Popverse's top stories

• New Batman writer aims to show why anyone would want to live in the worst city in the DCU
• Avengers and Doctor Who star Karen Gillan is on her way to New York Comic Con 2025 - and Popverse Superfans will have an early chance to connect
• Daredevil, Punisher, Spider-Man, Marvel Zombies, and all-new Avengers: The future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe looks like this [Marvel Matters]

And everything happening this week for Future Fest!

Ask Critical Role fans who their favorite character from the global-hit liveplay series is an you'll probably get some very emotive answers. Hell, you might actually start a fight. Folks like Jester Lavorre, Cassandra de Rolo, and many more fly to the top of Critters' lists of most beloved characters... but for all that flying, there's one character in particular with that skill baked in. That would be Cerrit Agrupnin, a birdlike character from a campaign set centuries before the most popular Critical Role stories, and one for whom there's unfortunately not a ton of adventures.

Unless you're counting the headcanon of Liam O'Brien. Appearing at Rose City Comic Con 2025, O'Brien revealed that he has a whole character arc worked out for Cerrit that has not officially made it into a liveplay session, and we got to hear him explain it in the room.

Let's take a step back - in case you don't know, Cerrit Agrupnin was not introduced into the world of Critical Role via a core campaign, but rather in one of the webseries offshoots known as Exandria Unlimited. Particularly, the world met Cerrit as part of the Exandria Unlimited: Calamity campaign, which both introduced us to the Ring of Brass gang of heroes and served as the introduction of GM Brennan Lee Mulligan, who will be leading Campaign 4 in the very near future. A humanoid bird creature called an Eisfuura, Cerrit was like if Big Bird was part of the Rogue class, so you can see why fans fell for him pretty quickly. 

One of those fans was apparently O'Brien, although the actual character was played by O'Brien's longtime castmate, Travis Willingham. O'Brien's love for the birdguy turned into an internal fanfiction about what came for him after the events of Calamity, which O'Brien explained at Rose City Comic Con 2025.

"My one head canon I have for Cerrit," the actor explained, "is that, once he had grandchildren, he told them a safe version of what happened [as] a story at bedtime, and then those grandchildren grew up and told their grandchildren a story, and those grandchildren told their grandchildren a story, and now it is a Zemnian fairy tale."

Ah, so apparently O'Brien's headcanon had more reason to exist than just a love for the character. See, O'Brien is the author of Critical Role: Der Katzenprinz and Other Zemnian Tales, a collection of fairy tales that the denizens of Exandria would be telling themselves in more "modern" ages of the realm such as we saw in Campaigns 1 and 2 (Vox Machina and Mighty Nein, respectively). As master of those Zemnian bedtime stories, O'Brien must've found commonality in Cerrit not just as someone steeped in Exandrian lore, but as a storyteller as well.

Or maybe Liam O'Brien has feathers. Who's to say?

Critical Role: Campaign 4 debuts on October 2 on Critical Role's Beacon, YouTube, and Twitch channels.

From the lands of Exandria to your very own smartscreens, Popverse has everything you need to know about the TTRPG phenomenon that is Critical Role. Here you'll find:

• Popverse's Critical Role watch order
• An interview with GM Brennan Lee Mulligan
• The cast's appearance at C2E2 '25

...and more. Roll initiative, player. Adventure awaits.