Campaign 4 of Critical Role has been a breath of fresh air for a variety of reasons. The actual-play Dungeons & Dragons show not only has a new Dungeon Master, with Dimension 20’s Brennan Lee Mulligan taking over from Matthew Mercer, but also has a great new world of Aramán and an eclectic cast of characters to explore.
However, as any Dungeon Master worth their salt would tell you, starting a new game means laying down the groundwork for what does and doesn’t fly in a campaign. This can be as simple as swapping how items or spells work, or as game-changing as adding house rules that shake up combat. Speaking to Critical Role cast members Liam O’Brien and Taliesin Jaffe, Polygon learned that Campaign 4’s DM was pretty collaborative and open-minded with the characters the cast were making. However, there was one hard rule: They couldn’t be evil.
“Brennan is never interested in telling us what we can’t do, other than you can’t play an evil character,” Jaffe, who plays warlock Bolaire Lathalia in Campaign 4 of Critical Role, shares with Polygon. “But other than that, we would come to him with what we want to do, and he goes, ‘OK.’ It was never about fitting you into it. It was about [the world] reflecting you.”
This might be surprising to some fans. There have certainly been characters across the first three campaigns of Critical Role who have either committed evil acts or who were aligned as evil, such as Caleb Widogast (O’Brien), who murdered his family, and Percy De Rolo (Jaffe), who had a corruption mechanic system in-game. While not inherently evil, there have been morally dubious choices made by characters throughout Critical Role history. That said, none of the principal player characters have been outright evil. (In the case of NPCs like Essek Thelyss from Campaign 2, some started out evil before becoming allies of the party.)
For Campaign 4, evil is most definitely out. While Sir Julien Davinos (Mercer) can certainly be arrogant and push characters’ buttons, his prickly personality doesn’t change the fact that he believes deeply in justice and doing the right thing. The same can be said for other characters, such as Tyranny (Whitney Moore), who, despite having a demonic heritage that leads her to be cruel to others, actively fights to be kind and good.
Some might argue that restricting players from getting creative with how ‘evil’ can be portrayed is a bad thing. We’d argue that having evil players in the party would ultimately soil the story that Mulligan and the cast of Critical Role are trying to tell: revolutionaries fighting against the oppressive Sundered Houses. It’s true that an evil character can be used to push people past their comfort zone, but if it doesn’t fit the campaign, which is, in itself, a collaborative story told by the players, it makes sense that Mulligan ruled out playing an evil character outright.
It’s not the first time that Mulligan has shared his thoughts about evil and evil characters in role-playing games. Speaking to fellow Critical Role cast member Marisha Ray, Mulligan spoke about the relatively easy difficulty of being evil versus being good.
“Evil is boring. Right? I kinda believe in the banality and mundaneness of evil. Evil is just selfish impulses, which, at the end of the day, are really easy to understand,” Mulligan tells Ray. “It’s easy to understand why people do bad things. It’s like, ‘Yeah, OK, you’re selfish and scared and cruel, I get it.’ Being good is complex, beautiful, and hard.”
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