Critical Role Campaign breaks Kickstarter Records

Northridge, CA- The Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for Critical Role’s animated series has come to a close. But not before smashing the sites record for the most funded animated series to date.

*The Critical Role Crew’s campaign announcement video on Youtube.*

Dungeons and Dragons has seen an upsurge in its popularity recently. This is due in part to shows and podcasts Such as Critical Role. Critical Role started a Kickstarter campaign to fund an animated short of their first season. The cast began the campaign with a goal of 750 thousand dollars to make one animated episode. the campaign has since changed and developed into a 10 episode series.

Cheryl Fitzgerald, a long time fan, and donator to the campaign said she was shocked by the amount of support some community members poured into the project. ” There was twenty five thousand dollar donations and fifty thousand dollar ones. I was only able to give twenty.”

With donations like those, the campaign broke its asking price of Seven-hundred-Fifty-thousand dollars in the first hour. It ended with over ten times the asking price at eleven million dollars. This figure broke the record for Kickstarters most funded TV or film project ever Members of the Dungeons and Dragons community outside of the Critical Role fandom saw this as no surprise considering the scope of the livestream’s audience.

Emmanuel Yummul, a regular at Fire and Dice’s weekly game meetups said, “Yeah, im not surprised. it makes sense for these people to support it when they hear them say, ‘Hey, uh, we are looking into making this an animated series.”

The attention Critical Role brings concerns some players. While shows like Critical Role bring in new players, they may not be preparing them for what the game is usually like. The most commonly played form of Dungeons and Dragons outside of meetups at home consist of moderated official adventures run by Wizards of the Coast. these meetups are known as Adventures League.

Adventures League games run differently to many of the heavily story based or roleplay based games like Critical Role or The Adventure Zone. Adventures League meetups focus more on core rules found in the various handbooks, and regulated missions and quests that are pre-written and provided to dungeon masters.

Erik Tukey, a moderator at Fire and Dice’s weekly Adventures League sessions says shows like Critical Role give new players an expectation for what the game is like before they come in the door. He wants new players to understand that the experience they will get at Adventures League, or at your local neighborhood game shop may be different than exactly what they see on the shows. And while it is still a good experience, they need to be prepared for the change in how things are run.

This campaigns success may signal the beginning of a push from the community for more Dungeons and Dragons content in pop culture, as well as introducing many more players to the game so many have devoted themselves to.

Critical Role’s Q&A Livestream after the events of Day 1: <a href="http://”>http://