This is definitely a "two months is a long break and I want information!" kind of ask. If you think it's too personally nosy and don't want to answer, I'll totally understand. But I know you've talked about player scheduling and how that might hint at table assignments in the past and I'm curious if you feel like you've got a good handle on this topic?
I'm trying to make sense of what a solo-Thaisha table and Aabria maternity leave actually means as a choice and how it'll play out. Because my understanding is that they filmed Convergence before Awesome Con in mid-March, and Aabria's baby was born in mid-to-late-June. Is the assumption that CR4 took a multi-month break from filming between mid-March and, say, mid-May, and just happened to plan to resume around the time Aabria would need maternity leave? Otherwise, why not just schedule her and whoever will be at a table with to be the first batch filmed in late March/early April? I wasn't around for C3, maybe heavy batch filming with incredibly long breaks in between is the norm for pre-filmed Critical Role? Or are we assuming that this is less a traditional maternity "leave" and more that the combination of materinity leave/preping for maternity leave with other projects (like Worlds Beyond Number)/other pregnancy-related factors just made Aabria schedule volatile for a long time and so they wanted to minimize the number of calendars that she would have to coordinate with? Or does it make sense to assume this is pre-emptive, and that these tables will be static for a while, and putting Aabria at her own table was more in anticipation of a leave that would happen a few months down the line while also giving them greater flexibility with her schedule overall?
oh I'm happy to answer this! the way they're filming is entirely unique to campaign 4 to accommodate the expanded cast and, likely, the fact that two cast members were going to have parental leave very close together, but i think you're misinterpreting the summer break a little. there are a lot of travel, live show, animated series and convention obligations happening during summer. this summer break is something that CR does most campaigns (or did when i watched campaign 2 and early 3 live), where they debut a miniseries to accommodate the aforementioned busy summer schedules. it's hard to say if the seekers table has started filming yet, but given episodes filmed in march aired through may and june, they're trying to be at least 2 months ahead, so it might be that the two tables will film during this airing break, but they also might have already filmed a bit of one table and they might not finish the second table until the other table is already airing.
judging by comments made on sam's stream, thaisha's arc may have been filmed in late-April/early May, before her leave, independent of the rest of the cast. this was likely planned this from the beginning of her pregnancy (there are seeds of "thaisha going to dol rungja" throughout seekers 1, tho i didn't expect her to fly solo personally).
if they had been filming a full 4-5 person table and for some reason she'd needed to go on leave sooner than expected, the ability to film the campaign and the order of episodes is impacted. it also is much less content to film and much less emotionally and physically stressful to just play the two of them. this is going to be a very short, RP heavy arc.
i am of the opinion that rather than doing like...two or three 3.5-4 hour episodes of just Thaisha and Brennan (a thing that would probably wreck their voices among other difficulties), they probably did a handful of 30 minute to hour long sessions that will be intercut with the other arcs (brennan called this next go around "two tables" during the cooldown but also called thaisha "soldiers," implying she's not really her own table properly, but WILL be first up chronologically). regardless of structure, her arc will build to thaisha returning to dol makjar and reuniting with the other tables in convergence 2 (or even, depending on when they film, crashing the end of schemers 2) with news from the druids about how they will factor into the plot.
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