Taliesin Jaffe


 * This page is about the actor. For the character from a one-shot campaign, see Taliesin Jaffe (character).

Taliesin Jaffe is a voice actor and director who plays the character of Caduceus Clay on Critical Role. He played Percival de Rolo in the first campaign, and originally Mollymauk Tealeaf in the second campaign. He was also the Storyteller for the two episode Vampire, the Masquerade mini campaign and. He was the Keeper of Arcane Lore for the one-shot.

RPG Background
Taliesin's first role playing experience was the Generic Universal RolePlaying System (GURPS) in high school when he was thirteen years old. He also hosted a Rifts game, a World of Darkness game, Paranoia, and HoL: Human Occupied Landfill. He gave HoL core rulebooks to now-Dungeon Master Matthew Mercer for his birthday.

Before Mercer's Pathfinder-based Exandria campaign (which evolved into 5th edition-based Critical Role), fellow voice actor and player Marisha Ray and he were in another pen-and-paper RPG game together.

Critical Role
In the first session that Mercer's Exandria group played together, Taliesin played a dragonborn paladin. Because he was one of the more experienced players at the time, his purpose for that first game was to try to ensure that everyone else stayed alive.

When the players decided to continue playing past the first session, Taliesin created a new character and chose the gunslinger Pathfinder class because it was interesting to him and he felt it could fill a role that did not exist within the group.

When converting the campaign from Pathfinder to 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons in preparation for beginning the Critical Role livestreaming webseries, Matt had to create a custom martial archetype for the fighter class, since Percy was a gunslinger. Matt and Taliesin sat down together and spent a full day to convert the character and all of his stats and abilities.

He is often called the "Anti-Wheaton" by other members of the cast, as he rolls frequent critical successes.

During Percy's resurrection ritual in, Taliesin was watching from another room. After the ritual succeeded, Matt revealed that Taliesin was the one who ultimately decided if Percy would want to come back, depending on the actions of Vox Machina and their players during the ritual.

Main Storyline

 * Percival de Rolo, human gunslinger (The Campaign of Vox Machina)
 * Mollymauk Tealeaf, tiefling blood hunter (Campaign 2: The Mighty Nein)
 * Caduceus Clay, firbolg cleric (Campaign 2: The Mighty Nein)

Trivia

 * On Talks Machina, the host Brian Wayne Foster likes to "#ThankMyGuests" with names that are either mispronounced or wordplay that sounds close to their names. Here are the names for Taliesin Jaffe so far:
 * Taliesin is bisexual, similar to his character Mollymauk.
 * Taliesin has an Essential Tremor.
 * Taliesin officiated Matthew Mercer and Marisha Ray's wedding.
 * Taliesin's chosen drink for his Between the Sheets interview was a blonde manhattan.
 * Every Halloween, the cast of Critical Role dresses up in costume for one episode. Taliesin has dressed up as Quentin Quire (2015), Clarota (2016), Ezio Auditore (2017), Sherlock Holmes (2018), Barry Allen (2019) and Archivist Zeenoth (2020).
 * The cast often jokes that Taliesin is an immortal, eldritch being, who is hundreds of years old.