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Few creators have stitched together as many fantasy worlds as Brennan Lee Mulligan. As host and Dungeon Master of the Dropout-exclusive actual play series Dimension 20, Brennan has developed lore that stretches the bounds of fantastical universes, from a Game of Thrones-styled Candyland to an anthropomorphic mice murder mystery to a Jumanji by way of an 80s action VHS. 

Presently, Brennan's got even more weird and wild worldbuilding on the horizon, with a live Dimension 20 performance at the Hollywood Bowl on June 1, a currently ongoing improv tour with his partner Izzy Roland, a new steampunk season of Dimension 20 dropping June 4, and the impending conclusion of The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One, the central campaign of his podcast Worlds Beyond Number. Somehow, despite that ginormously packed schedule, Brennan had the time to chat with Popverse, and we naturally had plenty to ask him about.

Read on to hear Brennan explain what it's like to run a game for crowd of thousands, a couple story drafts that never made it into a finalized Dimension 20 campaign, and even a tease of where the one of the internet's biggest TTRPG celebrities might like to go next as a DM. No need for a perception check, either, this article's free for any and all Popverse members. 

Popverse: Brennan, you have an extensive background with comics; can you tell us how they've influenced you have influenced you as a DM?

Brennan Lee Mulligan: Profoundly. I grew up all around comic books as a kid, through osmosis, through active reading. Different graphic novels formed like the basis of my sequential, visual imagination. My mom wrote a series called Starstruck, which is an incredible graphic novel series. [Editor's note: The story of Starstruck was continued by Brennan himself as a campaign in Dimension 20's Season 13.]

Her name's Elaine Lee, and she and her illustrator and co-creator, Michael William Kaluta, developed this insane technicolor or wild dystopian space opera. It's in this galaxy in an 'ark' era with this sort of lawless, hyper-saturated, retro-futurist outer space that is just unbelievable and textured and cool. Everyone [reading this] should check it out.

But I went to school for screenwriting, and one of the earliest things they do is talk about the importance of comics as a medium. That's very much in conversation with film; storyboarding is like this essential component of filmmaking, and there's so much to learn about storytelling, especially in a visual medium from, from comics specifically.

I feel like a lot of my storytelling sensibility comes from comics, even beyond the content or subject matter. Things like pacing, marginalia - which was a big part of the Starstruck universe, you know, the question of what's in the frame? Is it just the action of the characters, or are there some border panels, and what does the text bubble say, and how do we interact with that? You know, you see things like interacting with the fourth wall through comic books; it's an incredibly creative medium that I think has a huge impact on almost all other media. 

What I think you can really learn from comics is a lot of the things that are extractable to pure storytelling, like how a splash page is fundamentally about emphasis. You must break the way in which you're delivering information. It's not just the action of the characters; it's this panel that needs to be larger. You're like, well, 'Why would you take up a whole page to show one single moment? Isn't there an economy of page use? Don't you want to continue pushing the story forward?' But the pacing of the story will be ruined if we don't emphasize certain moments as being significant or important.

Splash pages are a great lesson to draw from. Some moments have to be small; some moments have to be big. If you have a rhythm of panels, you have to interrupt that rhythm for the benefit of your audience's attention span. 

Amazing. Now, I know you also have an extensive background in improv, and I feel like many TTRPG players these days have an understanding of the relationship between the two mediums. But as someone entrenched in both, are there links between improv and TTRPG play that you don't hear talked about?

The biggest touchstones that people come back to over and over again are elements of improv like 'Yes, And.' Which everyone knows; it's sort of like a first rule of improv. But 'Yes, And' isn't always appropriate for D&D. Sometimes there is a dungeon that has been pre-drawn, and the traps are either there or they're not there. We can fudge it a little bit; we can have some fun, we can make an NPC where maybe there wasn't one before. But occasionally, if you're making a big scheme for your evil villain, you don't always want to wing that, because it might start to sap away at the reality of the world. You need a little pre-established something.

What I think the two actually have in common that doesn't get talked about as much is the strength of pattern in creating meaning and structure. And pattern is often way easier than people realize. For example: You're playing D&D and you're pursuing a masked individual through a crowded marketplace. They turn a corner, capture the masked assailant, pull the mask off and... [gasp] It's the guy from before! It's the guy we met at the harbor! What's so interesting about that is, no matter how many times I see that trope in a story, I will gasp and I will go, 'I can't believe it! This is brilliant.' But that's also easy! It's the guy from before.

Literally, I'm doing less work. I'm using a guy I already made up. I'm not even making up a new guy. It's the same guy, but it feels so brilliant. That's a real trick in improv; you're doing a series of scenes over and over, and you keep bringing back the same joke. You bring back the same joke is a tool you are using to succeed. Once you learn to do it, it makes everything easier. But for some reason, this thing that's making your life easier is often being reacted to by your players or your audience as being like, 'That was incredible!'

You know, I've gotten 'The session started in the throne room, and it ended in the throne room. How did you know there were two ends in the throne room?' And you're like, 'Because we started in the throne room.' It's a trick, and it's very continuous from improv into TTRPGs. Things that seem incredible are themselves far from being impressive. That's actually streamlining my process. It's providing structure. It's making this all easier. 

So Brennan Lee Mulligan's advice to the audience is, 'Do less work.'

Hey, man, I'll cosign it. It's hard out here. You gotta find ways to make it work. 

Fantastic. So in the vein of performances - I know that you, as somebody who's done both filmed sketch work and live improv, know that there's a huge difference between performing for the camera and performing for an audience. Does that change how you plan your games, like the one coming up at The Hollywood Bowl?

There's a fascinating thing in terms of live shows that is very different from recording in studio, which basically is: there's an incentive structure that gets switched a little bit. My experience has been that audiences watching prerecorded studio actual play can tell if they're being overly winked at or overly pandered to, and they really don't like it. Because there's a part of watching these very intimate, vulnerable performances, whether comedic or dramatic, where people love the voyeuristic principle. It's like, 'I want to get lost and to be wrapped up in this story.'

When you're at a live show, it's impossible to get lost in that way. It's way more like a sporting event than like a play, right? It's live! The atmosphere is electric; the crowd is chanting. The first live Dimension 20 show ever did was at the Bell House in New York, and someone shouted out from the crowd that [Dimension 20 and Dropout cast member] Zac Oyama should have advantage on a dexterity saving throw. And that saved his life! There's a way in which the live part of it is very, very electric. 

So when you're preparing for a live show like that, you end up making adjustments to say, 'This can be rowdier, more gregarious, and we can acknowledge the presence of the audience more in a way that they probably would bounce off of if we were constantly doing it in prerecorded actual play.

There’s also the idea that, when you do a joke or a bit in a studio actual play, you move forward very quickly. In a live show, you have to wait for people to stop laughing. I know that sounds silly, but it's like those little things. 

Understood. So, talking about live shows here, is this the second time that you have returned to Fantasy High for a live show? Correct me if I'm wrong.

We had two live shows in 2019 which were at the Bell House, and we did a convention, we did RTX. So if we're just counting live shows with an audience, this will be our third time returning in a live show with an audience to the world of Fantasy High. 

[Editor's note - Fantasy High is the name of the first Dimension 20 campaign, a high school drama-styled high fantasy story that has spawned several sequels.]

Three times, OK. What are some things that people familiar with Fantasy High can expect to see from this particular live show at the Hollywood Bowl? No spoilers, of course.

Well, listen, we've been very clear: this is Battle at the Bowl. This is Rumble in the Chungle, okay? And this is a canon event. One of those two characters [Fabian Seacaster and Chungledown Bim] will die, and it will be canon in the show.

It's very exciting to go to a place as historic as The Hollywood Bowl. [There are] thousands of people in attendance to watch one of the show's most beloved characters fight a gnome with a beard made of mustaches and pockets full of spaghetti. A character that was made up on the spot, that should never have mattered. It's wild. So I think what we can expect is: we are going to have a fucking ball.

We cannot wait. The show is going to be stacked with awesome crowd interaction stuff. We're going to have the time of our lives. It's going to be a really funny show. To sell the show as hard as I can, I don't know if they'll ever let me do something this stupid again. 

I want to talk about that idea of the character that "should have never mattered." Because in mythology, there's this trope of having a character that seems so silly or unimportant but then ends up being so much more. Yoda would be a great example.

Yes. And that's also a part of, you know, fandom does have this ability to put a hand out and touch the object of creation that they are so enamored with. It is in what they choose to love and pay attention to. Yoda's a great example; I think another great example is Boba Fett. That guy said, like, two things. He was only implied to be badass; he got eaten by that Sarlacc right away. Right away. But people are like, 'This guy fucking rules! I love him, he's awesome, and you will not tell me that he does not matter.' That's maybe one of the first instances of true fandom creation, where the people who were not the authors impacted this creative world by loving something in it so much that it has to matter. 

I love that. Getting back to the live Dimension 20 shows, one of the biggest you've ever done is the return to the Unsleeping City at Madison Square Garden. That world is a fictionalized New York City,  and I read that you lived in New York for years and years. How did your New York experience come into that campaign?

Unsleeping City [Ed: The third D20 campaign] is a full love letter to New York City. I'm from New York. I grew up there when I was very, very little, and then spent time upstate. My mom lived in High Falls, my dad lived in Hell's Kitchen. When I was 17, I started going to college in New York and lived there all the way up until I moved to LA when I was 29.

My dad and I have always shared this deep, profound love of the city and of its history. The Unsleeping City is not just a testament to how great New York is (although it is extremely great; best city in the world) it's also a love letter to New York and its history. Moving through the city with my dad, there was always this thing where he was like, 'You know what used to be here? You know what that is? That's who that statue is. Do you know what this thing is?' Something I really owe to my dad is an ingrained understanding that everything is deeper and more magical than it first appears. He'd say, 'That's not a Dunkin Donuts; that's where the pool hall used to be when the Dead Rabbits in the Five Points came to this place.' 

So [the campaign] really is this attitude of like, you're standing in the middle of the greatest story ever told, and it's all right here. You need to learn to see it. That's on you, because it will only diminish your life if you walk around thinking that you're not in the middle of something incredibly magical. 

That brings up my next question: As a DM, there's so much 'under the surface' stuff you develop for your campaigns. You build these intricate worlds, and not everything you plan makes it into the sessions. Are there any pieces of campaign lore that you wished had made it on camera or into a live show that didn't get the chance to?

In the original A Crown of Candy, we had two full adventure arcs that were cut for completely logistical reasons. We had to. We were planning on doing a 20-episode season, and it had to get knocked down to 17, and we lost two full battle sets. There was going to be an entire adventure in for Terra, with a cool grotto of assassins, and then there was going to be a full colosseum fight in the Meat Lands with a bunch of giant meat monsters. One of them was an actual silicone chicken fillet with googly eyes on it. Those are the two big things that had to get cut that we were supposed to see that season. 

Damn. Well we'll try to get a 'Release the Cutlet Cut' hashtag going. Speaking of hypotheticals, is there anybody that you have not seen at the table, particularly from the Dropout crew, that you'd like to see there?

Oh, God. Everybody. I mean, that's the sad part, right? I want to play with everyone. There are so many talented people. I would say, that, just because we've recently talked about it, Vic Michaelis would be awesome to play with. They are just so beyond talented.

But also, I mean, there's not only other people that I want to play with for the very first time, but they are all the people that I have played with before and just want to play with again and get back to the dome as well. I had such a great time playing with Oscar Montoya, and I would love to DM for him as well. The list is truly endless. 

Fair enough. And while we're talking about more areas you want to explore: Dimension 20 has covered so many genres and parodies - a Harry Potter spoof, a Lord of the Rings parody, space operas, and gothic horror. Is there a particular genre, parody, or satire you'd really like to do in the future?

There's something very fun in the idea of like, a gallows-humor, doomed season. I also love the Armando Iannucci kind of comedic tone. A comedic political intrigue show would be very, very fun, just because everyone is just all fools and depraved imbeciles, you know? There's also a desire for big, genre fiction tropes that I think would be really fun to go back to.

Like what?

I don't think we've done anything like Underworld. Or a modern-day, kind of Twilight parody mash-up. Modern-day vampires and werewolves kind of thing.

Then, you know, we did a little bit of Greek myth, but I think there's something really fun about Tall Tales as well that I like. There are spaces in between deity mythology and fantasy, this realm of mythic, folkloric, Tall Tale that's really cool that I would like to do something with eventually. Things like King Arthur, Robin Hood, or Paul Bunyan.

I'll keep an eye out. Well, on the subject of the future; Cloudward, Ho is debuting on Dropout June 4. What made you want to get into the steampunk genre?

The players, honestly. We had just done Fantasy High: Junior Year the season before, and people were like, 'We just did a sequel season; let's do something brand new. And we want high adventure. We want a journey. We want heroic characters. We want something where you throw a fist in air.' You know that bit from The Neverending Story where the kid's riding the luck dragon, and he just goes:

[Brennan pumps his fist into the air]

Yeah, we just wanted that feeling for 20 episodes. I think Cloudward, Ho was about making a big, high octane adventure with some cool heroes with lots of fun abilities. Steampunk was just a cool thing. I love that retro-futurism, whether it's like in BioShock or like Miyazaki's movies, how aviation figures into a lot of those. That idea of a world that has elements of the freaky steampunk, the gaslamps the characters who are more machine than man. It's that dark side of the Industrial Revolution, but also that feeling of Amelia Earhart, the joy of aviation, the human spirit taking to the sky. There's something about that that's also like a vibe that I just wanted to base a world around.

But also, there's this thing that we all have to reckon with, which is the direness of the Industrial Revolution, the horrors of pollution and climate change, the horrors of capital and the ownership of labor and everything like that. You're trying to make space for that in your ideology and also say, 'Oh my God, thank God I can get on an airplane and go see my mom who lives in another part of the world.' I want us to figure out a way to do that. I'll take high-speed rail. If there's a bullet train that gets me to New York in, like, a few days, and that's better for the planet, I'll do that. But there's something in that idea of the parts of machines and innovation that are like, 'Oh, my God, we can touch the clouds.' How about that? That's miraculous. So there's there's a lot of that in the season. 

Before we leave off, what else of yours should we be checking out?

I'll just say that we are wrapping up Book One of our first campaign of Worlds Beyond Number. No one, I don't think, has ever gotten to see me do a long-form campaign before. This is an ultra-high fantasy, gorgeously sound-designed and scored epic adventure for the three main characters. In terms of the scale, the epicness, the drama, I don't think I've ever done anything like this. I think people who are fans of my work owe it to themselves to check out this podcast.

Would you call it an “all splash pages” podcast?

Exactly.

Dimension 20 is available to stream now on Dropout. Worlds Beyond Number is available on Spotify, Apple, and wherever else you get your podcasts.

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