If you’re one of the 20,000 people who saw “Dimension 20” live at Madison Square Garden in January, then you already know this anecdote. But leaning into the miraculous, improbable achievement of an online actual play series selling out MSG, the cast and crew were determined to do it up. They brought giant dice, incorporated audience participation, prepped stadium-ready graphics for every eventuality, and programmed actual fire that shot out of the stage at the arrival of a dragon, and also just in celebration of badass moments. “Gang, we paid for the butane. We have to use it,” game master Brennan Lee Mulligan told the crowd.
“Dimension 20” has grown beyond Mulligan’s wildest dreams when he pitched the series in 2018 as part of the spinning up of Dropout as a streaming platform, enough for stadium butane and a whole lot more. As the show’s audience has expanded, its creative team — currently including Mulligan as game master/executive producer, director Michael Schaubach, production designer Rick Perry, head of series Carlos Luna, supervising producer Ebony Elaine Hardin, and producer Jon Wolf, along with EPs David Kerns and Sam Reich — has had to figure out what shifts and changes about its pacing and format when it’s performed live, as in MSG’s “Gauntlet at the Garden” and the Hollywood Bowl’s “Rumble in the Chungle.”
But almost all of “Dimension 20” still happens inside of its polyhedral dome set, and as it’s grown, the series has also had to solve the challenge all serialized shows eventually have to face: How to keep coming up with fun variations on its format for each season/campaign, while maintaining what’s worked all along.
For Mulligan, no matter what else “Dimension 20” is doing, imagination and immersion have to be the series’ north stars. The live shows can be rowdier and somewhat more indulgent, but inside the dimensional dome, every choice needs to serve the core creative vision of the players and the stories they want to tell at the table.
“We had that funny moment [at MSG] of ‘Gang, we paid for the butane. We have to use it.’ And that’s a funny joke, but I think there’s actually a great lesson within that of not wanting the cart to lead the horse, ever, of creating toys so persuasive that now the players at the table feel like their storytelling has to follow the gears and gadgets we’ve made for them,” Mulligan told IndieWire on a recent episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “We’re always looking for how to create immersive feelings.”
‘Dimension 20’
On “Dimension 20,” feelings are very much a team effort. Finished episodes, which run once a week, are usually in excess of two hours. If Mulligan were trying to cut each one down to the sharpest, jokiest, most essential version of each session, “I would be dead on the cold stone floor,” he told IndieWire. Instead, the “Dimension 20” post team has very specific lanes, so that many eyes can keep an eye on something, without any individual episode needing to pass through rounds and rounds of revisions.
“We really don’t see a contradiction in table talk versus diegetic narrative scene work. The audience is really there for both,” Mulligan said. “I’ve had a lot of people in my life try to crack the nut of actual play and talk about [how they’re] going to focus on just one of these; it’s really about the hang at the table or it’s exclusively about the fiction and we’re going to treat it deathly seriously, and I think it is peanut butter and chocolate. You [want] deep and profound commitment to the stakes of the fictional world and lots of joy and camaraderie and bits at the table between players. That is the secret sauce.”
Making new versions of that secret sauce for each “D20” isn’t something that can happen in an empty kitchen. In addition to the hard work of the show’s production team, its main cast of players, aka its “intrepid heroes” — Emily Axford, Ally Beardsley, Brian Murphy, Zac Oyama, Siobhan Thompson, and Lou Wilson — as well as rotating guest casts and game masters, including Aabria Iyengar, Jasmine Bhullar, and Matthew “Mark” Mercer, all shape their seasons as they’re being developed.
The current “Dimension 20” campaign, “Cloudward Ho!” is set in a steampunk, pulp adventure world(s) largely because the intrepid heroes wanted to play in a new setting where a sense of discovery and transporting adventure would be core to the story.
‘Dimension 20’
“The cast was talking about feeling excited about going to a new world. They’re like, ‘I want to see something new.’ We had just done ‘Junior Year’ and then before that, ‘Neverafter’ and ‘Starstruck.’ So [the cast said] ‘We don’t want to do a sequel again. But we’d love some of the fun and adventure of ‘Sophomore Year’ or ‘Starstruck’ where we’re on a journey somewhere.’ And I went, ‘Big journey, got it. I can do Big Journey,’” Mulligan said.
Mulligan developed a couple of different pitches for a campaign that would get his players excited. The ultimate winner, the world that became “Cloudward Ho!”, ended up combining elements of “Dinotopia” with Miyazaki’s love of flight and biplanes, spiced with a bit of the “Bioshock” games and ‘30s-era, old-time-y radio newsreels extolling progress and innovation. “People were jazzed. They’re like, ‘Yes.’ And I think the idea of being an old crew coming back together, like one last adventure, felt very fun to people,” Mulligan said. “What’s better than dirigibles and dinosaurs? That’s D&D.”
It’s to the credit of “Dimension 20” that each campaign — and “Cloudward Ho!” is the 26th season of the series, including shorter “side quests” — creates a new definition for what D&D can look like, even while the core experience remains the same. For every new world and every new mechanic the show introduces, it is the pleasure of watching fantastic improvisers play with each other and become lost in the worlds they create that gets us to fall in love with those worlds, too.
“ I think in some ways my job is to keep the little candle lit of the heart of this thing,” Mulligan said. “Because systems and professionalism and expertise breed a level of craft that can make things — they just expand. They expand to become systems and machines of their own. And keeping that happy little ghost in the machine, keeping that, ‘This is a game that we’re playing and it’s fun.’ That’s the point.”
“Dimension 20: Cloudward Ho!” is now streaming on Dropout.
To hear Brennan Lee Mulligan’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
