For Brennan Lee Mulligan, juggling the many stories and skyrocketing popularity of his Dropout series “Dimension 20” comes down to two key things – “dissociation and compartmentalization.”
For the uninitiated, “Dimension 20” is a tabletop role-playing game series where a group of comedians and actors play through a story – usually using a “Dungeons and Dragons” ruleset, but not always. The format has ballooned in popularity over the years, with shows like “Critical Role” and podcasts claiming equally large fandoms.
“Dimension 20” and Mulligan kicked off 2025 with a bang in January by playing a live show at Madison Square Garden with the core players known as the Intrepid Heroes – Lou Wilson, Emily Axford, Brian Murphy, Siobhan Thompson, Ally Beardsley and Zac Oyama.
Now the show is prepping another bout of live shows starting with one at the Hollywood Bowl on June 1, while also premiering the next season for the Intrepid Heroes on Dropout – the streaming service that homes the show. Mulligan calls the first half of his year the best kind of blur.
“It’s been nuts,” he tells TheWrap. “The feeling of kicking off the year with Madison Square Garden, getting ready to release ‘Cloudward, Ho!’ – our next Intrepid Heroes season – in June, and really getting excited for the ‘Battle at the Bowl.’ It’s been wild, man. It’s also very funny, too, just on a personal level as well, because the life keeps on life-ing. With a family and everything else, it’s just a joy and a gift and also a total blur.”
Below, Mulligan talks with TheWrap about choosing to make the Hollywood Bowl show a canon event in the show’s “Fantasy High” setting, juggling the many worlds and settings of “Dimension 20,” and the laughable simplicity of creating a disgusting character like Chungledown Bim.
2025 has been a crazy year for both you and “Dimension 20.” How are you feeling at the halfway mark?
I really highly recommend to any creatives that become similarly busy — while also onboarding a lot of domestic responsibilities — dissociation and compartmentalization. I really can’t rate them highly enough. Segment your brain and just keep moving forward. That really is, from the bottom of my heart, highly recommended.
Is compartmentalization the name of the game when you’re keeping these big stories and worlds – from “Cloudward, Ho!” and the various live shows, to “Worlds Beyond Number” – straight?
Weirdly, the fictional realities is always the part that stays super close in hand. My brother makes fun of me because he’ll bring up a random NPC from one session when we were 14, and it’s like bam: I got their name, I remember what their deal was. Storytelling taps into memory in a really powerful way. Getting back into the stakes and reality of these different fantastical worlds – that part, gratefully and thankfully, has stayed pretty close to second nature.
Performing at Madison Square Garden at the beginning of the year isn’t something to leave top of mind fast, but with “Gauntlet at the Garden” landing on Dropout a few weeks ago how have you been revisiting the experience?
The documentary created by Lila Schmitz about it, that actually is a gift. I don’t know how to put this other than that I was able to feel the impact of that event more from watching the documentary than I did on the day – which is really, I guess why documentary and journalism and recording is so important. Shout out to every friend in the friend group who’s the one taking pictures, because when I’m there on the day, I’m there in my capacity as an executive producer and as someone who’s trying to just cross T’s and dot I’s as swiftly as possible.
You stay in a mindset of trying to do your job and trying to deliver the best product you can, and stop and smelling the roses is often a distraction from doing the best job that you can do, so having Lila use incredible artistry and hard work of her own to force us all to have that moment crystallized in amber, that’s a gift that I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to fully say thank you for because I don’t know that I would have felt the weight of that moment but for that documentary.
Have things changed in how you’re preparing for the Hollywood Bowl show mentally/emotionally/logistically after performing at MSG?
I think there’s a lot of great logistical elements that are like, ‘OK, what are the things that really seem to delight the crowd? What are the things that the audience was enthusiastic about? What are the things that were great ideas in theory, but then we saw in practice that there were issues or obstacles with pulling them off.’
You get better every time you do something, but that first time out there’s so much that settles into your bones about what this is going to be. So I think we’re heading to the Bowl with way more of a sense of confidence and certainty about what this is, what this performance fundamentally is, and how to pull it off.
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It can be hard to feel a sense of one-upmanship when your first arena show is at Madison Square Garden, but how are looking to build and grow this next batch of live shows starting with Battle at the Bowl?
One of the ways I think we look at the idea of one-upmanship — how do we push the envelope, how do we create something the audience had seen before — is to look at creating meaningfully different offerings such that people that came to the Garden have something new to look forward to. In other words, exploration and going like, ‘OK, the Gauntlet at the Garden was awesome, what a blast.’ Now we know what this is. Let’s lean into the fight night angle. Let’s let’s make it a canon event. Whatever this is is going to exist permanently in the canon of ‘Fantasy High,’ let’s have it so that people that are live there at the show with us can experience a piece of this story.
These shows are rowdy. You’re there in physical space with people, and I’ve been looking at it and being like, ‘Oh let’s lean into the rowdiness. Let’s rile people up. Let’s have fun.’ These live shows are absolutely a space for storytelling and for continuing these epic sagas of these characters, but also the energy in the room is so electric you have to lean into that excitement. It has to be an exciting chapter of the story.
‘Fantasy High: Sophomore Year’ was a live season of the show but having a canon live event seems like inviting in a whole new level of chaos and, like you said, energy. How long had you wanted to do a canon event and why hold off to do it now vs. at MSG?
Chungledown Bim was born of a livestream. Chungledown Bim was a random name I wrote on a list of pirate names. It was Old Young Benjamin, a couple other ridiculous pirates, Alistair Ash and then Chungledown Bim – and he was not supposed to matter. He was not supposed to be a guy that we interacted with. He could have been a name on a list forever, and instead he became through truly wild choices that came out live on Twitch to this audience.
So I think there was something that felt like, ‘Well isn’t it a better insurance policy to have these live shows not be canon in case they get out of hand?’ And we go ‘What are you talking about?’ The entire second season of the show was out of hand. This mustache, bearded gnomish pirate with pockets full of spaghetti was birthed from the chaos of doing this with no take backs. Let us conclude this story with no take backs.
You introduced an NPC named Chungledown Bim and you didn’t at all assume the players weren’t going to think “I need to know more about this dude?”
Jacob, I’m going to recreate on camera for you now the creation of Chungledown Bim, and how much thought was put into him before he was on camera:
Chungledown Bim, gnome, pirate. Great.
There you go. That’s it.
You mentioned Chungledown being born out of Lou’s decision to bail on everyone in Sophomore Year and wander off on his own. Are there other moments like that where your players’ choices truly caught you by surprise?
I think there have been many moments like that where you go, ‘Oh my god, what is this decision being made in this moment?’ There are single initiative counts in ‘A Crown of Candy’ that permanently change the future of that story. There are decisions made, I think, in ‘The Unsleeping City’ about how really entire characters relationships are going to resolve. Ally Beardsley had a single die roll in the middle of Season 2 of ‘The Unsleeping City’ that I had to rewrite the campaign based on one die roll. That’s why we do it.
I think each and every season we’ve done as a cast I can point to multiple moments that totally rewrote the back half of the season, and that’s something I’m very proud of.
You and Lou statted out Chungledown a few years back. Since then, you had a whole other season of Fantasy High – ‘Junior Year’ – but how much of that original statting remained in the character appearing in Battle at the Bowl?
I will say Chungledown will be recognizable from Dimension 20: Foundry, where we statted him out, but also we statted him out at a moment in time after the conclusion of ‘Sophomore Year,’ so another year of in-game time has passed. So Chungledown Bim will have all of the abilities that you saw him have in the Dimension 20: Foundry, plus whatever he’s been able to do in the intervening year of in-game time.
Switching gears a bit, the new Intrepid Heroes season “Cloudward, Ho!” starts right after “Battle at the Bowl.” This season is finally a steampunk setting, which fans have been wanting for a while. What came first for you when figuring this all out: the setting or the story?
This one came about very much from the PCs. We’ve done so many seasons at this point that it really is like, ‘Hey guys, like, I’m a short order cook. What are you guys in the mood for? What do you want?’ And for them, it’s like, “We just did ‘Junior Year’ so we want to go to a new setting.” I would say, more often than not, if we’ve done a sequel, we want to do something new. If we’ve done something new, we want to go back to a sequel. And the PCs were like, “We wanted to go to a new world.” And they were like, “We want high adventure.”
So I think for them it was we want the feeling of adventure and also if ‘Junior Year’ all took place in one town, so it was like let’s go on a journey. I think steampunk, it was like going back to old HG Wells and looking at Atlantis and looking at some like, Miyazaki biplane stuff. You know, the whir of a biplane engine with a powder blue sky filled with fluffy white clouds. Great, coming up.
Steampunk feels like one of the shortest walks to the classic “accusation” thrown your way that “capitalism is always the bad guy,” but what about the setting had you excited once you did settle on it?
The art department absolutely popped off. The art this season is just a different universe – like the battles and the projections and the sets and everything is so goddamn beautiful. Rick Perry, his entire team of Derek and Ruby and Schaubach and the minis team. It’s just really, really phenomenal.
Other than that, it’s just really wonderful to watch our PCs sink their teeth into not only a brand-new world, but the way their characters live and operate and move, it’s really thrilling. It’s unlike anything we’ve ever done before.
Lastly, you mentioned liking to do something new and then returning for a sequel of some kind. Have you given any thought to which campaign you want to get back to next?
I would say for me, the worlds that I feel the most prepared to go back to are probably “Starstruck,” “Fantasy High” and, frankly, even though it has not come out yet, “Cloudward, Ho!”
Where we left in Chapter Two of “The Unsleeping City” felt really solid to me, where we left off in “Neverafter” feels really solid to me, where we left off in “A Crown of Candy” feels really solid to me, as far as sequels are concerned. I think Comida and Calorum might have other stories, but I don’t know that I directly feel like the Rocks family needs an immediate sequel.
