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Sep 28, 202222 min read

Critical Role, Calamity and What To Do At The End of the World

Updated: Oct 5, 2022

OK, first thing's first, please forgive the Lemony Snickett-ass title. I'm trying to push through writers block and if I don't start now, this will never see the light of day. Second, I've actually tried to write about Critical Role, my newest obsession, twice now. However, as it turns out, it's quite hard to write a piece I'm confident about when there's a comical amount of reading to do. To give a brief idea to the uninitiated, Critical Role is a web series about a group of voice actors playing Dungeon's and Dragons. To date, there's two main "campaigns" or seasons with a third on-going. Those two campaigns clock in at a combined 200+ episodes, with an average runtime of about 3 to 4 hours. So when I tell you that summarizing story arcs in a way that my perfectionist brain finds satisfying is hard as fuck, please take the couple of hundred hours of research I'd have to do into account. So instead, to scratch that itch, I'm gonna talk about one of the shorter campaigns under the Critical Role banner. Alongside the main campaigns starring the core player cast, Critical Role has a variety of shorter series featuring a wide assortment of guests. Among them is Exandria Unlimited, or EXU, the only one that's treated as canon to the wider universe the main campaigns are set in. If the main campaigns are the main Star Wars movies, EXU covers stuff like Rouge One or The Mandolorian, a bunch of fun added flavor that can then be called upon for usage in the main campaign if needed. EXU: Calamity, or simply Calamity, its possibly both the easiest to get into without an encyclopedia's worth of knowledge about Critical Role and also the hardest given just how emotional the whole series is. So, with that, I'll get into the meat of this essay, me gushing about a bunch of talented nerds playing make-believe with dice.

1. Is It Thursday Yet?

Critical Role goes a lil something like this. You have the core cast that started streaming their DnD games on a lark back in 2015, that being Sam Riegel, Marisha Ray, Travis Willingham, Ashley Johnson, Laura Bailey, Liam O'Brien and Taliesin Jaffe with Game Master Matthew Mercer. They get together every Thursday for a few hours to play Dungeons and Dragons, stream it on Twitch and tell incredible stories set in the high fantasy world of Exandria, a world of Matt's own creation. There's a lot of lore I could delve into, both Exandrian and real-life, but the important thing to note is that as the years went on and Critical Role began to grow more as a foundational piece of a burgeoning Tabletop RPG resurgence, the world of Exandria grew more and more with it. With an entire world and history to explore and with each campaign, as long as they may be, only exploring as much as is relevant to the characters of that campaign, Exandria Unlimited was created to flesh out more of the world as well as to give the main cast some rest, especially Matt. Running a DnD campaign as the GM is a tough job without having to worry about continuity and streaming to an ever-growing audience. The first series of EXU was GM'd by Aabria Iyengar, a staple of the TTRPG scene online and featured guest players Robbie Daymond, Aimee Carrero and Anjali Bhimani alongside Liam, Matt and Ashley in an eight-episode adventure centered around an ancient crown. It's a really fun series and eventually got a sequel in the form of EXU: Kymalt, but sandwiched in between those two was Calamity.

[fig 1]

(Just, as a side note before we go any further, if any of those names sound even vaguely familiar, it's because everyone on Critical Role is essentially voice-acting royalty. Like, the core cast has Emmy and BAFTA winners among them and like... look, a lot of them voiced people in Fire Emblem: Awakening, a game that's up the top of my favorite games of all time list so I'm gonna be playing favorites a lil bit. I'm only human)

2. A Brief History of a World with More Lore then Sense

One of the interesting things about Exandria is that, for all intents and purposes, it's a post-apocalyptic world. As discussed in the wrap-up episode and a GM roundtable later, a lot of fantasy media has a weird perspective of time, where the greatest sword ever was made thousands of years ago when in our world, we went from steam to nuclear power in the same time. For Exandria, there's a pretty fair reason for why that is, along with the various magical artifacts and ruins scattered around the world. About 1500 years before the adventures of Vox Machina in Campaign 1 and the Mighty Nein in Campaign 2, there was an age of incredible technology, magical mastery and endless ego known as the Age of Arcanum. Mages played with time like a toy, castles were built by one wizard in a day, and flying cities engaged in arms races ala the Cold War. Everything, however, fails in comparison to the pinnacle of mortal achievement during this age, as The God of Death was erased from reality and replaced by a human who was known only as the Matron of Ravens. The Gods themselves were split into two factions, the benevolent Prime Deities and the Betrayer Gods, who wished to wipe away their creations in an age even further back then that of Arcanum, but were seal away by their brethren. If the name of the series didn't give it away, though, shit did go sideways eventually. That is where Calamity comes in.

[Fig 2]

3. Welcome to Avalir

Set on the flying city of Avalir, the top half of a mountain raised into the skies by magic with a city constructed around it, Calmaity follows the Ring of Brass, the group of six that actually get shit done in a city run by those largely content to grow fat off their own ego. Among them from left to right we have...

[Fig 3]

Cerrit Agrupnin, Guardian of the Seventh (Played by Travis Willingham)
Zerxus Illerez, the First Knight of Avalir (Played by Luis Carazo)
Laerryn Coramar-Seelie, the Architect Aracane (Played by Aabria Iyengar)
Loquatius Seelie, Herald of Avalir (Played by Sam Riegal)
Patia Por'co, the Keeper of Scrolls (Played by Marisha Ray)
Nydas Okiro, Guildmaster of the Golden Scythe (Played by Lou Wilson)

Finally, we've got Brennan Lee Mulligan in the GM seat, whose power knows no bounds and who could potentially destroy humanity as we know it if he wasn't distracted by Dungeons and Dragons. Jokes aside, Brennan is a long-time pillar of the TTRPG scene in his own right and his improv skills and endless fountain of energy does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of setting the tone of this extremely dour tale.

With the cast introduced, let me set the stage. Avalir is returning to its sister-city, Caithmoíra, for the Replenishment. Avalir flies along magical Leylines and collects Ether to be given back to the land every seven years at a Replenishment, literally replenishing the lands and giving rise to a new generation of magically gifted children. The entire story of Calamity takes place on the eve of such a Replenishment, each of its four episodes following the sudden fall of Avalir and with it, the Age of Arcanum, as the Ring of Brass desperately tries to save their doomed city.

[Fig 4]

4. The Ending of an Age

The Calamity is an established historical event in Exandrian history. Lasting over a century and taking two-thirds of the planets population with it, the Prime Deities themselves were forced to leave the world in an event known as the Divergence after their victory over the freed Betrayers. So going into the show with some sense of Exandrian history, listening to Brennan's introduction to the series or just by reading the title, you get that same feeling as hearing "A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life, whose misadventured piteous overthows doth with their death bury their parents' strife" at the start of Romeo and Juliet. Shits about to go down and no-one is getting out unscathed, least of all our heroes. So imagine my shock and irreparable heartbreak when I start connecting with the Ring of Brass. Cerrit as this noir eagle detective with zero magical ability in a city built on extreme magical power whose also a father to two amazing kids. Zerxus as the one-man army, a man who can obtain divine power without the blessing of the gods who takes up the First Knight position after his husband passes and whose left with a stepson whom doesn't live on Avalir, Patia as a magical Kennedy, granddaughter of the wizard who raised Avalir into the sky and now one of the most knowledgeable people in the entire world. Loquaties and Laerryn as a changeling newscaster and a gifted architect, former partners, one who informs the city and the other who keeps it afloat. Nydas, pirate turned money-man and Dragon of Avalir, trading and dealing and making money wherever he goes with. These six are the people who get shit done on the daily to keep Avalir going, while the Rings of Silver and Gold sit about and soak up the Ether. Oh, and every single person has some dark secrets. Except Cerrit. He's just a bit of a bad dad.

[Fig 5]

As is befitting any good "Golden Age turns to Dark Age" story, everyone's got aspirations fed by enormous egos. Avalir is supposed to give 25% of its Ether to a group of druids called the Gau Drashari as part of an ancient pact, with the remaining 75% going into the earth and replenishing the continent. By time of Calamity, there's rumors' of barely 5% going into the earth, as the various members of Avalir's elite claim some for themselves to boost their magics. Avalir's Architect Arcane, Laerynn, has tried to unlock the secrets of the Leylines. She wishes to find a way to transport all of Avalir across planes, essentially dimension-hopping a whole city, regardless of the severe energy drain that would take. Her ex-husband Loquaties was once the truth-seeking reporter but when a former journalist under him discovered the true fate of Zerxus's husband and Laerynn's involvement, Loquaties covers it up. Patia regularly covers for the Brass Ring with memory manipulation, Nydas constantly enables Laerynn and Zerxus, as the ultimate paladin and redeemer, thinks about the Betrayer Gods and if there's any hope of redemption for them...

[Fig 6]

All of this is slowly uncovered across the four episodes of Calamity and each of these secrets end up costing Avalir in some way. See, that 25% of Ether for the Gau Drashari was actually meant to go to a magic tree sealed away in a hidden part of Avalir, called the Tree Of Names. As Avalir ventured across Exandria's Leylines, it was actually writing runes of protection across it's surface, preventing both the Betrayer Gods and their Primordial allies from returning. With the past few Replenishments not giving the full tithe of Ether, that protection has begun to weaken and by the series's end, completely fall away.

5. A Paladin and a Wizard End the World.

I've hopefully given enough context now that I can finally get into the actual game. There's a lot that goes into making EXU: Calamity as fun and emotional of a series as it is but the most important in my eyes is the cast. The two that immediately jump to mind are the two who're arguably the most responsible for everything going to hell, Zerxus and Laerynn.

Zerxus is a man whose belief in his ability to redeem anyone is absolute. From the word go, he's shouting at a god to stop killing another, clearly evil god because said evil god is hurt. Zerxus does share this dream with the Brass Ring as it becomes clear that something sinister is afoot, but when he later visits the Hall of Prophecy and receives a vision of that same god, revealed as Asmodeus the Lord of the Nine Hells, still recovering, he attempts to help that god recover and absolve them with very little convincing needed from Asmodeus. At most, Asmodeus makes himself look hurt and allows Zerxus's piece together a story himself from his own redemption-hungry mind without really having to lie. By episode 3 and the brief skirmish between the Brass Ring, Zerxus is primed to want to 'save' the god, being the one to pull Asmodeus into Exandria before being absolutely obliterated over and over by a now mask-off Lord of the Hells, with a performance for the ages by Brennan selling how a god can have so much hatred for what is, to him, a bunch of ants. Zerxus's soul ends up bound to Asmodeus in a last-ditch attempt to try minimize the damage Avalir can do and is killed by Nydas in their last stand before Zerxus turns into a devil and hurts his friends. Luis is phenomenal and steals every single scene he's in. The fact he was the first character introduced in that opening dream sequence and managed to ace the entire thing is evidence enough of his talent in my eyes.

[Fig 7]

Laerynn has gone down in a lot of people's eyes as the person who started the downfall proper, being the one who destroyed the Tree of Names. Laerynn's lifegoal is to create a way for Avalir to become an interplaner city and allowing them to begin trading with all the various other dimensions in the world of Critical Role. This goal is what lead to her best friend and Zerxus's husband Evandrin to test the machine she was testing for this purpose, the Leywright and what led to his sickness/banishment from the material plane. She is driven and focused to a fault, leading to her split from Loquaties and her frustration with the cities Ether tithe to the Gau Drashari taking resources away from her Leywright. The battery that contained said tithe was revealed to be housing the Tree of Names, which is what kept fucking with Laerynn's experiments and what caused Evandrin's sickness so naturally, Laerynn "Fuck them druids" Coramar-Seelie blighted that damn tree and started the end times. As you tend to do. Laerynn is, besides maybe Nydas, the member of the Brass Ring with the most lofty ambitions as to what Avalir could be. This is an era where the gods are still present in mortal affairs and where one has not only been erased from the minds of all but supplanted by a mortal. The ambition there, the idea of "The only thing separating the gods from us is the barrier between realms and I can change that" is the thesis statement at the core of Laerynn and Aabria, whose just the best in everything she does, manages to convey all of this so well and still gives Laerynn the moment of using the Leywright to send the Primordials off into the realms to be destroyed forever. Likewise, Luis manages to bring the corrupted archmage Vespin Choloras to his senses for the briefest of moments in order to buy Zerxus more time before his soul is given over to the Lord of the Hells. It's this great lesson that Brennan talks about in the wrap-up for the series, that the story isn't just "Ambition is bad, scientific and magic advancement is bad" but that the context surrounding Avalir and Aeor and all of the Age of Arcanum is what enabled all this and that these circumstances is what lead to the end times. Stuff like Vespin and corrupt ass wizards were symptomatic of an age where godhood was something you could achieve with the right circumstances.

[Fig 8]

6. A Herald and a Pirate Triage A City

For a pair that don't have much personal connection, Loquaites and Nydas both one thing in common, in that they have an interesting turn in the final act of the story. Loquaites is the Herald of Avalir, doing that thing you always see in sci-fi stories of that one newscaster whose broadcast on the side of skyscrapers to say "Good Morning Dystopian Utopia! Here's your daily dose of propaganda and bullshit to keep the status quo in check!". He runs the news in Avalir and uses that to influence elections, pull strings and shape the public perception of any events the Ring of Brass need shaped. He's also a changeling from the Feywilds and, as the city goes to shit with demons and devils running amok on the streets and he's running through his offices to send out a broadcast, he's given a lifeline. The Queen of the Seelie Court, the ruling class of the Fey, reaches out to any Fey on Exandria. Having been given prior warning from the Hells as part of some ancient pact, she's evacuating whomever she can. Loquaites almost goes with her, but instead resolves himself to go down with the ship and most importantly, with the woman he loves. Loquaites, for someone whose all about misdirection and changing his identity, is remarkably simple to understand. He's a man who fell out with the woman he loves and when the end of days comes, he will stand by her regardless of any threat to his own life. His final speech as Herald, after trapping a Ring of Gold member sent to tell him "ay, spew more BS to let us rich people escape and damning the rest of the city", is so touching and sad and absurd. Sam Riegal has a trend on Critical Role of being the embodiment of the fine line between the dramatic and the absurd, that tragedy is an unfinished comedy (a personal favorite that's currently on-going is with his Campaign 3 character F.C.G) and that Sam can go from barely holding back tears as he makes a last broadcast to Avalir and Caithmóira, telling those to remember his friends and then to perfectly pivot to "and remember the Market of Wonders" and advertise a business that's almost certainly burnt to the ground is, as Brennan himself stated, the perfect joke. I hate using the phrase "underrated" when it comes to Critical Role, because the entire cast is rightly praised equally, but Sam spends so much time doing comedy bits in sponsor segments and often being the comic relief character of the party that when it comes time for him to do some drama, it hits that little bit harder because we always forget how good he is at it.

[Fig 9]

Nydas is my personal favorite character in Calamity. I love the Ring of Brass equally but put a gun to my head and make me pick, Nydas owns my heart. As the Guildmaster of the Golden Scythe, Nydas is the money-man for Avalir. He manages the trade and mercenary work that the Golden Scythe deal in. He's also a former pirate who sailed to Caithmóira with his brother in hopes of finding a new life. His brother became the leader of Caithmóira as Nydas rose to become the Dragon of Avalir with dreams of the cities potential. He even went so far as to build a university for the magically gifted and funds it, partially for his dream and partially because... well, having a say in the education of the next generation of sorcerers is a powerful thing. Nydas is also, as Lou says himself, shoveling coal into the train engine that is Laerynn. He is fully behind her in her quest to build the Leywright, knowing that Avalir's legacy and greatness will be solidified if they are the first to travel the planes. Plus, being the first mortal man to open trade routes across dimensions is certainly on his mind. So imagine everyone's shock when Nydas hears a prophecy from a supposedly mad oracle that details how the destruction of the Tree of Names would spell the end of everyone and as Laerynn later goes to blight the Tree, Nydas suddenly has a change of heart and actively tries to prevent the spell, fighting Laerynn and Loquaties. He fails and after Asmodeus leaves to go do some murders, Nydas rushes back to the Golden Scythe to secure their ships for use in evacuating the city, in opposition to the Ring Of Gold's request to use them for all of their treasure. He's stabbed in the back by a captain in his service and Nydas just wipes him off the face of the earth before activating some super automatons and charging out into the streets to fight the demons and devils plaguing his home. Nydas is part of the self-professed Trouble Troika consisting of himself, Laerynn and Patia, the money, the architect and the information of the Ring of Brass. Each of them are, for lack of a better word, into some deep shit. So when he sees Laerynn go to blight the Tree, a switch must click in his head that reminds him "Oh shit, things can go bad". It's an element the cast all discuss in the wrap-up, but Laerynn and Patia are both elves who're come from extremely privileged backgrounds on Avalir. They don't have the life experience to truly understand how bad things can get when rash decisions are made at important junctions. Nydas fought and bled and killed for what he has now. Brennan said it best in the wrap up, Nydas was fully behind doing shady deals and skimming Ether off the top for the Leywright but when he heard that prophecy, a kid who had to fight on blood-soaked docks remembered how bad things can get. If Zerxus and Laerynn are both the stars in the build-up to the Tree of Names falling, Nydas becomes the third act hero, leading the charge against the devils on the streets of Avalir, shirt off and ghostly dragon at his back. Lou channels this do-or-die energy for Nydas during this time as well, the amount of rallying cries and banger lines he shoots out is truly without equal. His third-act turn to the moral compass of the Ring is what really solidifies his place in my heart and Lou's performance afterwards is the cherry on top. Side-note, Nydas summoning the dragon ghost as everything falls apart and telling it to shut the fuck up before it can monologue is my favorite thing.

[Fig 10]

7. A Keeper and an Eye Secure A Future

It's not all doom and gloom for the Ring, though. Two of them manage to keep some semblance of hope alive in the coming apocolypse. Patia Por'co is the Keeper of Scrolls and Archmage of the Librarium Incantatum for Avalir which in not-magic speak means she basically has access to magic Google. Patia's grandfather is the wizard who first lifted the mountain peak that would become Avalir into the skies and her parents [REDACTED], so she's got a lot of generational pressure on her shoulders. In all fairness, she does live up to it through sheer girlboss powers as Avalir's own Littlefinger, with endless fonts of knowledge available to her through a lil blue orb she carries around, acting as both her magical focus to cast spells with and a mini-Library of Alexandria, holding all the combined knowledge of the Librarium Incantatum, the collected magical secrets and information of Avalir. It also allows Patia to, in Marisha's own words, just have all the spells.

(Another brief aside, but one of the neat things about Calamity is how high level all the characters are. It's a small thing, but when you think about DnD, everyone tends to start as a lowly adventurer with a handful of coins and two cool things they can do. The Ring of Brass are the people who keep a highly advanced flying city running day-to-day, no shit are they experienced and rich. Again, small thing, but it's fun. Plus, with everyone doing so much damage, it adds to how insane the combat encounters can get.)

Now here is where I would talk about Patia's connection with the rest of the Ring but in all honesty, besides her best pal Laerynn, Patia is an extremely isolated person. She's given her entire elven life to fulfilling her grandfathers wish to make Avalir as great as it could be at the cost of any meaningful personal connections. Just under 200 years worth of work, with one friend to her name. Marisha does this great bookending thing where, as Brennan gives each player a short introduction scene by themselves, she introduces Patia at the foot of a statue of her grandfather wishing his memory a Happy Replenishment. By Act 3, after the Tree is blighted and the city is falling apart, the Ring are all separated. Each are running damage control in their own way or saving what family they have. Patia, now missing an arm and having learned of the pact her grandfather made with the druids, finds herself back at that statue wishing it a Happy Replenishment once again but now with more spite and sarcasm. Brennan then asks if Patia can remember her parents and Marisha, on the fly, decides she doesn't and Patia realizes her grandfather removed any memory of them from Patia's mind, as Patia has done to plenty of people. That's the final push Patia needs to realize that she's really alone in the world and as a last-ditch effort to make her years of solitude mean something, she sends her Orb and all the knowledge therein to Maya, Cerrit's daughter whose escaped the city and has a knack for history. Marisha's characters in the main campaigns have all been personal favorites and Patia keeps that trend going, even in her final moments giving her life to protect her only friends.

[Fig 11]

Cerrit is an outlier in the Ring of Brass for many reasons. For one, he's got no magic. He's a rouge, a detective and he's the one member of the Ring without any shady dealings or secret pacts to hide. He's the one of first realizes that some creepy shit is going down on Avalir in a extremely cool scene where Travis roles an extremely high perception check and Brennan describes how Cerrit manages to spot an invisible person from the two smaller then grains of sand-sized specks of their eyes, as some of it needs to be visible for light to hit them and allowing the person to see. Stuff like that is what set Cerrit apart from his magical brethren, the dude was built to fuck up wizards and he does it with style. He's also the only one not present at the Tree of Names, essentially ditching the rest of the Ring when Laerynn confesses to how far she's pushed the Leywright with no regard for the risk. The Ring has a telepathic bond to help them all communicate (and save time for the players) so Cerrit is somewhat aware of how bad things go at the Tree. Once demons start pouring into the City, Cerrit rushes to find his children, Maya and Kir. At this point, Kir has been calling his dad on a lil magic stone phone to rat on his sister for going out to parties and it's all extremely adorable. Kir and his dad use codenames but there's also a genuine love that keeps Cerrit focused on his mission. Plus, the duality of Kir being very cute and sweet on the phone to Cerrit, as Cerrit stands over the corpse of the skinned cultist he just killed is absurd in all the best ways. Travis goes into detail about his thought process creating Cerrit in the wrap-up but what stuck out to me was the comparison to Jor-El, father of Superman. Travis became a father early on in Campaign 2, years before Calamity (his partner and fellow cast member Laura was actually meant to be part of Calamity but couldn't due to scheduling conflicts, so Marisha stepped in) and so his portrayal of Cerrit as a man just trying to get his kids out as the world falls around him has an extra personal element that Travis brings and makes a brilliant side-story as the rest of the Ring recover from their fight at the Tree. Come the last stand at the Helm of Avalir, Cerrit ends up being the guy to put down Vespin in the final fight in a fitting conclusion to his chase. arguably more importantly, Cerrit is the one member who manages to escape. The actual chances of his escape from a game mechanics perspective where extremely slim, as Avalir was crumbling around them and the mountain it had landed on begun to erupt so Travis had to roll at least a 30 on a d20, so he was relying on a bunch of buffs he had received from his friends during the final fight to stack extra numbers on top. He rolled a 31, a number he couldn't have gotten without the Ring of Brass. Travis has always struck a great balance between owning the scenes he's in and knowing how to support his other players in their important scenes with Cerrit being no exception. The wrap-up comment he gave about becoming father being like taking your heart out and putting it in his kid speaks volumes about his approach to Cerrit and it really pays off.

[Fig 13]

8. All the Bad Guys are One Guy

It's extremely difficult to discuss why Calamity works without talking about Brennan Lee Mulligan. It's like trying to talk about how a car works without mentioning the wheels, or how a plane works without it's wings. Brennan is simultaneously the ultimate support and the most sinister villain. Brennan has an improv background so his ability to come up with stuff on the fly when his players do something unexpected is already spoken for but his consistent and incredible secret power to string together words in the perfect way in the perfect scenario is what really sets him apart. The man is a bottomless pit of monologues and one-liners that have been engraved into my brain ever since I first heard them. Critical Role is a collaborative effort on and off the screen so saying that one person in particular brings it all together is dismissive but it is impossible to imagine a world where Calamity doesn't feature Brennan, within ten minutes of the show starting, asking newcomer Luis to describe Zerxus with the knowledge that their mouth is filled with blood. Or his wide variety of voices and mannerisms for the multitude of NPCs and how he drops all of that for Asmodeus. Or that previously mentioned moment with Cerrit and the invisible cultist. Or, a personal favorite that they say on-air in the final episode, giving Marisha the chance to do the reveal that Patia lost the memory of her parents. He's so good at lifting up all his players and giving them exactly what they want from both a storytellers and players perspective. Everyone gets their narrative arc but they also have fun and feel like they're playing a game and not just performing. Brennan runs his own TTRPG series with Dropout.TV called D20 which, on the whole, does a lot of genre and pop-culture themed games. Crown of Candy is Game of Thrones with a food theming, Escape from Bloodkeep is Lord of the Rings from the villain's perspective and so on. They are all amazing series with their own emotional beats and well worth a watch but a lot of the time, they're one-and-dones and more light-hearted. So to see Brennan unshackled and told "the world has to end and you need to make it happen" as he baits the cast with fireworks , terrifies them with his demons and perfectly wraps up the story with a really heartfelt rumination on storytelling is a real privilege

[Fig 14]

9. The Wrap-Up

OK firstly, if you've somehow gotten this far, just go watch the fuckin series. It's amazing, it's emotional and it's just a really great piece of actual play. Secondly, once that's done, go watch the wrap-up roundtable. It adds a lot of extra context and it's basically what I'm trying to do here but better.

Lastly, Calamity ends on a somber note. The Ring have all died. Avalir is destroyed. Most of those casualties of the Calamity will occur in the days and weeks immidiatly after Avalir's fall and the freeing of the Lord of Hells. He would release his other Betrayers and the following war would literally shape the face of Exandria. The continent on which Cathmoira sat, Domunus, shattered into an archipelago of islands known as the Shattered Teeth. On the continent of Marquet, the lush jungles surrounding the city of Cael Morrow were sundered by the spear of a Betrayer God known as the Ruiner, turning a third of the continent's jungles to desert. Civilizations were destroyed, cities razed and one flying city's Cognoza Ward would become very important to a particular group of nine many centuries later. But thanks to the efforts of the Ring of Brass, in a story lost to the age that they inadvertently helped to bring about, the Primordials didn't return. They gave mortals a chance and eventually, the Calamity did end. The world recovered and managed to continue. It's an extremely pyrrhic victory for the Ring but as our real world is still dealing with a global pandemic and its consequences, political upheaval and the endless horrors that emerge from the bottomless, unholy abyss that is Twitter Dot Com, a story about the end of days and the world that comes after it is comforting. Brennan puts it best at the end of the series. The Calamity is here, but it won't be here forever.

[Fig 15]

10. A Bunch of Pretty Pictures I Liked But Couldn't Find a Nice Place to Fit Them.

On the subject of pictures, a lot of these were taken from the Critical Role Wiki hosted by Fandom Dot Com and I'm going to work to create a bibliography for the artists and photographers of each and every image used in this piece. A lot of it is official artwork commissioned by Critical Role, such as the headshots of each Ring member, but credit is credit and artists need that to make a living so if you're curious as to who made what, check back here in a while and I'll try to have a proper list made. Thanks for reading xo