With two popular cartoons, four long D&D campaigns, and over 10 years of history, Critical Role is celebrating success after success. Now the two Dungeon Masters have interviewed each other and both can hardly believe it.
What is the interview about? The American magazine Variety published an interview with Critical Role on January 29, 2026. In it, the two Dungeon Masters (DMs) Matthew Mercer and Brennan Lee Mulligan ask each other questions for 51 minutes.
The discussion covers the currently ongoing fourth campaign, but also the entertainment industry itself as well as their respective careers. They both agree that neither Mercer nor Mulligan ever expected to become famous with Dungeons & Dragons.
By the way, Amazon Prime recently released the first season of The Mighty Nein, the cartoon based on the second campaign of Critical Role:
Who fucking knew, bro?
What did the two DMs have to say? Matthew Mercer and Brennan Lee Mulligan appear visibly surprised by their own success in the interview. Mulligan, the DM of the current campaign, says it is bizarre how the cartoon adaptations The Legend of Vox Machina and now The Mighty Nein are opening doors for Pen-&-Paper nerds in Hollywood.
He also mentions that he could never have imagined this as a 10-year-old child. Specifically, Mulligan made all decisions counter to any success: […]I picked a game that got your head put in toilets and I played it hard. And then I said, ‘Time to get serious. Let’s do free improv in a basement.’
Matthew Mercer, the DM of the first three long-term campaigns, feels very similar. There are discussions about how long Critical Role was in planning and how the format might have been designed on a drawing board.
[…] who fucking knew, bro? It’s wild to look back on how this whole thing has happened, but to that same degree, through this, building platforms in which we’re not reliant on external systems. We started on Twitch and YouTube, and we still stream to those places, but it’s also very dangerous from a business standpoint to put all of your stakes into a platform that you don’t control.
Matthew Mercer in conversation with Brennan Lee Mulligan, January 2026
What is the current status of Critical Role? In fact, Critical Role is a completely successful media company in 2026. The core business still consists of the streams and VODs for Dungeons & Dragons via Twitch and YouTube. In addition, they also play other systems, primarily their own creations Candela Obscura and Daggerheart. The latter is actually presented to you by MeinMMO editor Alexander Mehrwald in a separate article:
Both role-playing systems have been published under their own publishing house, Darrington Press. Through this publisher, Critical Role also distributes art books and settings for example Exandria, the world of the first three campaigns.
All video content is also offered alongside YouTube on the in-house streaming service Beacon. Critical Role also operates a charity organization, the Critical Role Foundation. Recently, the video game Dispatch was released, which was developed with the support of Critical Role.
In 2025, the team announced a world tour. They will also stop in the Uber Arena in Berlin in July 2026. But none of this would have happened if Matthew Mercer had not come to Dungeons & Dragons as a child. In an interview with Mythical Kitchen, he talks about just that: A teacher was the first person to show one of the most famous Dungeon Masters how cool it is to be a nerd
