critical Role ecosystem — campaigns, modules, homebrew, the difference between a GM who knows every rule and a GM who's right for your table — and explains why Vox Machina nails something most adaptations fumble: you never need to know what a spell is called to understand what it does, because the show just shows you the giant hand. They also dig into the three episodes Hem chose for Mandy: the pilot's shotgun-approach introduction (Lord of the Rings fake-out, musical number, immediate R-rating — all of it in episode one), the glorious chaos of episode seven's triceratops incident, and the season finale's earned emotional heaviness. Plus: Sam Riegel himself answers two questions, Mandy learns what a class is, and Grog is confirmed a beautiful being.If you've been nerd-curious but felt like D&D was a door you couldn't open — well, Grog has thoughts on that. Specifically that not everything is a trap. Specifically that it very much was a trap. The point stands: this is the episode that makes the door feel a lot less locked.GUEST SPOTLIGHTHem Brewster is the lead producer at Blighthouse Studio, a collective of creators from across the US and beyond making escapist audio and actual-play content. Their shows include:

The Lucky Die — a D&D actual play, with Hem as game master
The Sprouting — a Call of Cthulhu eldritch horror actual play
Plus additional fantasy shows and talk shows under the Blighthouse umbrella

Find everything at blighthouse.studio, including work from Blighthouse friends and collaborators outside the main umbrella.Connect with the ShowFollow Mandy on Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavensMake Me a Nerd runs on curious people. If that's you, the inner circle is at makemeanerd.com/join — it's where the show goes deeper between episodes, and where Mandy's most embarrassingly enthusiastic fans have found their people.
---
Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more.