Editor's Note: This article has been updated since its original publication. The details of why/how can be found at the bottom of this page.

Not everybody can be J.R.R. Tolkien. For most of us out there, it’s goshdarn hard to keep multiple languages in mind as you’re creating a fantasy world. Even the cast of Critical Role, who have been on the fantasy scene for quite some time now, struggle with it. Or at the very least, cast member Liam O’Brien has been struggling with it, as he recorded his lines for the upcoming animated series The Mighty Nein.

O’Brien mentioned his struggles at the Critical Role panel that went down at San Diego Comic Con 2025, where he was joined by fellow Critical Role cast members Matthew Mercer, Travis Willingham, Sam Riegel, Ashley Johnson, Taliesin Jaffe, Marisha Ray, and Laura Bailey. In case you don’t know, the upcoming Mighty Nein is an adaptation of the Critical Role liveplay campaign of the same name. And in that campaign, O’Brien plays Caleb Widogast, who speaks a language that, in the world of Exandria, is known as Zemnian.

Asked about what he loves doing in the booth for the Mighty Nein series, O’Brien said “I love working on episodes of the show where I'm asking myself, ‘Why did I do this? Why did I think this out?’”

“There's going to be scenes with subtitled Zemnian,” O’Brien continues, “And it's pretty cool.”

Pretty cool indeed. Zemnian comes from O’Brien’s own love for the German language, which is what he’s actually speaking in the Mighty Nein campaign and what he will be speaking in the upcoming animated adaptation of such. While Exandria creator Matthew Mercer has stated that the German language is a “a narrative reference/tool” and that “Zemnian has no specific language equivalent,” there’s little enough difference between spoken Zemnian and German in the campaign that one can’t, in good faith, be considered the other.

In any case, I’m glad there will be subtitles in The Mighty Nein for the laypeople like myself. Again, not everybody can be J.R.R. Tolkien. 

The Mighty Nein debuts on Prime Video on November 19.

Author’s note: Hey folks! Grant here. When I wrote this article, I incorrectly took from the panelists’ comments that Zemnian had been made up for the world of Critical Role. And I was wrong! Zemnian is, for all intents and purposes, German. I take full responsibility and apologize for this error, and I thank the Critters out there who helped correct this. The text of this article has been revised to reflect that.

As they say in Zemnian, tut mir leid.

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