I know it's not easy to catch up on the hundreds of hours required to watch/listen to Critical Role, but damn if this latest episode didn't showcase some of the most phenomenal improv/gameplay.
The show is superlative "actual play" entertainment in large part because the players and DM really take the RP aspect of the game seriously - yes, they make jokes and such, sometimes really silly, meta jokes, but they really commit to their characters in moments where it counts.
For context... let's do a spoiler cut.
Ok, here's the background:
Nott the Brave, Sam Riegel's character, is a Goblin Rogue, but many episodes ago, we discovered that Nott is actually Veth, who was originally a halfling and has a husband and son. She befriended Liam O'Brien's Caleb Widowgast (who, in fact, is also using a different name than he was born with, but for very different reasons) in part because she figured his expertise in magic as a wizard might help her return to her original form. It seems that Veth, having fought off and killed some goblins who threatened her family, was captured and then killed, only to be turned into a goblin via the Reincarnation spell, and then cursed by the Hag (we assume it's a hag) that the goblins had called in to perform the ritual, the curse making it impossible to reverse the transformation.
Meanwhile, Marisha Ray's character, Beauregard "Beau" Lionett, had a very difficult relationship with her crappy dad due in part to the fact that her father had made a deal with what turned out to be the same Hag.
The Hag (whose name I can't recall - I think we only learned it this episode) seems to be powerful enough to challenge even this group of level 11 characters, and so they attempted to negotiate the removal of the curse.
Many of the characters entered one at a time to speak with the hag, trying to figure out some way to lift the curse. But hags are wicked fey creatures and delight in being linked to the misery of others. She tells them that she'll only undo this curse if she can place another on someone else.
Nott considers undoing the peace negotiations the party has been trying to foster - figuring that's plenty of misery to compensate. Heartbreakingly, Beau considers offering up her entire social circle - the family of friends she has formed in the party, her actual family including the two-year-old brother she has only just met, and her place in the Cobalt Soul - the monastic order to which she belongs.
And then Jester Lavorre, Laura Bailey's character, waltzes in for her session with the hag.
Jester, if you haven't seen this season of Critical Role, is a delight. Naive, certainly, but generally just a bouncing ray of sunshine and whimsy. She's a Trickery Cleric whose god is essentially her childhood imaginary friend - who turns out to be real (I almost wonder if her belief in him is how he came to exist in the first place - we have yet to really find out more about the Traveler.) She is about 95% id, but also a very empathetic and kind-hearted character (I think she's officially chaotic neutral, but I think she at least skews good.)
Anyway, two things to note about Jester - she loves to draw and she loves sweet pastries.
So she goes in and offers to give her hands to the hag, figuring that would be enough of a sacrifice for her to balance out lifting the curse on Nott/Veth. And Bailey plays it entirely as if it's standard Jester being adorably crazy. She starts to consider how annoying it will be not to have hands, and how she hopes she'll still be able to cast spells. Then, she starts talking about how she'll have so much trouble eating, and she pulls out a blueberry muffin from her bag.
She demonstrates to the hag how much it requires her fingers' dexterity to pull the muffin apart in order to share it with her. And when the hag eats it, Bailey mentions that it's been flavored with a magic item - Dust of Deliciousness, which, beyond simply making something taste great, also gives someone who ingests it disadvantage on wisdom checks and saving throws.
And then she casts Modify Memory on the hag. The hag rolls a 2 (plus presumably an insufficient modifier) and makes it so that the hag believes that she agreed to lift the curse thanks to the pleasant company.
And it works.
It's an amazing moment. The Dust of Deliciousness was an item the picked up ages ago - quite possibly over a year - and its use in that moment was entirely unexpected.
DM Matt Mercer had clearly been planning this as a major confrontation with a character who was very important to multiple characters' plots. And as he described it, he was both incredibly frustrated (that he didn't get to use his cool monster in the way that he wanted to) but also incredibly proud (that Laura Bailey had managed to come up with that incredible gambit.
She's a Trickery Cleric. And I think nothing would have pleased the Traveler more than pulling one over on a diabolical hag (as Taliesin Jaffe points out in the episode - she tricked a hag into eating baked goods. That's a hell of a reversal.)
Especially given the wrenching potential self-sacrifice that Beau was considering (something that seemed to be affecting Ray intensely as she was playing the part) this was just such a moment of relief and broken tension, along with being a legendary play.
It was so amazing that I felt compelled to recap it on my gaming blog.
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