Never Stop Blowing Up: Brennan Lee Mulligan on the latest season of Dimension 20-Izzie Jones-Entertainment – Metro

Brennan Lee Mulligan has already blown up (Dropout.tv)

Hit show Dimension 20 has just aired the final episode of Never Stop Blowing Up, as we speak to creator Brennan Lee Mulligan.

The rise of online shows depicting role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons has exploded in the last few years. Dimension 20 is one such example, that has gone from strength to strength since its debut in 2018. The latest season is out now and takes a cast of comedians on an 80s action movie themed adventure called Never Stop Blowing Up.

It’s hard not to draw comparisons with the name of the new season and the meteoric rise of the show over the last six years, especially as this marks a significant first for the show. Dimension 20 has developed its own homebrew ruleset, riffing off of the popular tabletop role-playing game Kids on Bikes.

I was excited to sit down with Dimension 20’s chief architect, Brennan Lee Mulligan, just before the season finale of Never Stop Blowing Up went live this week, to discuss the new season and his other plans for the future.

We’ll just jump right in! Is Never Stop Blowing Up the most chaotic season of Dimension 20 so far?

Until someone stabs a character with two national monuments at the same time, I’m going to have to say so.

I mean, you definitely had perhaps the most unpredictable cast this time around.

And you know, that was very intentional. We wanted to pick people that we knew were going to take full body swinging for the fences. Especially knowing that this was going to be a full board comedy season.

There was a real joy in working with this cast who are beloved on Dropout, and who have an authority, a familiarity, and a comfort with action as a genre. And who we know are comfortable getting down and dirty in these very goofy spaces. I was just so delighted with each and every member of the cast and what they brought to the table.

It’s funny because I said that to Rekha [in an interview earlier that day] and she was like ‘What, me? Chaotic? No!’

That is Rekha’s chaos right there. That, flying in the face of everything we’ve come to know and understand. We were all there in The Seven, when you tried to brush a displacer beast! We were all there! We remember, so nice try.

This will be comedian Jacob Wysocki’s first time in the dome (Dropout.tv)

I guess this brings us to Jacob. Was this his first time playing? Was there much difference between the prep you had to do with him and everyone else?

I’ll do my due diligence here. Jacob has performed in an actual play before. He was a guest on the Rotating Heroes podcast by our very own Zac Oyama, which was delightful. But I believe this is his first time doing ‘televised’ actual play.

And, what a genius! What a truly brilliant performer. What I love about Jacob, too, was that he can go blow for blow with the best of them in terms of outrageous, zany, over-the-top stuff. But, what a heart!

Dang was such a heartfelt character, that I think gave an emotional heft and a grounded northstar to what the experience of this adventure was for the characters.

That scene with Wolfman Ann and Dang is one of my favourite scenes in the season. As a brand new player, I feel like he never lost sight of the core character he was representing, which I think is just… I think he’s brilliant. I have the utmost respect for Jacob.

D&D and role-plying characters often reflect an aspect of the self. So, a lot of your most beloved characters are elderly, crackpot wizards. Why do you think that is?

I can’t wait to be old. I can’t wait. It’s the level of unhinged that you are allowed to be as an elderly person in your day-to-day life that I am hungry for.

We did our wonderful UK and Ireland tour this last year. I had a moment where… I think there was a scene where the Baba Yaga from Never After and Plug from a StarStruck Odyssey were both crew members on Arthur Aguefort’s spaceship.

I realised… there is this archetype of the old, kooky, magical, unexplained phenomenon that I just love with my whole heart.

I’m going to try to psychoanalyse myself here. I’ll say I’ve spent a lot of my life, you know, I went to school for philosophy… there is an understanding that I feel in my bones, of a tipping point of knowledge where you go over the rollercoaster and realise how impossible it would be to learn everything. There has to be an embrace of chaos.

I still want to learn as much as I can. There’s something about that that I really love. The old mentor, sage, wizard, witch who’s just like, ‘who knows?’ It’s wild.

I was going to say, it feels like quite a classic literary trope.

Merlin, yeah!

This was the live show when it came to the UK (Dropout.tv)

Let’s talk about your homebrew, Never Stop Blowing Up.

Based on Kids On Bikes, the Never Stop Blowing Up system has been such a joy.

Action heroes tend to be just good at everything, right? Good at driving, good at fighting, good at jumping, good at smooching, and good at hot wiring and tech.

We wanted a system that would reflect characters levelling up throughout that process, as their characters became more concrete. There was a desire for a system that would be really fast and fluid, but still allow for fun mechanical choices like group abilities, that were really fun for the players too.

It felt like, ‘Oh, this is giving us identity. We pick la familia. That means something to us’.

A huge shout out to Carlos Luna for working on the system as well. And for organising a lot of the play testing and to our amazing play testers!

Carlos, our series producer, has a hand in everything we do at Dimension 20, but was absolutely instrumental in getting this system up and running.

I’ve got to ask who came up with letting your players DM for 60 seconds.

And that would be me. And you know… I regret nothing.

I stand by it 1,000,000%. I just felt very fortunate to look at these players and go, I know that they will take huge swings, but we have to honour the premise that this is the ‘off the rails’ season.

I was like, how much damage can they do in 60 seconds? The answer is a lot. But we honour that, and I loved every single choice that was made behind the DM screen.

It was a joy to have Ify, Rekha, and Izzy. Also, in a very touching way for me, my [at the time] unborn child has officially sat behind the DM screen for Dimension 20!

I know in the past that you’ve said that it’d be a lot of effort to do a sourcebook but have you considered publishing notes on Never Stop Blowing Up? I know a lot of people would jump at the chance to play it in their home games.

Because this is the first novel sort of game system that we really worked on, we’re exploring ways to get that to people. But obviously it’s a huge lift. There’s a desire for us to share as much game material as we can.

If I were to share my season notes, I would be revealed as a kind of humbug. As they say in The Wizard of Oz. My, bizarre, unreadable chicken scratch. My stenographer shorthand. I might be the worst note keeper on the planet.

And so being that vulnerable in front of our audiences, if they were to see, they would go ‘This is what this guy is running the game off of?!’ And so we need to avoid that.

But short of that, I want to share everything that we can.

So, finally, we know that we’re getting a Dungeons and Drag Queens 2. Are there any other genres you’d like to explore?

Oh, God. Endless, endless, endless genres I want to explore. There are some ideas that I pitched in my original Dimension 20 pitch back in 2017 that we still haven’t had time to get to.

There’s so many fun ones that I think would be great. There’s types of sci-fi that I think would be really fun, like Asimov’s I, Robot. The idea of doing something in the eldritch horror space! Like doing a full maritime campaign there!

Then there’s different mythological things… that would be really fun. There are so many more worlds and fantasies and adventures to be had.

You can watch never Stop Blowing Up on Dropout.tv, with the full season already live now.

Dimension 20 is streaming now (Dropout.tv)

Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter, and sign-up to our newsletter.

To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.

For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.Entertainment – MetroRead More