Ashley Suzanne Johnson is an American actress. She became known as a child actress for her role as Chrissy Seaver on the sitcom Growing Pains (1990–1992). As an adult, her television roles include Amber Ahmed on The Killing (2011–2012) and Patterson on Blindspot (2015–2020). She has appeared in films such as What Women Want (2000), The Help (2011), and Much Ado About Nothing (2012), and is a cast member on the Dungeons & Dragons web series Critical Role (2015–present). She became the president of the show's charity branch, the Critical Role Foundation, upon its launch in 2020.
CH Media, doing business as Dropout, is an Internet comedy company based in Los Angeles which produces content for release on its streaming service, Dropout, and on YouTube. It was originally founded as the CollegeHumor website, created by Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen in 1999, and was owned by InterActiveCorp (IAC) from 2006 until January 2020, when IAC withdrew funding and the website shut down. The current CEO of CH Media is Sam Reich, a veteran performer and former Chief Creative Officer of CollegeHumor, who purchased the company in 2020 from IAC. In September 2023, the company formally dropped the CollegeHumor branding in favor of its Dropout branding, which originated with its streaming service.
Paizo Inc. is an American role-playing game publishing company based in Redmond, Washington, best known for the tabletop role-playing games Pathfinder and Starfinder. The company's name is derived from the Greek word παίζωpaizō, which means 'I play' or 'to play'. Paizo also runs an online retail store selling role-playing games board games, comic books, toys, clothing, accessories and other products, as well as an Internet forum community.
Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is a fantasy role-playing game first published in 1974. As the popularity of the game grew throughout the late-1970s and 1980s, it became referenced in popular culture more frequently. The complement of games, films and cultural references based on Dungeons & Dragons or similar fantasies, characters, and adventures became ubiquitous after the end of the 1970s.
Matthew Christopher Miller, better known professionally as Matthew Mercer, is an American voice actor and game designer who has provided voice work for cartoons, animations, video games, and English localizations of Japanese anime.
Jacob Penn Cooper Hurwitz is an American comedian, writer, actor, and member of the comedy duo Jake and Amir. He was hired by the comedy website CollegeHumor after becoming an intern there in 2006, and has written and appeared in original videos for the website, as well as contributing articles which have been published both online and in print. He also starred in The CollegeHumor Show, an MTV sitcom that ran for one season in 2009. Outside of CollegeHumor, Hurwitz has hosted Myspace's BFF series.
Critical Role is an American web series in which a group of professional voice actors plays Dungeons & Dragons. The show started streaming partway through the cast's first campaign in March 2015. Campaign one ended in October 2017 after 115 episodes, and campaign two started in January 2018 and ended in June 2021 after 141 episodes. A number of one-shots were aired in the hiatus between the two campaigns. After campaign two was completed, the spin-off limited series Exandria Unlimited aired from June 2021 to August 2021. The third campaign premiered on October 21, 2021.
Siobhan Thompson is a British-American comedian and writer. She is known for her work on the CollegeHumor Originals web series and has appeared in other programs such as Adam Ruins Everything and Broad City. She was also a staff writer for Adult Swim's Rick and Morty and as of 2024 a writer on Krapopolis.
Brian Kevin Patrick Murphy is an American actor, producer, and writer. He is best known for his various roles in CollegeHumor videos, his role as Murph on truTV comedy original Adam Ruins Everything, and his role on the Pop original Hot Date, co-starring with his wife Emily Axford.
Marisha Ray Huber is an American voice actress, host, producer, and creative director. She is best known for her roles as herself and her characters Keyleth, Beauregard, and Laudna on the Dungeons & Dragons web series Critical Role. In video games, she most notably voiced Margaret in Persona 4 Arena Ultimax and Persona Q, Laura S. Arseid in The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel series, and Miranda in Metal Gear: Survive.
Critical Role Productions, LLC is a multimedia production company incorporated in 2015 by the members of the creator-owned streaming show Critical Role. The first two shows from the company, Critical Role and Talks Machina, originally premiered on Geek & Sundry. The company moved to their own studio space in 2018, and began putting out new shows on their own Twitch and YouTube channels. A split from Legendary Digital Networks was completed in early 2019, at which point Critical Role Productions took over production responsibility and since then has continued to launch new shows independently.
Dimension 20 is a tabletop role-playing game show produced by and broadcast on Dropout, and generally hosted by Brennan Lee Mulligan as the show's regular Dungeon Master. Most of the games use Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition. Long seasons, featuring a core cast of players in seventeen or more episodes, are interspersed with shorter side quests, featuring a rotating cast in ten or fewer episodes.
Brennan Lee Mulligan is an American comedian, actor, writer, and gamemaster. He has worked with CollegeHumor as a sketch writer and performer, and as gamemaster for their actual play web series, Dimension 20 (2018–present). He also wrote the superhero webcomic Strong Female Protagonist alongside artist Molly Ostertag, on hiatus since 2018.
Erika Ishii is an American voice actor and host. They are best known as the voice of video game characters such as Valkyrie in Apex Legends, and for their appearances in actual play web series including L.A. by Night and Dimension 20.
Actual play, also called live play, is a genre of podcast or web show in which people play tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) for an audience. Actual play often encompasses in-character interactions between players, storytelling from the gamemaster, and out-of-character engagements such as dice rolls and discussion of game mechanics. The genre emerged in the early 2000s and became more popular throughout the decade, particularly with the 2015 debut of Critical Role, an actual play webseries featuring professional voice actors.
Lou Wilson is an American actor, writer, and comedian. He is best known for his work as a writer and his roles on actual play anthology web series Dimension 20 and the creator-owned podcast Worlds Beyond Number. He is also known for being the on-air announcer for Jimmy Kimmel Live! and his roles on American Vandal, The King of Staten Island, and The Guest Book.
Honey Heist is a tabletop role-playing game by Grant Howitt about bears in disguise stealing honey from a honey convention. The mechanics are based on Lasers & Feelings by John Harper. Honey Heist has featured in 3 episodes of Critical Role,one episode of Dungeons and Daddies, and a special episode of Tales from the Stinky Dragon. It has been a top seller on Itch.io's physical games section since 2017 and inspired new designers to make their own games. It also has a popular response on the Tabletop RPGs subreddit.
Aabria Iyengar is an American web series actress known primarily for tabletop role-playing game anthologies, streams and podcasts. She was the Dungeon Master (DM) for the first season of Exandria Unlimited. Iyengar has been both a player and a Game Master for multiple seasons of Dimension 20 and a guest DM on The Adventure Zone.
One Shot Podcast Network is a network of podcast series about tabletop role-playing games, with many shows dedicated to actual play, interviews, and discussion. It was founded by James D'Amato to showcase a wide variety of games and systems, including indie role-playing games, as an alternative to actual play shows that focus exclusively on Dungeons & Dragons.
