Critical Role Author Madeleine Roux on “Fun, Weird and Unexpected” The Nine Eyes of Lucien Novel

Critical Role’s newest novel explores The Mighty Nein campaign from the perspective of one of its main villains. Earlier this week, Penguin Random House released Critical Role: The Mighty Nein–The Nine Eyes of Lucien, a new novel written by Madeleine Roux that explored the origins of Lucien, the enigmatic mercenary and blood hunter whose life became entangled with The Mighty Nein in many ways. Last week. ComicBook.com had the chance to speak with Roux about her experience writing the book, how she approached researching Lucien, and whether she would venture back into the world of Critical Role for a second time.

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ComicBook.com: Exactly how long has this book been in the works? Because Campaign 2 only wrapped up about a year ago. And Lucien was only revealed to be the main villain a little earlier than that. 

Madeleine Roux: Oh my gosh, time. I came on late summer of last year.

So literally right after the campaign wrapped up.

Roux: More or less, yeah. I honestly don’t know the thought process behind a lot of it. You’re sort brought in at a later phase, but I think probably over the summer was when the decision was made to do the book and then various people were approached and I was interested and came on officially sometime in late summer or fall.

ComicBook.com: So what attracted you to this project?

Roux: Well, I was a come and goer of Critical Role. I had watched some of it during the pandemic lockdown and then fallen off for whatever reason. Then when they approached me, I was like, “Okay, I think this is very close to my sensibility.” And I wanted to meet with the team and hear their vision and then make a final call because I knew it was going to be a lot of work to catch up and listen to the entire season, and then write the book. You’re looking at a lot of upfront research and work. So it was really just getting in that meeting with Matt and Taliesin and everyone at Critical Role, and just hearing that they wanted to do something very weird. And anytime you say weird, I am usually in. And it was just so unlike any other meeting I’ve taken to work with an IP.

It was so refreshing and inspiring, and I could just tell how excited and passionate they were. And sometimes that’s BS, right? You’ll get on calls with people who seem very motivated at the time, and then it turns out that’s not the case down the line. But it stayed true this whole time. And I just trusted that what they were saying was true, that they didn’t just want this to be a straightforward book, they really wanted to have it be weird and experimental and different.

The stamp of confirmation was taking that meeting and seeing that the cast is involved. They were on this call for almost two hours with me, just to pitch and work out what the book was even going to be. Anytime you encounter that kind of dedication, I think it’s a clue that it’s a good project to take on.

The Nine Eyes of Lucien isn’t just a prequel novel, it’s a retelling of sorts of Campaign 2 from literally the villain’s perspective. How did you balance the fact that people are obviously going to be familiar with the story, but approach it in a different and interesting way?

Roux: That was the biggest question. Everyone knows the ending here, so how do we make it still surprising and interesting and something that’s worth reading? There’s a lot of time during the campaign where he’s off doing stuff and you don’t know what it is, and you don’t quite have all the pieces. And so what we ultimately were interested in is not only filling in the blanks of his backstory as a younger person, but making it all feel seamless. We wanted to understand this person’s personal motivations. We understand how we got here, and the book helps readers understand now why he behaves the way he does in front of the Mighty Nein. 

Then in the ultimate big showdown where he’s defeated, you have so many more pieces now to see why The Mighty Nein’s strategy works. And it’s ultimately pretty tragic. Even though he is not a great person, and I did not want to rehab his image, it still is tragic in a lot of ways. And I think you see get to see from his perspective what’s actually going on under the hood during those conversations with them. We get to see if they are getting to him, and how much of Molly is still there. What is the relationship between these fractured parts of his soul? How does that all work? And that to me is where a lot of juice is, the psychological profile of this person and seeing what makes them tick and seeing why the Mighty Nein ultimately can defeat him.

So let’s talk a little bit about Mollymauk. Obviously he appears in the book, but I read in a previous interview how you layered bits of Mollymauk’s personality into Lucien to reflect that broken soul. What were the challenges of trying merge Lucien and Mollymauk, who are totally completely different personalities? And then you throw in Kingsley, which is a third aspect of that. 

Roux: For me, I was really interested in showing that this original character you meet at the beginning is potentially the whole onion. There are little aspects of what ultimately become Mollymauk, there are aspects of what becomes Lucien, and then obviously aspects of what becomes Kingsley. I wanted to run with the idea that Lucien is a holistic person until he’s not, until a spell actually does split him apart. 

So I wanted to put in aspects where you see it makes sense that Mollymauk does that or is interested in that, or why they have this really deep relationship with a person. You see these little glimmers that they’re not completely different people. If you just took your own personality and started to just string it out and see all these little bits of you and all the different traumas, all the different memories, all the different tastes and personality traits, how could you layer those into different characters? So the Lucien you meet at the beginning is very different from the one that we ultimately have at the end after he’s been resurrected. But you also will see little hints of Molly in there when he’s a young person. 

It is challenging to write because when you’re watching the show, it’s all from the perspective of the Mighty Nein. They’re our protagonists. We are sympathetic to them. You have to keep reminding yourself, this is not about The Mighty Nein. This is not a book about Mollymauk. So ultimately, while those aspects are interesting, and certainly Molly is a part of this book, that’s not the focus, right?

You don’t see him as Molly really, other than when he is trying to break through again into his consciousness later on. And that’s tough because I love these aspects, I love the protagonists, but I listened to the show with the ear of no, The Mighty Nein are the villains. They’re working against my guy. And so I have to come at it from that perspective. What I hope ultimately comes of reading this book is just everything makes a lot more sense, everything feels a lot richer, everything feels a lot more nuanced.

And again, that you see this person who could have been something, who could have been not a villain, and through their own choices and their own mistakes end up one. But yeah, I think you’ll see right from the beginning, little hints of Molly and Kingsley that are woven into his personality.

Were you… intimidated is not the right word, but I’m going to use it anyways. Mollymauk is a fascinating character to me, but he was only around a fraction of the campaign. And despite that, he might be the most popular member of the Mighty Nein. Everybody else in the Mighty Nein got hundreds of hours of character study to explore. But you only get a fraction of that with Mollymauk and with Lucien as well. So was that intimidating or challenging at all? Because that’s a really big set of characters that you tackled.

Roux: It’s actually sort of a gift. It’s a credit to Taliesin Jaffe that the character makes the impact that he does when he’s really not in it for that long. But, for me, just purely from a content and time basis, it was a lot less to take in. And that’s nice because I still had to watch the whole thing but as far as taking notes, I’m really interested in these specific people and these specific characters, and it’s looking at a very concentrated amount of personality.

And that’s why Mollymauk and Lucien were so memorable. It was actually great in that you have two really charismatic, larger than life characters. And that is always easier to work with than someone who’s very quiet and soft spoken. If I had 200 episodes of someone who’s quiet and shy, that would be a lot harder. I think Mollymauk and Lucien have such specific quirks. They have such specific personality traits that it’s a lot easier in some ways than having to capture someone who is way more subtle. 

It’s intimidating for other reasons, as it’s a passionate fan base and you want to get it right. That’s more intimidating, I think, than the characters themselves, because they’re fully realized. I just have to come in and do a good job interpreting them.

I was just about to ask if the fan base intimidated you at all. I find that to be the scariest part about Critical Role in both a positive and negative way. It’s not the franchise, it’s the fans. They’re so passionate about it.

Roux: When I was taking this on, I’ve dealt with some pretty serious online harassment in the past coming from other fan bases. And it was certainly something I considered. I was nervous. I was actually very nervous, and I reached out to a lot of friends who consider themselves hardcore Critters, and I was like, “Give it to me straight. Don’t sugar coat this. I really need to know what I’m getting into here.” I have miscalculated that in the past and it has hurt me.  And the response I got was”Look, they are really passionate. They’re going to tell you what they think, but I genuinely don’t think, if they didn’t like it or something, I just don’t think they’re going to be in your inbox sending you death threats.” 

That’s not who we’re talking about here. No, they care, but they it’s a much different field. I have to make these calculations as a visible queer woman on the internet. So hearing that was very affirming, actually. If I mess up and it’s just a bad book, then that’s fine. But it is the cast itself in the book. You’re dealing with a lot of people who are queer. You’re dealing with diversity. I’d much rather be there. I’m at home there and it’s good to know that the more I do of that, the better received I’ll be. Hearing that was like, okay, then that’s all I need to know.

When digging into the world of Critical Role, did you fall into any rabbit holes while doing your research or anything like that?

Oh, that’s interesting. I’m going to be honest, I had such a huge amount of content to take on, I kind of couldn’t. I really had to stay focused. I really had to genuinely make a schedule to be like, ‘I have to consume this much of it every day in order to stay on schedule.’ I think there were parts of the story that I became more obsessed with than others.

But personally, anytime you want to put a cursed object in something, I’m super there. So, the journal that Lucien comes to have from Aeor – that is my shit. I could not be more thrilled about that. Just doing that, getting an opportunity to show more of it. Almost all of my books have book within a book aspect, so I was like, “Yes. Again. Once more I can force this into it.”

So, that was a bit of a rabbit hole, but ultimately a lot of it’s in the book, so it wasn’t a waste of time. 

Now that you’ve written the book,would you consider returning to the Critical Role franchise? Were there any parts where you felt there’s still more of a story to be told here, and you wanted to be the person to tell it?

Roux: I mean, there always is, right? That’s kind of the beauty, especially of D&D, is all these rich side NPCs that you never expect people to get attached to them. I’m DMing a Star Wars campaign right now, and it’s wild which NPCs the players decide to attach to. I think there’s always more to mine. I would absolutely return if they would have me. I have to say it was a incredibly pleasant, inspiring experience from nose to tail. And I’m not saying that just to blow smoke, I would just avoid the question if I didn’t believe it. I truly can’t speak highly enough of the team. They were a joy. 

And I don’t even know who I would… I mean, Vess DeRoga is in this book a lot. I love her. I would love to see more of her. I got so attached to Kree, she’s a huge part of this book, and she has such a sad end. So I would always love to do more with her. There’s always rich side characters to take on. Part of why this is as big as it is that Matt creates these incredibly textured worlds that you’re just like… I mean, as a person who DMs with some regularity, I’m like, I can’t touch this. I’m just doing my best.

So last question -what do you hope that the readers are going to get out of your book?

Roux: That’s always an intimidating question. I hope they’re surprised. I think a lot of people will go into this expecting one kind of experience and then encountering another. And so I guess my advice would be go into this with an open mind. Because one of the things we really wanted to try to do was mimic the journey that Lucien is going on, which is that the more encounters he has with the Nine and the more corrupted he becomes by it, and the more he pushes back against it, the more fragmented he becomes.

The book itself follows a very similar trajectory where it begins very what you would expect, and then as we get into the back half, it just changes a lot and devolves a lot into something much more kind of experimental. So just keep an open mind. And I hope that in doing so, you come away like, “Whoa, that was a experience. That was something weird. And not at all what I was expecting to find in a branded IP book.” I really hope that it’s fun and weird and unexpected.

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Critical Role: The Mighty Nein–The Nine Eyes of Lucien is available to purchase now at major booksellers.