Critical Role Explores Dark Side of Gods With Downfall
Critical Role recruits Brennan Lee Mulligan to tell a tragic tale of the fall of Aeor.
Brennan Lee Mulligan returns to Critical Role with another dark tale of Exandria's past. This week, Critical Role will launch Downfall, a new three-episode arc featuring Mulligan and Critical Role cast members Laura Bailey, Ashley Johnson, and Taliesin Jaffe as well as guest stars Noshir Dalal, Nick Marini, and Abubakar Salim. The arc is set during the Calamity, a 150-year long war between the gods, and explores the downfall of Aeor, a flying city that developed god-killing weapons. While past Critical Role arcs have explored parts of Aeor's history, Downfall will explore the role of the Prime Deities (a pantheon of "good" and "neutral" gods) in the downfall of the city.
Sitting down with ComicBook's The Character Sheet last week, Mulligan noted that the series explores an important moment in Exandria's history and more importantly what that moment means. "Obviously we've seen a ton of Aeor, not only in Campaign 3, but so much of Campaign 2, our initial descent into Aeor," Mulligan said. "And all we know about the downfall of Aeor is that, in the lore of Critical Role, is that the Prime Deities and the Betrayer Gods, whose great war is the foundation of the Calamity, paused that war to lay low the City of Aeor. Within that sentence of lore, I think there is so much weight, given all that is signified by that action."
Stories about rising up against the gods aren't uncommon in high fantasy, but Mulligan pointed out that Downfall really explores the cosmology of Exandria and its intricacies. "There's so much complexity to the literal cosmology [of Critical Role,] Mulligan said. "Not only in the motivations for how gods became Primes or became Betrayers, but also the fact that yeah, Aeor rose up to kill the gods, but gods had died or been destroyed or vanished before the ascension of the Matron of Ravens. We learned about Predathos in Campaign 3 and all the things that signifies about beings that are on the level of the gods, but not gods themselves. The Chained Oblivion, is that really a god or is that some other kind of entity or being? Downfall shows an examination of something that I think can get glossed over if you read it in a history text. You read the Prime Deities and Betrayer Gods briefly called to truce in their war to lay low the City of Aeor. And I think what Downfall does is dig into what that means."
When asked about preparing for a story that digs so deeply into the lore of Matt Mercer's world, Mulligan compared his work to archeology, especially in how it captured some of the "lost" story of Aeor. "Matt will have these structures in place, but as you populate those structures with the detail work, with the grit of the human element, we see Aeor as a architectural structural wonder of the Age of Arcanum, but it had been living through the Calamity for a hundred years," Mulligan said. "One of the interesting things about Aeor is that the city has a ton of refugees from the Calamity who haven't necessarily impacted its civic architecture. Because those people don't survive to the modern age, that element is lost, so you end up seeing these things that are large and civic, and other realities can be missed if they're just not recorded." Mulligan also compared Aeor to the last human city in the Matrix series of movies, one of the last bastions that mortals have fled to as their world has gone up in flames.
Of course, Mulligan previously explored a different flying city during his last miniseries, Exandria Unlimited: Calamity. However, he stressed that the two stories will feel very different. "To the casual observer, it feels like I'm the guy they call in when a sky city collapses, like the guy you call when you have raccoons under the porch, okay?" Mulligan said with a laugh. "I'm just going to tell you this, given that each of these two stories is about a fabled city of the Age of Arcanum, falling to Exandria below in wrath and ruin, you could not have two more different stories. I think that the themes and the things that Downfall is wrestling with are just so different from Calamity. The brief, the mission briefing for the players, was totally different."
However, Mulligan also said that we would see ties to other bits of Critical Role history, especially the robot-like Aeormatons and their role in the culture of the city. "I have to keep it vague, but I'll tell you this – I'll be dead in the cold earth before I miss a shot at seeing magic robots. Okay? 10 out of 10 times, if you give me the shot, I'm taking it," Mulligan said.
While many of the details about Downfall were kept under wraps until the arc's premiere, Mulligan ended the interview praising the work of the cast and how the portrayed a critical moment in Exandria. "I'm so incredibly excited for people to dive in to this story, this time period, the performance of these six cast members, and what they played through," Mulligan said. "I think I had the best seat in the house to watch the absolute clinic on roleplaying and depicting this moment in time in history that these six people tell us this incredibly dark and tragic tale of Exandria. I can't wait for people to watch it."
Downfall will air on Thursday on Critical Role's Twitch and YouTube channel, with VOD versions of the show posted on Beacon and YouTube. The arc requires no prior viewing of Critical Role and can be enjoyed as a standalone story.
