#cr calliana

[renatogpadilla]

Okay, so I've been thinking about the Mighty Nein Animated Show and how they might skip some guest characters like they did in TLoVM.

So far, they've skipped Lyra, Thorbir, Lilith, Gern Blanston, FUCKING KERREK and Shale, and they're probably gonna cut out Arkhan. Chances are Lionel stays, but that's about it.

So regarding the Mighty Nein, I've reached the conclusion that there's only 3 guests they can skip: Calliana, Twiggy and Spurt.

Now here's my reasoning for this, taking into account the beats they've used in TLoVM so far. MIGHTY NEIN SPOILERS AHEAD! (Up to episode 103, which is where I'm at.)

- Shakaste: OTHER than being the single coldest motherfucker to ever set foot upon the surface of Exandria, he's the reason Nott's family makes it to Nicodranas safely, aside from being connected to the Golden Grin, who are either directly or indirectly connected to the conflict between Xhorhas and the Dwendalian Empire. So he stays.

- Calliana: As much as I LOVE HER, the quest to the swamp could be re-structured so the Nein could still find the cave with the religious items, and Caleb and Beau could still pull Bowlgate as a gag without her. Also, her existence leaves the question of "Hey! Are we gonna deal with this tremendously evil, Tiamat-worshipping cult? That sounds important!" and of course, we never do. Lastly, her letter's impact later on ends up being a Wand that Caleb probably never uses...

I LOVE Cali, but considering they cut out KERREK AND SHALE, she seems to be one of the characters that could be cut for time. I would LOVE to be wrong, though!

- Keg: SHE'S THE REASON MOLLY DIES. FULL STOP. SHE HAS TO BE THERE. That and her connection to the Iron Shepherds...

- Nila: She and her Family caring for the Blooming Grove is what gives Caduceus the comfort to leave until the Clays come back. She can't be cut either.

- Twiggy: Look, I LOVE TWIGGY. I'm sure we all do! But realistically, all she does is show up, leave them the Happy Fun Ball™ and leave. This could also be circumvented by finding it among the treasure in the Tide's Breath or one of U'kotoa's Temples. Granted, she kills the Dragon inside it, but... Guests getting the final blow on something seems isn't enough to push the story their way (unless TLoVM S3 changes something DRASTICALLY, but even then, Kerrek's moment already got stolen, so I don't think they will). And again, she leaves the question "Are we ever dealing with the inhumane collector from Port Damali?" and of course the answer again is "no". She can be cut, though having her Cameo might be nice if possible. Again, I hope I'm wrong.

- Spurt: He's 50/50. The ONLY reason he would be here would be for the "Spurt Went Splat" Gag. He probably wouldn't take a full 5 minutes of Screentime. Depends on whether they cut the Kobolds entirely or not.

-Reani: She has to be in. Other than being the reason Beau survived Gelidon, she's also the reason Caduceus's Family makes it back to the Blooming Grove okay.

So that's the likeness with which I think the guests will be able to come back... I hope I'm wrong and Cali and Twiggy (and Trixie!) make it in, but it seems like this might be, realistically, all we get... Thoughts?

Edit: Since posting this I have finished Campaign 2 and Cali's chances SKYROCKETED after Rumblecusp thanks to the Nein-Sided Tower! She has to be there now in SOME way shape or form!

[twiggyrogue]

God imagine if everyone reverted to using their old names and met back up with Calli imagine this poor girl's pain

“This is all very confusing, so... Nott is not Bren, but Nott is also not Nott? And Caleb is not Caleb; Caleb is Bren, who is not Nott, because Nott is Veth?”

“And this is Caduceus!”

“Oh my…”

[haywarde37]

Mark Hulmes, legends ONLY. Jesus Christ Calliana came in clutch to save our disaster lesbian.

[reebal]

CALIANNA YOU BEAUTIFUL BABE THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR SAVING MY GIRL

[nosnexus]

Hi! Love your CR/Hades AU. If you need some ideas, Molly as Eurydice (though Veth and Yeza might make more thematic sense) and Yasha as Patroclus? Nyx is hard to fit, but maybe Calliana?

Wonderful suggestions! Luckily I’ve got Yasha as Patroclus! Veth and Yeza were both in the running for Eurydice and Orpheus, but I really loved Veth as Dusa, so unfortunately Yeza’s probably gonna be without a role here.

I wish we had more interaction with Caliana in canon. She’s such a lovely character, and I would love to include her in the AU!

[loquaciousquark]

Talks Machina Highlights - Critical Role C2E63 (May 21, 2019)

Sorry it’s late, guys. @eponymous-rose has narrowly avoided being blown away by tornadoes and I’ve narrowly avoided drowning in equally dangerous paperwork, so here we are at the end of all things. Preroll is post-its of donors for Red Nose Day.

Tonight’s guests: Sam Riegel & Liam O’Brien.

Tonight’s announcements: We’re opened by Mark Hulmes instead of BWF. He dabs. No one blinks an eye. After the music open, we find out BWF’s neighbor’s kid stole his keys and then he lost his wallet. It hasn’t mattered, because he’s about to be Mr. Ashley Johnson & people just keep giving him what he needs. They’re still raising money for RedNoseDay. Thursday morning, the Colbert one-shot airs on the Critical Role Youtube. You can donate at critrole.com/rednoseday. Mark Hulmes joined Taliesin & BWF today for an episode available on the CR Twitch.

Episode 63: Intervention

CR Stats: Caleb cast his 700th spell, Gift of Alacrity, on Caduceus. Nott rolled her 40th natural 1 this episode to understand the local sewer system. This was Caduceus’s first HDYWTDT. Everyone mourns that someone stole the Golden Snitch from Matt’s bag.

It’s more stressful not knowing everyone’s motivations, both within the party and the game world. Sam talks about Yasha’s mysterious past and Beau’s dangerous ties to the Empire, especially given how much they understood in the first campaign about (at least) who the bad guys were. Sam feels like once they have a shred of information, he wants to jump on it ASAP and make big, bold decisions on them. He’s dealing with the discovery that this might be not as great an idea. He’s not experienced this kind of “trepidation, failure, uncertainty...I don’t like this game. I don’t like it at all!”

Caleb likes using the little bit of dunamantic magic as a taste of a drug--each little hit makes him want more and more and more.

Danimancy? Make a Carrcana check. Sigh, Sam.

Sam made two big mistakes in the last fight: he missed the gender of the dragonborn, so he thought that one of the other voices Matt was doing was actually the dragonborn giving orders (and therefore the one in charge, while the drow was the one taking orders). He also saw the dragonborn leaving and was worried that he was waiting on the party to give him (Nott) the go-ahead to kick things off. He recognizes he put Caleb in a terrible position both in a meta yes-and sense and in the Nott-Caleb team sense.

The world devolves into campaign slander and propaganda. Everyone’s in it, including BWF and Dani. #samforpresident

Caleb told the Brightqueen about his past because he feels like they’re on a very tight timeline, looking for very slight drips of information like gold. He thought it was worth the shot.

Sam desperately wants to know what the missing years in Yasha’s memory hold. BWF tells him to get what he can out of her while she’s here; her show’s been renewed for another season. He sounds genuinely bitter as he says it, but he notes at least it’s the last one. :(

They ask Mark Hulmes about what Charm does for people. He helpfully tells us it doesn’t say if they remember or not. Sam also points out Nott has blown up Caduceus before, so doing a few more points to Yasha is *wigglehands*.

Caleb did not mean to kill the horse on purpose. Sam tries to get him to confess that on camera, but instead Liam needles him about not cuddling Henry.

Cosplay of the Week: @andy_srivastava’s cosplay of Beau. Gorgeous!

Both Sam and Nott feel the fight’s outcome was his/her fault. He expects her to feel very guilty next week. Sam genuinely felt and still feels bad about it. He also prefers hashing out reactions the night things happen instead of having to wait a week for the next Thursday. He feels it’s more genuine.

Caleb is very worried about Jester’s mom and Astrid’s crew finding ways to use her mom as leverage. He’s also worried about the kid, but is glad Shakaste is going to get him. Liam also always imagined running into his old crew against the backdrop of the Empire, and is now very worried that if he runs into them soon he’ll have the added perception of being a traitor since they’re in the Dynasty.

Liam and Caleb both were surprised he was given hints of dunamancy so freely. He looks forward to learning more.

Liam totally understands how easy it is to miss things now. He’s constantly looking things up and reading in an attempt to understand his spells, and therefore missing parts of the battle. He greatly sympathizes with Marisha. Sam, on the other hand, is finding it hard to adapt to rogue life; he doesn’t like the necessary “out there, bold choice” nature of rogues in D&D and having the pressure of making big decisions very fast. He prefers Scanlan’s nature of sitting in the back, casting spells, and being more reactionary than instigatory. Liam always is afraid of picking the wrong spells, and finds it much harder than Vax. BWF: “Dagger dagger dagger...dagger dagger dagger dagger?” Liam: “I kept track of that fine, it’s everyone else that was wrong.”

Sam is shocked the D&D Beyond campaign bit has dragged on. BWF calls his rebuttal “bogusly weak,” and Sam looks genuinely aghast. It’s hilarious. “I don’t know how he got to you, Brian, but this feels like coming on Fox News! You’re a partisan hack! I won’t take it anymore, but I love attention, so I will stay.”

Nott is super interested in the dodeca’s ability to give people different bodies, but Caleb is still the clearest path to getting her body back. It’s complicated because the Dynasty souls are “chosen” and Nott’s not likely to be so.

Liam is very excited to see this magic system Matt has created in dunamancy. Did he create it in response to Liam or had he already thought about it? Sam tells us he’s always been thoughtful about fate and the subverting of it. Liam is so pumped because in campaign one, fate strings existed and were uncontrollable, but in campaign two we’ve “developed physicists, tinkering.”

In re: Essik, Nott’s just happy Caleb has found a friend. She wishes he’d bring him home more often.

Sam finally busses Henry’s cheek and affirms to us that he actually loves dogs. Everyone in his family is voting for a new dog except for his daughter, who wants a cat.

Liam doesn’t want everything to be cat-themed, but likes retouching a few spells here and there for flavor. He also wanted to differentiate it from Scanlan’s Bigby’s Hand. Sam thinks he should reskin more spells.

SPOILERS FOR C1 IN THIS QUESTION. Sam talks about rogue high-stakes moments as genuinely, surprisingly stressful. Liam says Vax was stressful but exhilarating, especially when it came to moments that conflated poor meta decisions vs roleplay decisions. He specifically mentions Raishan’s chase as a terrible in-game decision but one that was right for the character. He and Sam will always do what’s right for the character, even if it’s bad narratively in the moment. Sam says he got a lot of support from the group thread this past week, though. END SPOILERS FOR C1.

Fanart of the Week: a gorgeous Caduceus portrait by @larndraws.

Nott trusts Shakaste to get Luke traveling safely. Sam also drops a bombshell on the world by telling us Luc is spelled Luc. It’s just that no one’s ever asked. Heavens!

Caleb’s made an effort to tell people he cares for them, but he fears it at the same time. He’s afraid he’s going to be put in a position where he needs it too much. Brian asks if he believes he’s truly irredeemable: Liam says there’s a certain road where he could feel he atoned, and there’s a road that might lead to balance, but there’s never a brass ring that he could reach that could let him relax entirely. I don’t entirely understand the metaphor, but I get what he means.

Sam likes that the theme of this campaign seems to be “atonement and reconciliation” compared to the first campaign’s “finding family.” There’s a bit of that in this campaign too, but he likes how everyone has something in their past that they’re clinging to, and he’s interested to see who will be able to resolve it, who will be able to handle it, and who won’t be able to let it go.

Mark Hulmes come on to talk about the Stream of Descent, which happened last weekend. He’s the DM for High Rollers, which airs at 9am Pacific on Sundays.

BWF talks about how C1 had a lot of the Hero’s Journey in various forms, and C2 feels a lot like “what it means to be good.” He doesn’t feel they fit the “antihero” archetype very well.

Liam thinks that if Caleb were going to leave the campaign, he’d have done it already.

Part of Caleb’s generation was to create a character the world would shun, and seeing if he could find a way to find compassion for them. He mentions the poem written for the Boston marathon bomber a while ago. BWF talks about how it’s a really interesting character choice because it depends on the rest of the table being willing to stick around and seek out that redeemable quality in your character, even when you’re making decisions that are true to the character but bad for the table/the rest of the group. You can’t always expect that to work with every group you play with.

Mark talks about Calliana being the other end of the spectrum from Caleb, because she also has a history of having done very terrible things, but she was taken in by a family who helped her understand she’d been manipulated and it was not her fault. He’s desperate for his recently mentioned package to be picked up because she has some messages for Caleb in it. Now she tries to see the best in everyone she meets as a result of her history. He has a whole folder of fanart of Calliana on his wall. Awwww.

It’s still never gotten old for Liam or Sam either.

Mark endorses Sam for President. Good job, foreign fellow. Is it Thursday yet?

[renatogpadilla]

OH GODS I SAID A THING™ AND NOW I CAN'T GET IT OUT OF MY HEAD:

Probably because of the Announcement of the Animated M9 Series, but...

"Wildemount. The final Continent. This is the story of a rag-tag band of mercenaries and sellswords. Their five year Campaign? Prevent a reality altering relic from falling into the wrong hands, discover new conspiracies between warring nations, and boldly go where no one has gone (for good reason) before."

I call this abomination of an idea: DEEP SPACE NEIN!

And yes, it's every bit as cursed as you can imagine a CR / Star Trek crossover to be!

Everyone needs their space on the UNSC-1909 "Mighty Nein":

Fjord "The Unwitting Face of the group" Stone: Captain. That one's obvious.

Beauregard "Beau" Lionett: Number One. Because she gets physical and FUCKS. You can blame Ryker for this one...

Yasha "Worf WISHES he hit this hard" Nydoorin: Security. Nuff said.

Caleb "my phaser doesn't have a Stun setting" Widogast: Navigation. Keen Mind once again comes in clutch!

Nott/Veth "The Brave" Brenatto: Engineering. Yeza helps as well! She's still CONSTANTLY smashed and that's how she does her best work!

Genevieve "Jester" Lavorre: Comms. This one is primarily because of the Message spell... During their travels, she finds a sterile Tribble she names "Sprinkle". Hilarity ensues.

Caduceus "Earl" Clay: Ship Doctor. Always a bit of tea on hand to talk about somebody else's problems. The crew knows better than to ask why he gets a new batch of tea whenever Spurt gets killed, though...

Mollymauk "Nine Eyes" Tealeaf: The hot bartender who illegally smuggled himself into the ship to escape a past he himself doesn't remember... Sees EVERYTHING. Knows everyone's secrets.

Essek "The Hover" Thelyss: That ONE guy in the Transponder room that energizes the teleporters. He seems unimportant until he gets promoted to Series Regular halfway through Season 2 due to his unexpected Political connections and insight.

He accidentally invented hover boots while messing around Engineering and now NEVER takes them off...

Bonus:

+ Pumat S.0.L: Ship's AI voice. Occasional holograms of him show up to manage the built-in shops, respectfully.

+ Kiri: Baby on board. The Wesley Crusher of the show. She and Luc get along quite well!

+ Shakaste: Chief Science Officer. Don't even give him LaForge shades. Have a little robotic Hummingbird called the Grand Duchess scan the area with sonar and directly transmit the info to his brain!

+ Calliana: Pilot. She flies the ship. Whether it's smooth sailing or crazy, death-defying acrobatics depends on her mood that day.

+ Spurt: The Red Shirt. It's always him. The same one. He always dies and comes back next episode like nothing ever happened. Nobody acknowledges this. "It's been 11 days since Spurt last went Splat".

+ Keg: A down-on-her-luck space smuggler the crew encounters on occasion. She's almost never followed by good news, but she's good for her word, and (with some "persuasion" from Beau) will usually help the crew out of a pinch.

+ Nila: She and her family were diplomats/emissaries for a pacifist race, but when her husband and child get kidnapped by Keg's old partners in crime, the Iron Shepherds, Nila proves to be a formidable spy on top of a ferocious fighter...

+ Reani: Still a vigilante, plain and simple. She goes from planet to planet "rescuing" people with her own lethal brand of justice. Her abilities as a shapeshifter and her interest in biology make her a valuable ally though, not to mention that she knows just about every shady person on any given sector...

+ Twiggy: The ship's resident Archeologist, albeit the most eccentric member of the crew. She specializes in identifying where magical artifacts come from, and dragging the crew on "archeological escapades" for "Science". Her pet squirrel Trixie and Caleb's cat Frumpkin seem to be good friends, but neither of them feel comfortable around Sprinkle for some reason...

+ Yussa: The Negotiator. Not because he can smooth-talk anyone, that's Fjord's thing. No, Yussa's the negotiator because of how EASILY he can figure out what everybody wants. Although he keeps a calm exterior, he has a habit of taking EVERYTHING regarding anything that resembles a puzzle or a mystery as a challenge, and his hubris WILL get the crew into trouble more than once...

Occasional antagonists include:

# The Iron Shepherds: Led by the dreadful Lorenzo, these low life slavers make their credits pulling the most despicable jobs... Regardless of who pays for them, so long as the job is paid for.

# Captain Avantika: Obligatory femme fatale with a thing for Fjord. Whether it's a relationship born of convenience, manipulation or simply blind worship towards the same thing, nobody can really tell. The pirate captain of the "Squalleater" is OBSESSED with releasing an entity which she believes to be an ancient god, hidden in the farthest reaches of space... And only the crew can stop her from achieving her malicious goal.

# Obann and the Unkillable Family: Much like Avantika, the God-releasing MO stands, but rather than getting their followers by power of charisma or duty, the crew of the ravager ship "Angel of Irons" directly controls the minds of the people they believe might help them accomplish their goal... Including the Nein's own Chief of Security for a time.

# Special Guest Star Matthew Mercer as "The Traveler": He's Q. That's it. He's JUST Q. There is no joke, there is no agenda other than wanting to become a God himself, but taking such a liking to Jester that he can never endanger the crew to continue his schemes, so he finds ways to trick them into helping him out... Mostly by pretending to be a sterile Tribble and arousing chaos wherever he goes.

And that's what I've got! Let me know what you think! I'm not very good at AUs, but I couldn't get this idea out of my head!