Tasha Huo and I don’t make it a minute into our conversation before we start gushing about wizards — and that’s how I know I’m talking to a true Critical Role fan.
Huo is the showrunner of “The Mighty Nein,” Critical Role’s second animated series with Prime Video. “The Mighty Nein” follows the success of “The Legend of Vox Machina,” the series for which Critical Role raised over $11.3 million in Kickstarter seed funding in 2019. Now, Huo, a longtime viewer of the show, is the series’ creative writing powerhouse.
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Nerding out over ‘D&D’
Huo, who’s based in Los Angeles, said she first started playing “Dungeons & Dragons” as a kid, but hadn’t touched the game for years. In her adult life, a friend wanted her to join his “D&D” campaign and recommended a Twitch stream that he said would help her understand how the game worked.
That turned out to be Critical Role. At the time, the company’s eight cofounders were in the midst of their second long-running campaign. And the stream that Huo watched, so many years ago now, has taken on an animated series form in “The Mighty Nein.”
“I was absolutely hooked. I was like, this is all I can watch now, and it’s all I can listen to in the car. And I binged it, which took years,” Huo said of the 141-episode campaign.
Several industry contacts recommended Huo to Critical Role in 2021 when they were looking for a showrunner.
Huo started work on the show in November 2022 as part of the Prime Video team and oversaw its writing until its release this fall, working 9-to-5 daily with three other writers and a writer’s assistant. She has an MFA in screenwriting from Boston University and has written for other shows, including “The Witcher: Blood Origin,” released in 2022, and “Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft,” released in 2024.
“It started with me having a lot of conversations with Critical Role. I met with Sam Riegel first, and then Travis Willingham and Matt Mercer, and we all just nerded out,” Huo said. Riegel, a cofounder, oversees much of Critical Role’s animation business alongside the team’s CEO, Willingham. Mercer is the crew’s chief creative officer.
“It was kind of like coming home. It was just all these pieces coming together that started over a love of ‘D&D,'” Huo added
Inside the writer’s room
Huo said conversations in the Critical Role writer’s room involved many talks with the eight cofounders about their campaign characters. She wanted to find the best way to condense the hundreds of hours of campaign stream time into eight, 44-minute episodes.
“The conversations always started with all of us in a room talking about the characters, talking about why they felt the way they did or why they did the thing they did,” Huo said.
Huo says these character conversations helped her figure out what the first season’s arc would be.
“Every day we would come into the Critical Role offices. And we had a giant whiteboard up with magnets, and we’d come up with ideas of like, ‘Okay, if we know what the season arc is, now let’s start thinking about some turning points within the episode,'” Huo said.
Making tough choices
Having so many hours of source material also meant that Huo and the writing team had to make tough decisions about what to focus on in the first season. Huo said it quickly became clear to them that the plotline for cofounder Liam O’Brien’s character, the wizard Caleb Widogast, needed to be covered first for the rest of the show to make sense.
“A lot of his backstory is really linked to a larger story that we were telling,” Huo said.
The season’s final cut also included several tidbits of information that were not in the original Twitch stream.
Huo also got to live the Critical Role fan dream and suss out all the juicy details from Mercer that had never aired on stream — including the ins and outs of how the season’s key antagonists, the Volstrucker wizards, worked.
“We get to tell a side spy show within ‘The Mighty Nein,’ and that’s really gratifying because you sit Matt down and he has all the answers already, so you just mine from all of the great stuff that he has and fill the story up with all of those things,” Huo said.
How to get your dream writing gig
I asked Huo how one might go about landing a dream writing job, and she had two tips.
“I would say the first thing is to dedicate yourself to the craft. Always be writing, even when there’s negativity and there’s rejection, just keep going. I think the number one reason people don’t make it is because they give up before someone else,” Huo said.
As for her second piece of advice for writers: “Don’t be afraid of what you love.”
“I remember when I met with Sam Riegel, I was so embarrassed. I thought, ‘Oh no, I fangirled too much when I talked to him,'” Huo said. “And it turns out that’s exactly what they wanted to hear, from someone who really, really loved the show.”
Do you work on the Critical Role franchise and have a story to share? Get in touch with this reporter at [email protected].
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