I had my doubts about Critical Role's new 13-player D&D campaign, but its latest episodes have me fully bought into its grand, ambitious promise

This article contains spoilers for Critical Role Campaign 4, episode 30.

I've been rather enjoying Campaign 4 of Critical Role—a 13-player, three-table epic that plans to reinvent the West Marches type of game for a modern actual play show. It's almost daedalian in scope, pure and utter hubris. It shouldn't work. And yet, 30 episodes in, it absolutely has.

The first four-episode overture was impressive. As I wrote back then, Brennan Lee Mulligan set up and spun 13 individual plates with the ease of someone who has been doing this his whole life—because he has, wielding a documented history with LARP, TTRPGs, and improv comedy with experience and ease.

But the recent arc, where all three parties have come back to the main city of Dol-Makjar, seemed to me a higher ...