Liam O'Brien

Liam O'Brien (@VoiceOfOBrien) is a voice actor and voice director, and he plays the character Vax'ildan in Critical Role.

Critical Role is Liam's first "pure" game of Dungeons & Dragons. Before this, he was a Dungeon Master in his sophomore year of high school as well as a player, which, as he states, "is totally cheating." He also ran a Rift game as well as a Cyberpunk game. After Critical Role became such a large part of Liam's life, he began running several D&D games for his children.

The Roots of Critical Role
Liam was indirectly responsible for starting the Pathfinder game that would later become Critical Role. He was the director for Matthew Mercer in Resident Evil 6, a video game. Matthew kept telling Liam about how he was running a D&D game and kept inviting Liam to join. Eventually, Liam asked Matt to run a game for his birthday, and he invited some friends for a game of Pathfinder with Matt as the DM. Liam enjoyed the game so much that he messaged everybody, asking if they would like to start a continuing game. They have been playing ever since.

Toward the end of the second episode of the podcast [allworknoplay], Liam and Sam Riegel talked about getting ready for the upcoming "one-time" D&D game.

Liam and Laura Bailey played the twins Vax'ildan and Vex'ahlia (respectively) in the game because they both share the same birthday (May 28th). When creating their character backgrounds, both he and Laura spent three hours at a diner creating their story.

Liam has stated that D&D has helped him get through a rough patch in his life after he developed a problem with one of his ears. It became very disorienting, but he has found that running has helped, as well as spending time with his family and friends.

Before the Critical Role stream, Liam recorded snippets of their Pathfinder gameplay. He still records some behind-the-scenes footage of Critical Role.

When asked if he could switch to any player character in the game, Liam said Scanlan.