Matthew Lillard knows the power of fandoms.
He’s been surrounded by them for decades, having played iconic characters in everything from Scream to Scooby-Doo to Five Nights at Freddy’s, and now his liquor company Find Familiar Spirits (launched in 2023 with his buddy and business partner, screenwriter Justin Ware) is partying up with Critical Role to launch a limited-edition collectible liquor based on their first campaign, Vox Machina.
The liquor, Sandkheg’s Hide, comes straight from episode 65 of the campaign, where Travis Willingham‘s character Grog buys a couple bottles and promptly gets the gang smashed.
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In Critical Role’s Dungeons & Dragons universe, Sandkheg’s Hide is secreted by giant insectoids (as one character puts it, you “hold it down and just squeeze its abdomen and the whole sandkheg spews out into this little glass barrel and then you pay for it”). But IRL, Find Familiar Spirits’ master blender Ale Ochoa made the drink into a bourbon with notes of baked apple, brown spice, shortbread cookies, oak, herbs, dried red fruit, and “a hint of smoke.”
Each bottle ($99) also comes with a 44-page booklet with an original, canon short story written by Jasmine Bhullar, original art by illustrator Tyler Walpole, and a new map by Critical Role’s cartographer Deven Rue.
Lillard says the idea for a Critical Role collaboration came last October, during the launch of Find Familiar Spirits’ first line–an ongoing D&D-themed collection with one liquor for each character class. He sat down with Critical Role’s head of relationships and merchandise, who asked if Find Familiar Spirits would ever want to create something for Critical Role fans.
“I was like, ‘Oh my god, dude, we would freaking love to do something,'” Lillard says. He’s a longtime friend of the Critical Role crew, and has made guest appearances during its campaigns, which now command around 20 million views per month on YouTube (and, in case you missed it, spawned an Amazon series also based on Vox Machina).
After his meeting with Critical Role, Lillard went to one of the employees at Beadle & Grimm’s, the TTRPG accessory company he co-founded in 2018. That employee, Chris Daly, is a CritRole superfan who has seen “every single episode” of all the campaigns, so Lillard asked what he’d make for his fellow enjoyers, given the opportunity. He came up with the idea to make Sandkheg’s Hide a reality.
For Lillard, the production process we’ve just outlined is exactly what he wants to do with Find Familiar Spirits. He wants to make stuff with fans, for fans.
“We’re never gonna compete with Jack Daniel’s,” he says. “What we want to do is be the number one spirit experience for these fandoms. And instead of using that relationship to transact, instead of taking the knowledge we have and being like, ‘Okay, how can I manipulate this community and get as much money as possible?’ what we try to do is create authentic opportunities to celebrate community and build something that adds lore, adds legend, adds something that the community will respond to.”
“Expressing myself in Dungeons & Dragons is where my joy lived”
In the nine years since it began airing as a web series in 2015, Critical Role has grown one of the largest digital content-based fandoms. Lillard says he, like many people, has reservations about the omnipresence of social media, but he also thinks there’s some magic in fans from all around the world being able to find one another on the internet.
“When I was a little kid in Austin, I was an obese teenager with severe learning disabilities, glasses, and braces, and was transported to Orange County, which was a bunch of perfect white people,” he says. “I found that expressing myself in Dungeons & Dragons is where my joy lived. Then I got into theater, and I didn’t do well in college, but I went out to acting school and I found my people and I started expressing my joy. The idea of finding your people and celebrating with those people that you love is more possible now because of the internet.”
As for what CritRole lorehounds can expect in the bound booklet that comes with Sandkheg’s Hide, Bhullar tells Tubefilter her short story focuses on “the kind of character all of us want to play in a D&D game. He’s exuberant and he is a little bit inspirational and wisdom is not his highest stat.”
Illustrator Walpole adds that working on Sandkheg’s Hide was “a really unique opportunity to be able to work with two wonderful creators who are invested in the world of Critical Role. I think mostly we just got to play and have fun in a world that we all three appreciate.”
Rue, who’s been CritRole’s official cartographer since 2018, says this project has been a way to “flesh out a little part of Exandria.”
“I love that this becomes canon,” she says. “I draw their maps, so what I draw for Exandria is canon. So yeah–stick a flag in that land!”
Sandkheg’s Hide will only be on sale for three weeks, from May 2 to May 23, on its official website (confirm your age and species before entering). A presale opens up for Find Familiar Spirits’ newsletter subscribers on April 30.
