The folks behind web series “Critical Role” wanted to raise $750,000 to finance an animated Dungeons and Dragons digital special.

Their Kickstarter campaign made that much and more during its first hour Monday.

“Critical Role” is a weekly livestreamed Dungeons and Dragons game played by voice actors from TV shows “Avengers Assemble,” “Spider-Man” and “Transformers” as well as video games “Overwatch,” “The Last of Us” and “Fallout,” among others.

The group started sharing their adventures on livestreaming platform Twitch in 2015 and have racked up more than 17 million views on YouTube.

On Monday, the group launched a Kickstarter campaign to create an animated series based on the first “Critical Role” Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Within an hour of its launch around 1 p.m. Monday, it raised more than $1 million in funding and is still gaining steam.

As of 9 a.m. Tuesday, the campaign had raised more than $4 million from more than 30,000 backers. The Kickstarter still has 44 more days until it closes.

The series, having been successfully backed, will be produced by Titmouse, the production company behind Netflix’s “Big Mouth,” and it will be written by Jennifer Muro (“Star Wars: Forces of Destiny”).

“Critical Role” smashed through its initial monetary goal and is now offering “stretch goals” to its backers. Stretch goals are monetary benchmarks that, when surpassed, give backers more rewards, such as merchandise, art or downloadable content.

Having surpassed its first two stretch goals, “Critical Role” has now quadrupled the amount of animation it will be able to produce.

“I leave my phone for 45 minutes … And you all just went ahead and did the damn thing. Unreal,” Ashley Johnson (“Blindspot”), the voice actress behind Pike Trickfoot on the first campaign by “Critical Role” and Yasha on its second, wrote in a tweet on Monday.

“Critical Role” is in the midst of its second campaign and has featured a number of guest stars, including Joe Manganiello (“True Blood”), Will Friedle (“Boy Meets World”) and Deborah Ann Woll (“Daredevil”).

Article Plucked from:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/04/critical-role-fans-finance-dungeons–dragons-kickstarter-in-an-hour.html