Attention, Critters! Critical Role next year is turning 10, and the Dungeons & Dragon role-playing troupe is staging a worldwide tour to mark the milestone.
In 2025, Critical Role’s eight founders and performers will bring live shows to five cities: Chicago, Fishers, Ind. (a suburb of Indianapolis) and New York City in the U.S., and Sydney and Melbourne in Australia. (See below for dates and venues.)
Each live show will be a standalone event, although the pair of Australian shows will have “some loose narrative connection,” the company said. The shows will weave new stories within the world of Critical Role’s Exandria with the founding cast: Matthew Mercer, Ashley Johnson, Marisha Ray, Taliesin Jaffe, Travis Willingham, Sam Riegel, Laura Bailey and Liam O’Brien. The tour is being produced with live entertainment company AEG Presents and Australia’s Frontier Touring. Additional details on the tour including ticketing info are available at this link.
“Embarking on a global journey to bring Critical Role to the stage in brand-new cities with our ragtag group of adventurers is nothing short of a dream,” Marisha Ray, co-founder and creative director of Critical Role, said in a statement. “Let alone during our tenth year of telling stories together — I couldn’t imagine a better way to celebrate!”
Critical Role started as a group of “nerdy voice-actor friends playing a tabletop game,” and they held their first D&D livestream on March 12, 2015. Since then, Critical Role has won millions of fans (lovingly dubbed “Critters”) and the company has expanded into multiple lines of business. That includes both fiction and nonfiction books on the New York Times Best Seller list, comic books, graphic novels, collectibles, tabletop and roleplaying games, podcasts, live events — and adult animation series “The Legend of Vox Machina,” currently in its third season on Amazon Prime Video. In addition, the company has launched the Critical Role Foundation, a nonprofit supporting multiple organizations, and a tabletop game publishing company, Darrington Press.
AEG Presents previously presented Critical Role’s Mighty Nein Reunion show at the OVO Arena Wembley in London in October 2023. The 2025 tour will “give Critters the chance to experience Critical Role Live,” said Eliza-Jane Oliver, promoter at AEG Presents. Meanwhile, for the group’s first Australian live shows, “Aussie Critters are going to be blown away, and we’re thrilled to be working with the Critical Role team and AEG to help bring it to life for fans Down Under,” Frontier Touring CEO Dion Brant promises.
Here are details on the Critical Role 2025 tour stops:
Chicago, April 10 (Wintrust Arena): CR will host a “unique live one-shot experience,” where the audience will vote to decide which of the original main campaign characters the founding members of Critical Role will play for the evening, with Mercer leading the story as game master. The founding cast will also attend C2E2 for a weekend of signings, photo ops and a panel discussion.
Sydney, June 19 (ICC Sydney Theatre) and Melbourne, June 25 (Rod Laver Arena): For each of these live one-shots, party members from two separate Critical Role campaigns – played by the founding members – will join forces as they fight a common threat, threaded together by game master Mercer. Comedian and musician Tom Cardy will emcee both events.
Indianapolis/Fishers, Ind., Aug. 2 (Fishers Event Center): This event will be Critical Role’s first one-shot set in the world of Exandria and powered by Darrington Press’s upcoming role-playing game, Daggerheart.
New York City, Oct. 7 (Radio City Music Hall): The final show on Critical Role’s tour will feature two of the Mighty Nein lovebirds, Jester and Fjord, embarking on their greatest adventure yet: marriage! The following weekend, the CR founders will attend 2025 New York Comic Con for signings, photo ops and a panel discussion.