Critical Role’s Taliesin Jaffe has a new perspective of the gods, thanks to the show’s most recent three-episode arc. The popular streaming series is exploring a moment in the lore of its world of Exandria in Downfall, a new standalone arc featuring Dimension 20 Game Master Brennan Lee Mulligan and a cast of Critical Role regulars and guest stars. In the new arc, Laura Bailey, Taliesin Jaffe, Ashley Johnson, Abubakar Salim, Nick Marini, and Noshar Dalal play “aspects” of the gods of Exandria looking to infiltrate the flying city of Aeor and destroy a powerful weapon capable of playing gods.
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Speaking with ComicBook’s Character Sheet before the airing of the second episode, Jaffe admitted that he never looked fondly on the pantheons frequently found in games like Dungeons & Dragons, despite having played a cleric during the show’s second campaign. “I honestly have never been a huge fan of these sorts of pantheons in Dungeons & Dragons to begin with, just due to the nature of the way that they were created, which was a bunch of guys in the basement just figuring out what they wanted,” Jaffe said. “I felt always a bit sloppy, and honestly, more of just a interesting way to power paladins and clerics.
However, his time playing as a god of Exandria has helped change his perspective. “It never occurred to me that they had real personalities beyond what they put forward to the players,” Jaffe said. “And watching everyone give life to these characters made them far more flawed and far more interesting to me. It had never occurred to me that they were flawed in that way, other than flawed in the way that gods are flawed.”
Jaffe chose to play an aspect of the Wildmother, a goddess associated with nature and harvest. However, instead of playing the character as a benevolent character with a strong affinity with and control over nature, Jaffe chose to personify the Wildmother as Asha, a wolf who shifts into an elven monk form. When asked about why he opted to skew away from a more traditional nature-focused build, Jaffe noted that the era that they were playing in – the Calamity, a time where most of the world was devastated by a conflict between the gods, was not a “good time” for druids.
“I love the idea that if she is nature, especially in the time when nature is not doing that well, of just deeply grounding her on a level that everyone else was not going to be grounded,” Jaffe said of his decision to build the character as a monk. “The supernatural bent of her was small and was always meant to be small. She was really making an effort to be something else than what everyone else was going to be doing. And that was the thinking behind that of she wasn’t going to be flashy. She wasn’t going to be casting big spells. She was just going to be barefoot and angry. At least barefoot and hungry. Not even angry. I won’t say angry. Barefoot and hungry. There was no anger in there. There never is, other than some relationship issues.”
Also explored in the new series is the relationship between the Prime Deities (the “good” gods within Exandria’s pantheon) and the Betrayer Gods. A war between the two factions was the root cause of the Calamity, but the Downfall miniseries revealed a much more complicated relationship between the two sides. Jaffe compared the deities as a whole to The Endless in Sandman, and noted that the Calamity was (to the gods at least) a disagreement rather than a full-blown war. “I was finding myself with an awful lot of sympathy for them,” Jaffe said. “I was realizing that the line between being on one side of the Betrayers or the other was very thin. And I found myself agreeing with them an awful lot, which was disconcerting. I realized that this is a family that really just wants to be together again, one way or another.”
While the Downfall arc has a “fixed” end in that history has already shown that the gods will succeed and Aeor will fall from the sky, Jaffe pointed out that it was fun to watch the tragedy unfold, in part because of Brennan Lee Mulligan’s masterful storytelling. “I’ve known Brennan quite a while, a very long while, and whatever time we’ve spent together has definitely never been enough. He is that sort of person,” Jaffe said. “This game could have been nine games, and I honestly would’ve wanted more. I am too big a fan of tragedy. I will watch the knife slowly slide between my ribs and applaud the drama of it. I will say even he broke even my expectations with some of the things that are going to happen. And everybody brought some very interesting things to this game as it slowly rolls out.”
The first two episodes of Downfall are available on Critical Role’s Beacon streaming service, with VOD also available on YouTube. The finale of Downfall airs this Thursday, with no prior knowledge of Critical Role necessary to enjoy the arc.
