This past Thursday, Critical Role launched its third campaign, introducing us to a new* party and a new setting - the spire-city of Jrusar on the continent of Marquet.
(As a note, there are some spoilers in here for the first two campaigns.)
As someone who has been a big fan, having watched/listened to the entirety of the first two campaigns and the other Exandria-set one-shots and mini-arcs, this is a lot to be excited for. While I play plenty of D&D on a weekly basis, Critical Role is so well-produced and entertaining that I'm happy to be an audience member.
Critical Role's campaigns take place on the world of Exandria, which has become a canonical setting for D&D thanks to the show's popularity (to be fair, in a certain way, every homebrew world is "canonical" thanks to the limitlessness of the game's meta-settings).
The first campaign mostly took place on the continent of Tal'dorei, though the party, Vox Machina, did go through a few arcs visiting the other major continents. The second campaign, with the Mighty Nein, was set almost exclusively on and around the continent of Wildemount (which was probably the one they spent the least time on in the first campaign.)
One thing I noted during Campaign Two was that DM Matt Mercer was very reluctant to make reference to the events or characters of the first campaign. There seemed to be a kind of rule in place that it was to be pretty fully-separate. Now, to be fair, there was a bit of overlap. For one thing, a memorable NPC from the first campaign was brought back in a much more prominent role as the quasi-god for one of the party's clerics to worship (behind-the-scenes, Laura Bailey had initially intended to make a Warlock character, for whom Artagan would be a pretty classic Archfey patron, but when her husband Travis Willingham decided to make a Warlock, she chose to rework the concept as a Cleric, though even if it was mechanically a cleric character, flavor-wise it really blurred the line.) Apart from a brief meeting with a major NPC from the first campaign toward the end of the second - which was mostly just "we need to talk to a powerful wizard" - there was a pretty solid separation between the campaigns - no one watching the Mighty Nein adventures would feel any sense of continuity lockout.
Campaign Three looks to be relaxing some of those restrictions.
First off: this summer, Critical Role had a short mini-campaign called Exandria Unlimited. This was DM'd by guest Aabria Iyengar, letting Matt Mercer play alongside Liam O'Brien and Ashley Johnson, along with other guests Robbie Daymond and Aimee Carrero. The whole thing was I believe eight episodes, and while it resolved one story, it left things very much in the air.
However, when players were being brought to the table to introduce their characters, it turned out that Liam O'Brien's Orym, Ashley Johnson's Fearne, and Robbie Daymond's Dorian are also going to be part of the third campaign. (I don't know if Daymond is permanently joining the cast or not, but it seems highly possible.)
Already, this means that there's a bit of backstory from EXU for viewers to perhaps want to go back to in order to fill out what they know of these characters. But also, EXU was set on Tal'dorei, and as a result, was more firmly tied into the events of the first campaign. In fact, Orym is a member of the Air Ashari, a society that is led by Keyleth, Marisha Ray's character from that first campaign. Indeed, Orym appears to have been sent on his quest by Keyleth herself, which creates a firm line connecting his story with that of the first campaign.
But beyond even that, after these three were introduced, Travis Willingham wasn't even there when the first combat began. However, when he arrived, there was another surprise - his character was also familiar.
Sir Bertrand Bell was a character created for The Search for Grog, a post-campaign one-shot (though it became a two-shot) that was made possible after Willingham's infamously low-intelligence goliath Barbarian Grog drew a particularly disastrous card from the Deck of Many Things. Given that Grog's soul had been sucked out and hidden away in Pandemonium while his body was left in a catatonic state, Willingham naturally needed a different character to play, thus giving us the braggart and charlatan (but nevertheless capable) Bell.
Sir Bertrand was at a fairly high level for the Search for Grog, in order to match the rest of the party (some of whom were even level 20) but was de-leveled to 5 (still more than the rest of the party, who are all level 3) for this campaign. I'm not sure how that will work in the long run.
Indeed, I'm not really sure how the "long run" will work for this campaign. EXU ended with what I thought was the implication that it would be just one season of an ongoing campaign that would pick up perhaps next year. But with 3/5 of the party joining CR's primary campaign, I wonder how that will work.
We've only had one episode with the other half of the party - Ashton, FCG, Imogen, and Laudna. Laudna does seem to be encouraging a lot of speculation. We know she is a Warlock and Sorcerer, and on the Warlock side at least has the Undead patron (her use of Form of Dread would seem to confirm that,) but as with any warlock, there's room to speculate on who her patron is.
Fueling that speculation is the fact that Laudna is apparently from Whitestone, which was the home of Vox Machina's Percy de Rolo (and would, after the initial defeat of the Briarwoods, become the party's de facto home base.) Given that the Briarwoods (servants of Vecna who initially killed off almost all of Percy's family) were a vampire and a necromancer, there has been some speculation that Laudna's patron might be them, or perhaps Vecna himself. The Briarwoods are dead, which would make it difficult for them to be warlock patrons (Silas Briarwood was finally destroyed permanently in the final Vox Machina one-shot, which also happened to take place on Marquet) but hey, this is fantasy. The rules can always be bent.
Technically we don't even know what Laudna is. Her art depicts some slightly hidden pointed ears, which could indicate she's an elf, though pointed ears are also sometimes associated with vampires, which could suggest she's a Dhampir (I've even seen it suggested she could be the Briarwoods' daughter, which would be a pretty straightforward origin for a half-vampire).
The point is, this campaign is clearly not cordoned off the way that the second campaign was. If that's the case, I'm hoping that there's also some connection to be seen with the Mighty Nein's adventures.
That being said, I'm very content (and would in fact prefer it) if the third campaign has plenty of time to develop on its own terms.
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