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Critical Role star Travis Willingham says The Mighty Nein is different from Vox Machina because the characters will be rougher

Critical Role’s Travis Willingham explains the difference between The Mighty Nein and The Legend of Vox Machina

News by Joshua Lapin-Bertone, Contributing writer

Published on Sat Oct 11 2025

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The Mighty Nein is the next animated project from the Critical Role gang, but don’t expect it to be like their previous series, The Legend of Vox Machina. While it’s going to have the same sense of adventure and fun you’ve come to expect from the Critical Role gang, this is a whole new story with different types of characters. As one cast member puts it, The Mighty Nein gang isn’t as nice as the heroes of Vox Machina were.

“This is not a group of heroes,” Travis Willingham explained during the Critical Role spotlight panel at New York Comic Con 2025. “Vox Machina was at least trying to do some good, or trying to earn some coin by doing good, and then failing at that, and then succeeding. But Mighty Nein is a collection of individuals, and as opposed to Vox Machina where we start together in a tavern - that classic trope - we are going to meet them as individuals on a path, slowly finding their way into each other, but usually with cross purposes, things that are going to cause friction and tensions."

Meeting the group as individuals one-by-one and then watching them come together offers some different narrative challenges, Willingham suggested. "How do you negotiate that? How do you start to navigate towards a shared goal, if there is one?" he asked, rhetorically. "The nice thing about this show, because the world is so large, we’re constantly going to be doing rug pulls on the characters. We’re going to be changing priorities, differing up alliances. We’re really trying to dive into the meat of who these characters were, and I think we did a pretty good job.”

The Mighty Nein premieres November 19, 2025 on Prime Video.

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Joshua Lapin-Bertone: Joshua is a pop culture writer specializing in comic book media. His work has appeared on the official DC Comics website, the DC Universe subscription service, HBO Max promotional videos, the Batman Universe fansite, and more. In between traveling around the country to cover various comic conventions, Joshua resides in Florida where he binges superhero television and reads obscure comics from yesteryear.