The Legend of Vox Machina‘s third season has officially come to a close, and while the 12 episodes pretty faithfully adapted the remaining narrative of the original campaign’s Chroma Conclave arc, it wasn’t without some major changes — both ones that were departures from the original story and ones that were simply expanded moments worthy of a world-building that will be useful down the road (looking at you, Mighty Nein!).
No matter what the material is, adaptations are always tricky. You have the task of introducing a new narrative that feels fresh and exciting, but you also have to keep enough old elements for fans to care about the source material in the first place. In other words: you need to reinvent something beloved while keeping it recognizable. Fortunately, with the cast of Critical Role at the helm of their show, that’s not an issue — they know what fans want to see and what moments are important to preserve. But that still doesn’t mean they can include everything.
In order to be successful, just like in a Dungeons & Dragons game, you have to roll the dice and take some big swings. Sometimes, those swings will land. Sometimes, they won’t. Such is the nature of storytelling. For The Legend of Vox Machina, the challenge from the beginning has been adapting 115 episodes of story (plus additional hours from the home game sessions that occurred before the show started streaming on Twitch and Geek and Sundry in 2015), with said episodes being as long as four to five hours. That’s a lot of story and as Liam O’Brien, who plays Vax, told us before the season premiered, “There are moments that we love, and I love, for all the characters in our story, that the time that we had to breathe and find it, we had to work really hard to make their journeys feel lived in and believed in. And sometimes that meant splitting the party in ways that they weren’t before, removing things entirely, or giving a single thing double purpose.”
Take Percy’s (Taliesin Jaffe) death, for example. In the actual play game, Percy’s demise at the hands of his nemesis Anna Ripley (Kelly Hu) is as real as it gets (everyone dies a few times over in Dungeons & Dragons!) But he’s rushed to a temple and revived relatively quickly. The show tweaked this moment twofold: first, it opted to make Percy’s death feel more permanent by killing him at the end of episode 7 and not reviving him until the last episode. It also chose to keep Ripley alive instead of having her executed at that moment, a shift that threw longtime fans who thought Percy would stay dead for good and in some cases, frustrated the ones who wondered if Ripley would get her due at all. (Spoiler alert: he didn’t and she did!)
But one of the reasons that Legend of Vox Machina has become so beloved is because of the characters themselves and the relationships that they’ve built with each other. Allowing Percy’s death to feel real permanence gave us a gateway into the individuals we have invested our emotions. It was a chance for us to see them grieve, to see them break, and most importantly, to see how deeply important they have become to each other. The longevity of Percy’s death enhanced intimate and personal moments—with Vex (Laura Bailey) and Vax pursuing Ripley in a revenge quest and Vex ultimately delivering the killing blow, Ripley’s death became not just an angry retaliation but instead an earned culmination of Vex’s emotional journey as well as her deep love for someone whose heart she earned and fought for. Similarly, when Vax kills the dragon Thordak, it’s not just an exciting kill. It’s a triumph (visually and metaphorically) that comes at the cost of many things, including multiple losses of life and a betrayal. When, at the end of the fight, Vax and Keyleth (Marisha Ray) break down in each other’s arms to let the weight of their emotions overwhelm them, we not only feel their pain—we understand it. And we connect with them in this intimate moment, which allows us to feel further connected with the story.
Percy’s perma-death and Ripley’s survival were far from the only significant changes this season, but even the changes that seemed out of the ordinary served a purpose. Pike’s (Ashley Johnson) faith crisis might have caught fans by surprise, but it fits within the Calamity lore the show is weaving in that came to exist after the campaign ended and it gives additional meaning to her story, as well as all of Vox Machina’s: You have to believe in yourself, not just someone else. When fan-favorite character Kash (Will Friedle) met his end unexpectedly while helping Vox Machina during the Thordak fight, his death added an element of shock to an already emotional scene and gave even more weight to the group’s win.
And while many believed the season would end with Scanlan (Sam Riegel) leaving the group after some strained tensions, things played out a little differently. Scanlan departed the group halfway through the season to work out issues with his daughter Kaylie (Aisling Franciosi) but he made his return after Percy’s death. He, too, fell in the Thordak fight — but in the show, he stayed in a coma instead of dying the way he did in the campaign and Pike enlisted Kaylie to help bring him back to life. The emotional beats of the campaign episode best known as “A Bard’s Lament” were there throughout the season: Scanlan feeling like an outsider and someone unimportant and invisible among the people he considered his friends. But with Pike by his side in a way she wasn’t in the actual campaign to steady him and guide him, his spiral wasn’t as severe. At the end of the season, when Scanlan announces he and Kaylie are leaving together, he learns that other members have also decided to go their separate ways: Keyleth announces she’s finally pursuing the rest of her Aramante with Vax by her side. Percy and Vex announce they’re staying in Whitestone to help rebuild the city and heal their bodies and relationship. Pike and Grog (Travis Willingham) decide to hold down the fort, protecting each other and the world. (Buddies!) The story was still able to show Scanlan’s growth: how he matured from someone who only seemed to think of himself to someone who realized the importance of loyalty. But the narrative change allowed us as viewers to see how other characters have evolved and grown in their personal journeys as well.
All the additions or shifts in the narrative served their purpose—that is, they allowed the series to retain its original heart and soul while becoming something new and exciting that elicited the same emotions. When Percy is ultimately saved, his soul restored, it’s not just another D&D move. His death and revival become about many interlocking things, all of them important: Vex’s profession of love, Ripley’s revenge, Pike’s faith struggle, and the Chroma Conclave’s defeat. Season 4 is on the horizon and for the first time, it’s a season where we might not be able to predict where we’ll end up. But it’s exciting to know what comes next and also not know at the same time.
What The Legend of Vox Machina has done is masterful: It has taken a story that once existed in a bubble of a world and expanded it to include an entire universe of storytelling. It has taken characters who once existed in an actual play game and given them new life (and new fans) through the vessel of new costumes, new emotions, and new interpretations. The changes keep fans guessing. They spark conversation. They allow for new theories, thoughts and perspectives. They let their creators explore avenues of storytelling and ideas that maybe they wanted to explore years ago, but couldn’t at the moment due to timing or not having the right lived experiences. But the changes don’t change the fabric of what we know and love—as Pike reminds Grog in the last moments of Season 3 when the group is on the verge of disbanding (if only for a short time), “We’re still Vox Machina. We still fuck sh*t up.”
And in the end, the story speaks for itself — a beautiful and emotional one brought to life by some of the most passionate storytellers in the industry.
How lucky we have been, indeed.
The Legend of Vox Machina, Season 3, Prime Video
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