Awesome / Critical Role Kraghammer Arc

The first broadcast story arc of Vox Machina, the audience follow's VM's adventures into Kraghammer. Upon a request from the dwarven lord of the city, the crew finds themselves in the Underdark, and their adventures eventually culminate in a battle between Vox Machina and a beholder named K'varn who is controlling an entire city of Illithid.

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

Episode 01: Arrival at Kraghammer

• Marisha's first Natural 20... which culminates into a magnificent circus-like performance while in bear form.
  • It's the first Natural 20 of Critical Role!
• The very first HDYWTDT of the series: Scanlan uses magical lightning to finish off a particularly tough monster that was giving the team trouble. It's particularly impressive since one: he's the bard, and two: it's his very first HDYWTDT in the entire campaign. Even the anticipation is awesome. Travis has his arms around both Liam and Laura as they wait to see if Matt will utter those seven magic words.

Episode 02: Into the Greyspine Mines

• The mere mental image of Cave Bear!Keyleth grappling an Umber Hulk into a river.
• The team kills the two Umber Hulks without any casualties. Note that this was after one of the monsters hypnotized a raging Grog into fighting for them temporarily.
• Scanlan polymorphing a giant and dangerous Umber Hulk into a tiny snail, and Vax then picking it up and throwing it into the nearby waterfall with a very affable "Erm, go fuck yourself."
  • When the polymorph wears off and the Umber Hulk returns and attacks Scanlan, Vax deals the killing blow by cutting it open from its nads.
  Vax: No one touches the gnome!
• Vox Machina gets a lot mileage out of the "ass cloud" that Scanlan conjures. The three dark dwarves caught in it spend the entire battle coughing and retching too hard to aim their crossbows.

Episode 03: Strange Bedfellows

• The gang thins the numbers of a duergar warcamp by creating illusions of powerful monsters that draw them out, then lead them over a magically-disguised abyss to fall to their doom.
  • And then when the plan goes awry and our heroes start falling in, they manage to save everyone (and their magic carpet) with some quick thinking.
• Percy takes a pot shot from across the abyss and knocks the Illithid on its backside. The cocky laugh he makes afterward sells the moment in a screw-you-noodle-face way.
• The ending of this episode is awesome too. Hard to know what's better - Keyleth and Vex stealing the flying carpet when the rest of the party disagrees with their idea of exploring the crevasse, Tiberius stealing the carpet back, or Matt keeping a straight face the whole time.

Episode 04: Attack on the Duergar Warcamp

• This was the episode in which Pike is properly introduced (i.e., Ashley Johnson appears in person.) Her first roll; a Natural 20!
• The entire party (sans Trinket) successfully infiltrates the warcamp and lands on its barracks without alerting the army. Then Vax and Scanlan sneak into the barracks, stealth-kill a guard, and enter the command room. The mind flayer has no idea they are in the same room as it until Scanlan chucks a bucket worth of gobin feces into its eyes! It's a very tense sequence, requiring several stealth checks and a number of close calls. Metal Gear gets a mention when Vax throws a coin to distract a guard, and, indeed, Solid Snake himself couldn't have done better.
  • Keyleth had the foresight to cast Pass Without A Trace on the group before leaving, which added ten to their stealth checks. In the words of Matt, this is their "saving grace".
• Vax'ildan kills the illithid residing in the war camp after managing to stealth behind it, and eviscerating it with both an assassination attempt and two follow-up strikes upon getting the top spot on the initiative order. Good thing he did that, considering the mindflayer's turn would've occurred right after his and he would've been screwed!
• Thanks to the efforts of some creative uses of Stone Column from Tiberius and Scanlan successfully casting Dominate Person on the duegar general, the fight doesn't last longer than a round...at least until the Bulette shows up.
• Percy firing his Pepperbox pistol down the gullet of a Bulette while his hand is stuck in its mouth for 35 fire damage.
  • Preceded by Taliesin asking if he could get Advantage if his hand was stuck in the mouth. When the DM tells him that he would in exchange for remaining grappled by the Bulette's mouth, Taliesin simply says "Done!" and proceeds to add modifiers to his incoming attack.
• Just when you think the battle can't get any crazier, Scanlan decided to run at the Duergar general, with his arms outstretched, giving him a big hug... and casting Banishment to send him to another dimension. To the surprise of everyone, this actually works!
• Kudos for the healer. In order to cast Cure Wounds on an unconscious Scanlan, Pike dashes across the battlefield, pulls herself up a ledge (just barely making the acrobatics check needed) and grabs her fellow gnome, who is still gripped in the Bluette's teeth.
• Grog gets the "how do you want to do this?" against the bulette. And promptly not only rips open the mouth but tears out the tongue partially by biting it. The final blow? A punch up into its brain.

Episode 05: The Trick About Falling

• Clarota gets one when we see the reason behind his people being nicknamed "mindflayers." Creepy Awesome has a new poster child.
• The mere fact that the entire team survived a disaster during their escape that resulted in most of them free-falling is awesome in itself, they could have all easily been killed right there.
• Later in the episode, we see Clarota help out the party in battle for the first time. His first attempt only makes things worse, but his second more than makes up for it: after seeing Tiberius use Telekinesis to throw one of the Hook Horrors into a lava pit, he does the same to one of the slimes (which is at serious risk of killing Grog), telekinetically hurling it into the same lava pit, onto the Hook Horror already in it. Matt announces that the Hook Horror is dissolved instantly by the slime's acid, followed by the slime itself melting into nothing in the lava. With a single move, Clarota turned the tide of battle and likely saved the team's lives!
• During the same battle, Keyleth gets one by making unconventional use of Thorn Whip to pull enemies into lava. She also gets a "How do you want to do this" with the Thorn Whip spell later on.

Episode 06: Breaching the Emberhold

• Scanlan blasting two duergar off the roof of the fortress with Thunder Wave, leaving them wide open for the party to slaughter.
• Percy's "Bad News" blows an enemy's head clean off.
• Grog dispatches a duergar torturer by bullrushing him onto a rack of his own torturing tools, ripping his jaw off, and then pummeling him to death ''with'' the jaw.
  • Preceded by the entire party giving him "encouragement" to get violent. This is where the "I encourage (X)" meme comes from.
• The party finds Lady Kima and free her from the rack she's chained to, but she rips apart the handcuffs herself. Then she burrows Pike's morning star and reduces the dead torturer to "hamburger". This is after a long period of horrific torture; unbreakable will and drive like this is how she earned her reputation.
• After rescuing Lady Kima, she proves... unwilling to work alongside Clarota. Tiberius, Vax, and Scanlan all do their damnedest to achieve some form of peace between the two so they can complete their respective quests (all of which boil down to "kill K'Varn"). Despite some terrible rolls, their acting is top-notch during this scene. And it works.

Episode 07: The Throne Room

• Unsurprisingly, the climactic battle in the throne room of Emberhold. Some highlights:
  • Keyleth and Tiberius use a clever combination of Call Lightning and Water Sphere to take out an entire line of duergar guards... except one, which Scanlan finishes off by using his Vicious Mockery ability to shame the guard into killing himself.
  • Tiberius takes on the form of the duergar god and rides in on Keyleth, in the shape of a giant scorpion. His voice is enhanced by Pike's magic, and he intimidates the hell out of a bunch of dwarves. He has a legitimately badass voice, and it makes some of the players jump as well, if you watch their reactions.
  • Once things turn to battle, Vex takes out half the mooks (five soldiers) in single a volley of arrows.
  • The duergar king proves a mighty foe, taking on Lady Kima in combat and even enduring Percy shooting his jaw and part of his scalp off. He even downs Scanlan. Who takes this enemy out? Scanlan, of all people, having been revived by Pike and using his magical sword to lop off the king's head. This was his first time using a sword, by the way.
    • Even better: Earlier in the battle, Scanlan attempted to suggestion the duergar king to "stand on his head" and failed. Scanlan's comment before decapitating the king? "You should've stood on your head."
• Pike is running to and fro on the battlefield doing her healer thing when the king takes a swing at her. The attack roll is 19 against her AC of 20, so Matt narrates it as the sword rebounding off her armor and divine magic. Pike laughs in the king's face, flips him off, and then continues doing her healer thing. This session's haul is: a Mass Cure Wounds to off-set some area attacks, reviving Scanlan so he can have his moment of awesome, collecting basilisk blood in order to restore her petrified comrades despite the room filling up with lava, and then dragging an unconscious Vax away from the encroaching stream of the stuff (with help from Trinket).
• After an intense battle, the duergar queen nearly killing everyone with magma, and a harrowing escape sequence where Grog becomes dominated, and disappears with the duergar queen, Tiberius and Kima are statues thanks to basilisks while Vax gets heavily injured, they still manage to avoid a TPK. In fact, everyone lives.
  • Speaking of, during this sequence Clarota immediately grabs the petrified Kima and pulls her to safety when the lava starts pouring in. Considering that just last episode she fully intended to kill him and he made it clear he'd return the favor if she attempted it... well, as the team would sing, "That's fucking teamwork!"
• After doing virtually nothing through the entire campaign, Trinket pulls Vax away from the lava. Considering Pike had made a very low roll attempting to do the same, this almost certainly saved his life.

Episode 08: Glass and Bone

• To the surprise of everyone (Matt, her co-players and the chat room itself), Vex, who at this point was constantly failing to use her Hunter's Mark, remembers that she did use it on Queen Ulara during the previous session, and is thus able to pinpoint the Queen's current location and movements. Everyone is genuinely impressed.
• Keyleth, the otherwise awkward and introverted druid, getting suddenly aggressive towards Kima regarding the paladin stubbornly placing all of her faith in Bahamut. The air was definitely filled with so much tension you could cut it with a knife.
• Percy pulls out the Bad News against the tentacled aberration the team is fighting. Cue a natural 20 and Mercer asking "How do you want to do this?"
• Pike using her holy mace to release Trinket and later literally carve a path through the sea of skeleton hands - one of the hands actually refrains from trying to grab her during this.

Episode 09: Yug'Voril Uncovered

• Scanlan's speech to the Duergar queen before combat starts:
  Scanlan: Queen Ulara, if I may have a word? Let us spare each other lots of bloodshed and just have a chat before we fight. Is that all right?
  Queen: Talk, small, annoying creature, and perhaps it may delay the inevitable.
  Scanlan: We, my friends and I, have come, we’ve come from the above world - the "normal world", let’s say - to your fine kingdom down here below. And we were on a mission, a bit of... I don’t want to brag, but we’re an elite task force sent in by kingdoms and kings that you probably haven’t heard of down below. But anyway, I’ll spare you. [...] M’lady, we have come on a mission to save someone that you are holding captive. We have completed our mission, and in the melee, in that, um, hovel you call a palace back there, we lost one of our own, and we would like him back. Now, I’ll make it very simple, ‘cause my fellows are begging me keep things simple. It’s a simple binary choice: you can all die right now, or you can turn over our friend and we will probably, probably leave you in peace. I would promise, but I don’t make promises to dogs.
  • When the fighting starts, he banishes Ulara moments before she casts Chain Lightning, thus saving the party from significant damage. Due to crummy rolls, she's neutralized for the entire fight. Vox Machina even has the opportunity to gather around the spot where she will reappear so they can ambush and subdue her.
• Tiberius using Counterspell to stop a mindflayer from getting away, followed up by roasting it with a fireball.
• Grog riding on Shark Keyleth. That alone is pretty awesome.

Episode 10: K'Varn Revealed

• K'Varn damaging and knocking Keyleth out of a scrying spell and taunting her is awesome in and of itself. It is appropriately sinister for this story's Big Bad.
• Using a saddlebag bomb originally meant to blow up a pony (long story) to utterly annihilate a pack of Gricks in a cavern. The ensuing explosion was indeed, as Vax said, "pretty cool".
• The battle with the Cloaker is full of great moments.
  • The party is fleeing on their boat, and it causes most of the party to become frightened of it (lots of bad saving throws). Grog is one of the few NOT frightened! In retaliation, he promptly runs to the back of the boat and uses Intimidating Presence (a new ability he just picked up after leveling to 10) to cause the cloaker to be afraid of HIM!
  • When Tiberius gets enveloped by the beast he scorches it with his flame breath then telekinetically pulls it off.
  • The 3-hit combo finish is pretty great - Scanlan immobilizes it with Bigby's Grasping Hand, Tiberius telekinetically rips one of its eyes out (rendering it blind since the other had already been disabled), and Vax gets a perfect throw and drives a dagger right through the socket.

Episode 11: The Temple Showdown

• Both players and characters went into this expecting at least some of them to die and a probable TPK. They go anyway.
• Grog headbutting a Fomorian Giant (which is at least 4 or 5 times bigger than he is) because it drank all of Grog's ale and then crushed the cask. He asserted dominance through this, briefly preventing it from fighting Keyleth's geas.
  Travis: (when asked to roll an athletics check on the headbutt) Natural 20!
  Everyone else: (various shades of Oh, Crap!, while Ashley confirms that he did in fact roll a natural 20)
  Travis: You don't FUCK with Grog's cask of ale.
  • Afterwards:
    Grog: You owe me a cask! Of! Ale!
• The greatest Dynamic Entry ever; GIANT THROUGH THE CEILING!
  Matt: You splattered a giant.
• The epic battle against K'Varn, unsurprisingly.
  • Keyleth's first act against K'Varn? Swan dive off the roof and turn into an earth elemental, above K'Varn.
    • She then proceeds to grabble the beholder and, because her earth elemental form's hit points are not her hit points, the others don't have to hold back with their attacks on her behalf.
  • Keyleth is kind of an MVP trampoline. Fastball Special! She even uses that very name.
  • Scanlan gives all four of his inspiration dice before the battle, and then he becomes a sort of lightning blast brigade with Clarota. He even uses a Chain Lightning scroll, which is the biggest big gun in his arsenal. It not only blasts K'Varn, but two of his stitch monsters, which forces the one grabbling Pike to let go.
  • Lady Kima is in full paladin form in this fight. She casts Aura of Vitality on herself so she can heal Vox Machina more easily and then gives K'Varn an eyeful of smite evil with Sacred Weapon and Holy Smite.
  • Grog attempts to pull the horn of Orcus from K'Varn, he's unsuccessful, and in retribution, K'Varn targets Grog with all of his attacks to knock him out of the fight. Thanks to Pike's death ward, and a natural 20 strength saving throw, K'Varn wastes so much effort trying to off Grog only for the Goliath to get past with one hit point.
    • K'Varn spends more turns trying to kill Grog, successfully does so by sucking out his soul, and then is foiled a second time by Pike; this time with revivify.
  • "How do you want to do this?" goes to Vex'ahlia, for shooting an arrow straight through his pupil and out the back of his head.
    • ...And the second one, after the horn of Orcus revives K'Varn as an undead, goes to Tiberius, who gives the zombie beholder an ice spike right through the hole opened by Vex, which then explodes and pushes more ice spikes through his skull.
  • Percy contributes a lot of headshots, a newly obtained skill upon level 10, keeping K'Varn down and minimizing just how much he can do. He even damages K'Varn's armor, which decreases his AC. Not to mention the fact that he basically pulls off a Falling Chandelier of Doom with K'Varn's mind-control device.
  • When the session ends, Matt tips his hat to the entire party for their strategic planning and tactical decisions.

Episode 13: Escape from the Underdark

• Clarota goes turncoat after the Elder Brain is freed and tries to snack on Scanlan's brain, only for Percy to put the kibosh on that in epic fashion by blowing the mind flayer's brains out!
  Percy: Some people have no sense of fucking honor!
• Vax manages to kill the mind flayer grappled onto Pike literally a turn before it would've killed her.
• The escape sequence is incredibly intense. Everyone is desperately fleeing K'varn's lair while struggling against many, many things trying to stop them: mind blasts and stuns from mind flayers and intellect devours, Grog was still grabbled by a stitch monster, Lady Kima was petrified, three trolls were trying to get into the room for the bulk of the battle, and the Elder Brain was waking up and growing stronger. It is touch-and-go all the way through everyone running through Tiberius' Circle of Teleportation.
  Tiberius: By the blessing of Bahamut, I choose Emon!

Episode 14: Shopping and Shipping

• The episode is something of a breather after the climactic battle and escape sequence, but there's still a good gem of awesome here. Percy overhears the sovereign of Emon directing a letter toward the Briarwoods... which is to say, the noble couple who murdered his family. There follows a very tense scene as Percy tries to pry some information out of the sovereign without giving too much away, and when Matt asks for a deception check? Natural 20! Taliesin roleplays the pants off the scene, and the feeling of released tension when everything turns out okay is so palpable the viewers felt it.
  Percy/Taliesin: (after rolling the Natural 20) Don't fuck with me.

Episode 15: Skyward

• Doubling as a Heartwarming Moment, Pike re-establishes her slightly fractured connection with Sarenrae, and then uses the newfound faith to completely heal Vax's foot.
• Scanlan successfully intimidates for information after Grog failed at it earlier. Yep, the gnome bard scared the crap out of dudes who weren't scared of a goliath barbarian!
  Scanlan: LISTEN, YOU MOTHERFUCKERS, MY FRIEND JUST ASKED YOU A FUCKING QUESTION, NOW FUCKING ANSWER HIM, OR I'M GONNA KILL EVERY LAST MOTHERFUCKING ONE OF YOU!
  Grog: (taken aback, but impressed) I'd listen to him, he means it.
• Keyleth polymorphs one of the wyverns attacking the skyship they were on into a bunny rabbit. Due to the skyship being hundreds of feet above the sea, she essentially one-shotted it!
• A random NPC guard manages to take out one of the wyverns with a well placed arrow, and it was a Natural 20 to boot!
• Tiberius uses his telekinesis to send daggers at one wyvern, calling them back, and repeating the process several times. Matt gives Orion a +20 modifier for his attack damage.
• Percy defeats the last wyvern with a combination of his fire and ice Pepperbox shots, Western-style.

Episode 16: Enter Vasselheim

• Vex, with telekinetic help from Tiberuis, Enhance Ability from Keyleth and inspiration from Scanlan, pulls off what is described as a "death star shot": firing an arrow into a tiny hole with a piston slamming into it constantly. The arrow needs to ricochet off the piston to get in, but the shot goes though, disarming the trap. Matt admits afterwards the difficulty on that shot was "nearly impossible", but Vex managed it with a combined total of over 35!