It’s a good time to be a fan of Critical Role. Prime Video’s The Mighty Nein is only a few weeks away, and Campaign 4 (featuring a stacked party of 13 players, including the original founders) is now streaming every Thursday night.
With every new campaign, Critical Role introduces a new cast of characters for us to fall in love with. In Campaign 4, fans got to meet Thimble, a cute pixie rogue played by CR mainstay Laura Bailey. You might see Thimble’s mischievous smile and immediately think Bailey’s heading back into a more chaotic personality, like she expertly conveyed with Jester in Campaign 2 (which will be adapted into the upcoming animated series, The Mighty Nein), but you’d better think again.
“When we just released the fan art without ever having the episodes released, there were a lot of people saying, ‘Ooh, it’s going to be another Jester character. It’s going to be a lot of chaos,’” Bailey tells Polygon. But in actuality, Thimble is “so completely different from Jester. She’s far more grounded in her views of the world.”
In fact, in the first two episodes, fans already got to see that Thimble is not a mischievous, happy-go-lucky fairy. She is grieving the death of her best friend, Thjazi Fang, and is laser-focused on finding out who’s responsible for it.
Character creation is a key component of the Dungeons & Dragons experience. For Bailey, after creating iconic characters such as Vex, Jester, and Imogen for the first three campaigns, the big question was where to go next.
“With each campaign, I’ve sort of flip-flopped with the character creation,” Bailey says. “With Vex, she was very much like myself, and probably all of the Vox Machina characters were probably closest to our own personalities, just our go-tos. And then after coming off someone who’s thoughtful and always wants to say the right thing, like Vex, it’s fun to go to a character like Jester who is absolutely off the wall, doesn’t ever stop, doesn’t have a filter at all. And then I went to Imogen for campaign three, which is the exact opposite of that, where she overthinks everything.”
The cast of Campaign 4 characters is truly an ensemble of curious and delightfully bizarre personas. Travis Willingham, another Critical Role co-founder, tells Polygon he felt immense pressure ahead of Campaign 4 due to the decision by incoming Dungeon Master Brennan Lee Mulligan to move the story to a brand-new setting: the world of Aramán.
“I sort of found myself sitting back in my chair and going, ‘Oh God, I don’t know anything about this world. I am nervous about it,'” Willingham says. And that caused me to make a slightly more simple character just in the beginning, because I think I’m going to go back to that same sort of game playing approach where the backstory sort of gets added in the background as we’re going.”
Thankfully, he nailed it. Unlike his previous Critical Role characters like the moronic Grog, the young but serious Fjord, or the wise-cracking Chetney, Willingham’s Campaign 4 character, a nama (a species of lion-like beastfolk) paladin named Teor Pridesire, has an aura of wisdom and regality about him that fits right into the world of Aramán.
Bailey and Willingham’s characters are both just starting their adventure in the new, godless world of Aramán. Where this will bring Teor and Thimble remains to be seen, but considering how long these campaigns run (usually three to four years), their character development is only just beginning.
