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Like all the best Dungeon Masters, Matt Mercer knows when to drop a hint.
In fact, that’s how the Exandria Unlimited miniseries came about.
And he’s right to think it’s cool, because it is very cool."
Calamity, Mulligan’s first as a Critical Role DM, was born out of this lunchtime conversation.
But why scale back when so much of the game is about delivering a power fantasy?
Second hardest choice, technically.
Where do you go from there?
People who have suffered, survived, and rebuilt in the wake of what’s come before.
It was too perfect."
This didn’t reduce the stakes either.
In much the same way, Divergence was no less dangerous than previous Exandria Unlimited campaigns.
It’s difficult to keep starvation at bay with a +1 longsword, for instance.
“I wanted to get one,” Mulligan says with a grin.
“I thought I had [Jasmine Don’s character] Fiedra dead to rights.
I thought that it’d be the first on-stream character death from pneumonia.
Let’s go, dude.”
Impossible odds aren’t new for the show.
“I was like, ‘Oh, now we’re gonna get real weird.'”
“It was real close,” Mercer agrees.
“We were all clenched tightly at our player side table.
It was real tense.”
There’s only so far it’s possible for you to go in dialling up the grim, though.
As he mentions during our talk, tabletop games inherently have a “baseline percentage of slapdickery.”
Collaborative creation
I imagine all this has to be an odd feeling for Mercer.
What was it like to hand his creation to someone else?
“I say this without any shred of construct it is the greatest experience,” Mercer explains.
It’s a communal act of creation.
You know, Exandria… evolved out of love and collaboration at the beginning of all of this.
People have watched, now over 10 years, something evolve that was not intentional.
I love to live the antithesis of the auteur theory.
I want to forever wave the banner of many minds make the best art."
I don’t know that I would call this a straight up equal collaboration.
So, where next?
Brennan feels like his time in Exandria’s past is done, but its future may be beckoning.
“Precisely, 1,000,000%,” Mulligan agrees.
I love it."
I’d be down for that.
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