Critical Role‘s new season is just getting underway, and is just starting to scratch the surface in regards to campaign three’s new characters. As the bits and pieces of their backstories begin to emerge, one character in particular stands out in ways that hearken back to the Dungeons & Dragons play show’s very first campaign.
Marisha Ray’s humanoid Sorcerer/Warlock Laudna claims to have come from Whitestone, which longtime viewers know to be the home of Vox Machina‘s cursed gunslinger: Percival de Rolo. After the vile betrayal and murder of nearly the entire de Rolo family by Lord and Lady Briarwood, Percy was visited by a shadow demon named Orthax that offered him resolution and revenge.
Orthax came in a dream and provided Percy with the vision to create his first firearm, which tied not only to the list of targets Percy planned to take his vengeance on, but to his soul as well. Every time Percy crossed a name off his list, Orthax stole a little more of his soul, until almost nothing was left of the young man who narrowly escaped the Briarwoods. In time, and after numerous confrontations and attempts to destroy the demon, Keyleth managed to sever the connection between Orthax and Percival, freeing him at last from the curse of his own hatred.
Stepping back to examine Laudna and how Percival’s origin story could potentially tie to her, one can’t help wondering if perhaps another of the de Rolos managed to escape the Briarwood’s bloody coup. Laudna registers as undead, which suggest she may be one of the Hollow Ones, reanimated bodies who no longer have their souls, but still contain some semblance of their former lives and personality. This magic came about sometime after the Calamity and was almost solely practiced in the Blightshore area of Wildemount.
Delilah Briarwood was a Necromancer from Wildemount, so it is possible that her necromantic education was heavily influenced by the Blightshore practice of creating Hollow Ones. Laudna revealed that she came from Whitestone and, in episode two, she referenced the de Rolo family, commenting almost flippantly about how many children they have. When questioned about how she knew of the de Rolos, she didn’t say, but that was enough to arouse suspicions.
As for who Laudna was in life, the entire de Rolo family — save for Percy and his sister Cassandra — were murdered. Their bodies were then left to hang on the Sun Tree as a warning to anyone who might think of challenging the Briarwoods. However, it’s possible Delilah Briarwood used the Blightshore magic to turn one of them into a Hollow One.
If so, the most likely candidate would have been Johanna Klossowski de Rolo, Percy’s mother. Laudna is described as being in her mid-fifties, which would certainly make her old enough at the time of her resurrection to be Johanna. Since undead don’t age, she would retain much of her appearance, but the corruption of horrors the Briarwoods thrust upon her before her murder may very well have fractured her perception of herself. It is altogether possible that after resurrecting Johanna from the dead, Delilah forced her to murder her own children.
Drawing from her grief as she wandered the world in search of solace, Laudna drew the attention of a shadow entity (much like the demon Orthax who corrupted Percival) and in time, that entity became her patron. She carries with her a puppet that she made from a dead rat affixed with a raven’s skull, suggesting not only that her patron could be the Raven Queen, but that she has a link to Percy, who carried with him a raven skull that Keyleth fashioned for him. She also named the puppet Pate de Rolo, commenting that all the de Rolo children had ridiculous names. Who would know that better than their own mother?
There is still so much to uncover about the new characters of Critical Role campaign three, including Laudna. One can’t help wondering after the reunion between Keyleth and her estranged mother during campaign two if it could lead to some intriguing revelations about a core member of Vox Machina that even he never saw coming — especially considering how deeply Percy longed to subjugate himself to the Raven Queen.
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