Critical Role's second campaign started three years ago in January of 2018. They've now had what is presumably the "final boss" fight of the campaign, with what is likely to be a denouement episode to close out the campaign next week, similar to how things worked out in the first campaign.
Campaign two has been a fairly different experience than the first one for a few reasons. The first campaign jumped in in the middle of it, when the players were already level nine or so, and with a home game that had already gone on for a few years prior to the stream. Apart from a few sessions with pairs or one trio of group members at level 1 to get a feel for the characters, the second campaign started things off more or less at the beginning, with the whole group getting together in the first episode.
Structurally, the first campaign also felt, at least in retrospect, to be a bit more about world-spanning, universal threats, connected to the player characters but less directly. Meanwhile, campaign two was almost entirely based on plots and arcs that centered around its characters, which reached its logical conclusion in the campaign's final boss.
Let's get into spoilers.
Taliesin Jaffe's original character in the campaign was Mollymauk Tealeaf, a tiefling blood hunter who, it was revealed after several episodes, was actually an amnesiac. After a chance encounter with Cree, a tabaxi cleric who recognized him as "Lucien," Molly spilled the beans on his missing memories.
It was a mind-blowing reveal, but sadly, not long after, Molly was the first character to die in the campaign, and all while in an arc surrounding the kidnapping of the Barbarian, Warlock, and most crucially, Cleric (as the players were unavailable for several sessions.) Molly's tantalizing story was left unexplored...
For a while.
Eventually, in the midst of a whole other plot, the characters returned to Molly's grave, only to find that it had been vacated, and Cree had resurrected Lucien. The party journeyed to Eiselcross, a frozen expanse that was home to the ruined city of Aeor from ages prior, in order to find what they thought was their friend.
Instead, they found that Lucien was basically a vicious cult leader who had been granted several supernatural eyes on his body from an abomination called the Somnovum, which, it turned out, had been a group of Aeorian philosophers who removed their quarter of the city (the "Cognouza Ward") and journeyed to the Astral Plane, where strange magic warped them and the city into something horrific - a single living organism in which the nine of them bickered as detached consciousnesses alongside the trapped citizens in a cityscape of malleable flesh. Cognouza had become a horrible place of dread in the tradition of places like Carcosa, Rl'yeh, and Asshai.
The big question that lurked over the entire journey across Eiselcross, into Aeor, and Cognouza in the Astral Sea, was whether there was anything left of Mollymauk to save. They discovered that Lucien was the original person inhabiting that body, a member of the Claret Order (a group of Blood Hunters,) who had discovered the Somnovum while working with a member of the sinister Cerberus Assembly, Vess DeRogna, who sabotaged a ritual he underwent to commune with the Somnovum, "killing" him and leaving the amnesiac to claw his way out of the grave. Feeling "Empty," he settled on the initials "M.T." and then took on the name Mollymauk Tealeaf.
After Molly died, Lucien was resurrected properly this time, and continued his quest to bring Cognouza back to the material plane and spread the horrific melding of all life together. The party, naturally, opposed this, and chased him into the Astral Sea after killing off all but one of his cultists.
Ultimately, after Cree was slain (twice, as Lucien transformed her into a horrifying abomination after she died,) the party fought him. Mechanically, the party was allowed to make appeals to whatever fragment of Molly existed within him, using bonus actions and ever-more-difficult persuasion checks to cause him to lose legendary actions. But it highlighted the desperation and grief of the fight - Lucien was undeniably an evil monster, but in that mind there was also the kind and loving Mollymauk.
Molly had been a beloved character, and his death early in the campaign was shocking (and also controversial, given that he was genderfluid and pansexual - which is not to say he was the only LGBTQ+ character in the party, but he was perhaps the most visibly, and some took the decision to kill him as needlessly targeting a queer character. Personally, I think it was just bad luck and bad rolls when dealing with a vicious villain, but that's just my opinion). The fact that his story was allowed to continue at all was already something of a delight, but the tension over whether Molly could be salvaged from the monster that was Lucien was a major element to the campaign's final arc.
Despite some close calls (there was one point in which both clerics were at 1 hit point) the party ultimately prevailed against Lucien's final form, and they were able to separate the tiefling body from the horrible carapace that had grown around him.
Matt Mercer has an unusual process for resurrections - it's never a guarantee. Characters can contribute something to the resurrection ritual, which improves the person's chances of coming back, but it still comes down to a roll of the dice. Both the cleric Jester and the wizard Caleb had died during the fight, but were brought up with quick Revivify spells that went off without a problem. After heartfelt efforts to bring back Molly - trying to resurrect their friend into the body that had just been home to their enemy - the roll was a natural 1, and so the resurrection failed.
It was a really rough moment - there had been such great hope that they might finally bring their friend back after about two years of absence. But it looked like this campaign was going to end on a bittersweet note, much like the first one did.
But then, Taliesin Jaffe, who played Molly and then his replacement, the firbolg grave cleric Caduceus, gave divine intervention a shot. And he rolled a 3 (which, if you're unfamiliar with the mechanics of divine intervention, was a very lucky roll - you have to roll percentile dice and roll under your own level). This bought them one re-roll, and this time, it was well over the DC of 5 that was necessary.
The most wonderful moment was when Matt Mercer, who had been running Lucien as an NPC for the past several months, turned to Taliesin and said "You open your eyes for the first time," handing control back to the player, and making it crystal clear that, though it took an entire campaign, they had succeeded in bringing Molly back.
I've got to say, this was such an amazing moment to watch. Things have been, you know, rough for the past... well, several years, but especially the last year and change. Jaffe played Molly as disoriented, traumatized, and certainly in need of serious, serious therapy and rehabilitation, but his recognition of the party suggested that there was a story just beginning.
And honestly, that's what I think we all need. When a story you love ends, whether it's a video game, a book, a tv show, a movie, whatever, it can feel like grief for a lost loved one. But when a story can hint at new things on the horizon - not just as a sequel hook, but in a sense of possibility and renewal - it can transform that feeling of loss into one of joy.
It could have been poignant if Molly had just been lost - that not everyone gets out of these things, and sometimes you take what wins you can get - but it's no less poignant to suggest that it's not a foolish thing to hope.
Yeah, it's a bunch of nerds playing D&D. But good storytelling doesn't care about the medium.
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