Critical Role is a weekly live D&D game featuring prominent voice actors in Los Angeles as they adventure through the world of Exandria, an original world created by the veteran DM and voice actor Matthew Mercer. Critical Role (CR) started as an ordinary D&D game in 2012 that the players began to stream in the middle of their first full campaign beginning in early 2015. The show quickly gained popularity due to the incredible storytelling of Matthew Mercer paired with skilled voice acting by the other players, leading to an immersive and highly entertaining story that viewers loved. CR’s main contribution to the dismantling of the weird white guy stereotype is that the game features three incredibly accomplished and beloved women players: Laura Bailey, Ashley Johnson and Marisha Ray. By visibly including women at their table and crafting interesting female characters, CR has helped to disrupt the expectation that D&D is a game exclusively for men. While the cast is all white, the CR team goes out of the way to invite guest stars who are people of color and intentionally develops complex characters in-game that are POC and play an important role in the campaign. Two great examples of this are the characters Shakäste, a human cleric, and Beauregard Lionett, a human monk.

Shakäste is a recurring character played by guest star Khary Payton, and is epicted as a handsome, charismatic, older black man. Shakäste is a mysterious folk hero who is credited with many exploits and daring feats under the pseudonym of “Hush”. He is shown to be a powerful ally who helps the main cast in several critical quests throughout the campaign, such as rescuing two party members from the slavers The Iron Shepherds. 

     Both of these characters are nuanced depictions of powerful and complex characters of color that play equally important roles in the campaigns compared to their white counterparts. By including official art depicting these characters, and also giving them important and interesting narratives, Critical Role provides a window for people of color within the narratives that the games follow, however it shies away from how that identity impacts characters within the fantasy world. These characters are definitively described as black and brown, but they aren't necessarily representing black and brown people because they neglect to explicitly address the character's race. Effectively, Critical Role has created a high fantasy hero who happens to be black, but doesn't acknowledge said character's blackness.