Interview from May 29 2025

by Grant DeArmitt

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.*

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

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 'anarch' 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.

PV: 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.

PV: 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.

PV: 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.

PV: 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.]

(continued)

Critical Role Watch Order

by Avery Kaplan

Critical Role started as a recreational tabletop RPG game but has evolved into a worldwide phenomenon. Originally a private Pathfinder game played by group of voice actor friends, Critical Role made the jump to Dungeons & Dragons and began broadcasting weekly episodes on Geek & Sundry. Soon, legions of devoted 'Critters' had found the web series.

Critical Role’s main campaigns feature Matthew Mercer as Dungeon Master. The regular cast roster is comprised of Ashley Johnson, Travis Willingham, Laura Bailey, Liam O’Brien, Taliesin Jaffe, Marisha Ray, and Sam Riegel. Depending on the campaign, the actors play different characters.

Streaming episodes run from three to five hours in length, but can be longer. They are streamed on Twitch and YouTube, and subsequently released as podcasts. In addition to the main campaign, there are also one-shots, animated adaptations and tie-in books. Here’s how to watch Critical Role in chronological and release order.

In addition to several canonical one-shots, Critical Role has currently has two completed campaigns and one ongoing main campaign.

Here’s how to watch Critical Role in release order:

• Campaign One: Vox Machina (March 12, 2015 – October 12, 2017)
• Campaign Two: The Mighty Nein (January 11, 2018 – June 3, 2021)
• “The Search for Grog” (February 22, 2019)
• “The Search for Bob” (June 23, 2019)
• “Dalen’s Closet” (August 29, 2019)
• “The Adventures of the Darrington Brigade” (November 29, 2019)
• Exandria Unlimited (June 24, 2021 – April 1, 2022)
• Campaign Three: Bells Hells (October 21, 2021 – Ongoing)
• The Legend of Vox Machina (January 20, 2022 – Ongoing)
• Exandria Unlimited: Calamity (May 26, 2022 – June 16, 2022)
• “The Mighty Nein Reunited Part 1 – Unfinished Business” (November 17, 2022)
• “The Mighty Nein Reunited Part 2 – Uk’otoa Unleashed” (December 1, 2022)

Here’s how to watch Critical Role in chronological order:

• Exandria Unlimited: Calamity
• The Legend of Vox Machina
• Campaign One: Vox Machina
• “The Search for Grog” (concurrent with Campaign One finale)
• “The Search for Bob”
• “Dalen’s Closet”
• “The Adventures of the Darrington Brigade”
• Campaign Two: The Mighty Nein
• Exandria Unlimited
• Exandria Unlimited: Kymal
• Campaign Three: Bells Hells

Note: The Legend of Vox Machina is an animated adaptation of parts of Campaign One. However, the first two episodes depict a story that took place before the start of Campaign One. For that reason, it has been placed before Campaign One on this timeline.

What about Critical Role’s backstory?

Before the first episode of Critical Role was streamed, the Vox Machina campaign was the personal game of the cast. While attending a party, Johnson mentioned the ongoing game to Felicia Day. Day subsequently approached the group and asked if they’d be interested in live-streaming their game for her Geek & Sundry channel, which hosted the game until February 2019.

When the streaming campaign began in March 2015, it was en media res, picking up the story after the in-game Vox Machina party had already been formed and undertaken various adventures. Some of this pre-streaming campaign was adapted to comic book form in Critical Role: Vox Machina Origins.

More of the Vox Machina’s backstory is explored in the prose novel Critical Role: Vox Machina – Kith & Kin by Marieke Nijkamp. The novel is set three years before the eponymous characters joined the Vox Machina adventuring party. A second prose novel, Critical Role: The Mighty Nein – The Nine Eyes of Lucien by Madeleine Roux focuses on the backstory of the tiefling antagonist preceding and leading into the events of Campaign Two.