D&D campaign-turned-animated series The Legend of Vox Machina uppercuts fans with some brutal departures from the source material, and I'm here for it

pcgamer.com:

If you've not been keeping up with The Legend of Vox Machina's animated series on Amazon—first, I encourage you to do that, because it's genuinely proving to be some excellent high-fantasy TV, but secondly, you might want to stop reading here, because I am gonna get elbow-deep in some spoilers for episodes 7-9 of season three.

If you don't care about spoilers, though, let me catch you up to speed. The Legend of Vox Machina is an animated series based on a livestreamed campaign of 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons that ran from 2015 to 2017 over the course of 115 episodes, going under the title Critical Role, which starred a handful of super prominent voice actors in gaming. It's still going today, on its third campaign, but the series is based on that 100+ episode debut.

In the TTRPG space, Critical Role is credited—pretty fairly—with causing a bit of a renaissance, easily on par with Stranger Things in terms of getting people into rolling dice. To put it in perspective, when the now-bigboy company asked for Kickstarter help to fund The Legend of Vox Machina, it broke $1 million in the first hour, then proceeded to rake in $11.3 million of funding total. They've got enough money to produce and distribute their own TTRPG systems: People like this thing.

Which means that the animated series' departures from the livestream story last week are very bloody brave—in the literal sense of the adjective. Two character deaths rocked the boat hard enough that water's getting in through the cracks, and I'm finding myself in the position of a sicko yelling «yes, yes!» through the window.

First up, Percival de Rolo—voiced by Taliesin Jaffe—has bit the bullet after Anna Ripley, who is supposed to get coup de grâce'd by a set of very pissed off adventurers (but doesn't), shoots him through the chest. The death itself isn't the interesting bit here, it's the permanency.

D&D 5e is generally pretty lax with resurrection rules, to the point where DM Matthew Mercer had to devise a homebrew