Critical Role Preps a New Spinoff As Campaign 3 Winds Down

Whenever a Critical Role campaign ends, it’s always a big deal. The finales are events unto themselves, and fans tend to leave them excited for the future—which is good, because the Actual Play series is already teasing its next moves.

On Thursday, February 6, the “Bells Hells” campaign will close with an eight and a half hour episode. It makes for the longest Critical Role conclusion to date: finales for the first two core campaigns were four-and-a-half and seven hours long, respectively, and cappers for the Exandria Unlimited spinoff stories have largely stayed in the three to five-hour range of standard campaign episodes. (The one exception being Calamity, whose last episode wrapped at just over six hours.) For anyone who doesn’t have it in them to watch the whole livestream on Beacon, Twitch, or YouTube throughout the night, it’ll be a YouTube VOD or podcast the following week.

After “Bells,” Critical Role is bringing back Exandria Unlimited with a new four-part adventure, Divergence, which starts on February 13. The series will focus on the Prime Deities leaving the world of Exandria after the in-universe Calamity went down, and see Brennan Lee Mulligan return as the dungeon master. Player-wise, the cast will consist of Jasmine Don (Legend of Vox Machina), Alex Ward (Salem’s Lot), and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Celia Rose Gooding, plus Role co-creators Matt Mercer and Liam O’Brien.

Between the “Bells” ending and Divergence, Critical Role is getting some big events for its 10-year anniversary. The franchise’s post-Divergence future is currently in the air, but this is far from the end. In the announcement, creative director Marisha Ray promised there would be more Actual Play stories on the horizon, noting “the story continues with a simple turn of the page. I’m very excited to see what happens next in this story that remains to be written by the incredible emergent storytellers who are picking up the pen.”

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