Brennan Lee Mulligan on the joys of ‘Dimension 20: Dungeons and Drag Queens’
Looking for an epic fantasy tale featuring life-and-death stakes, fierce warriors, and legendary music producer Mark Ronson? Then you need to check out the latest season of Dropout’s Dungeons and Dragons actual play show, Dimension 20: Dungeons and Drag Queens.
Over the course of four episodes, Dungeons and Drag Queens sends legendary queens Alaska Thunderfuck, Bob the Drag Queen, Jujubee, and Monét X Change on a quest to the underworld, all guided by Dungeon Master Brennan Lee Mulligan. There is no end to the fun of this campaign. Nowhere else will you see Alvin the Chipmunk lead a battalion of fae into battle or hear jokes about Michelle Visage being undead. Whether you’re a fan of drag performers or tabletop role-playing games, or even if you’re a novice to both but want to learn more, the irreverent adventures of these questing queens are not to be missed.
To find out more about Dungeons and Drag Queens, Mashable spoke with Mulligan about how this season of Dimension 20 came to be, the joys of watching the queens immerse themselves in the game, and what it means to be airing this season during a time of increased hostility towards drag performers and the LGBTQ community.
Mashable: When Dimension 20: Dungeons and Drag Queens was first announced, Dropout CEO Sam Reich tweeted that Dropout had been trying to make this happen since 2019. What inspired the idea, and how did it all come together now?
Brennan Lee Mulligan: The idea for Dungeons and Drag Queens started across this constellation of people who perform. There are fans of Dimension 20 that work in the RuPaul’s Drag Race world or that work in the management company for some of these amazing queens.
Obviously, over at Dropout, we’re all enormous fans. My wonderful wife, Izzy Roland, introduced me to Drag Race many, many years ago, and Sam Reich and Paul Robalino, who’s one of our development heads at Dropout, are huge fans. So there’s this huge mutuality of respect and deep appreciation for each other’s work.
I think it was sometime last year when this long-sought-after collaboration came to be. It’s just one of those things where schedules start to line up, e-mails start firing off, and this huge collaboration came together.
I can see when people would be like, “Oh, Drag Race and Dungeons and Dragons. Is there a correlation here?” In my experience, yes, there’s a huge overlap of people who are fans of Drag Race and who I play D&D with. So it was a joy to be able to make this come to pass.
Speaking to that overlap, what kind of skills do you think drag performers have that might inform how they play D&D? How do you think Dungeons and Dragons and drag performance speak to each other?
Well, to borrow the phrase, I think Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve, and Talent are all incredibly worthwhile skills for anyone who would be playing D&D. And there’s a fearlessness to the things that these performers are capable of doing, the places they’re willing to go, how exposed and vulnerable yet also larger than life and incandescent they’re able to be.
They were all just naturals. You can watch as they learn some of the jargon and the nomenclature. All of the parts of playing, like storytelling and performance and the intersection of table talk, where we’re all friends at the table playing a game, then going into the narrative and diving deep into the storytelling — all of that was like second nature [to them]. I do think that there’s a lot you can translate from their facility with improv and comedy and performance, and how expressive and emotive they all are. But fundamentally, I think that the number one skill that they bring to us is fearlessness.
This is a brand new thing. They’re playing a game for the first time in front of the camera, and there is zero fear. As performers, they have that courage and bravery, that even with something brand new, they’re going to give it their all.
What was the character creation process like for these queens?
We had a couple of pre-sessions with them. We had a session zero and a character creation session, and it was really exciting.
As much professional D&D as I play these days, I have such a background in teaching new people how to play. So, it’s my favorite thing in the world to teach the game to new people. You watch them fall in love with it for the first time as they realize that anything is possible.
When getting down into the idea of “who do you want to be,” I kind of left it up to each queen, asking, “How would you like to interface with the mechanical crunchiness of the game?”
I said, “The pros and cons of having me walk you through the rules ahead of time are that you will have a deeper understanding of the mechanics, but it will take more time. Or I’m just happy to draft a character sheet based on your specifications: You tell me what kinds of powers you want broadly, and I will deliver that to you.”
These performers are so incredibly busy that I think a lot of them opted to just go over the rules on the day. They told me what they wanted to be able to do narratively, and I went, “Great, I will use rules to make that happen.” I think it ended up working really, really well, because it kept them in the mind of thinking about D&D narratively, and I just give them the dice roll they need to make.
I love the moment when Bob the Drag Queen realizes, “Once we say it, it becomes canon.” How does it feel every time you see a new player embrace that?
The heart takes wing! My soul flies forth from my chest! You see someone realize that anything is possible through the power of imagination, of saying yes, and of collaborative storytelling. It might be my favorite part of these games, those moments where that joy and wonder is discovered.
It’s like in Peter Pan, where you’re able to fly with fairy dust and thinking happy thoughts. There’s this totally celebratory embrace of the magical, and I love it.
One of my favorite parts of watching an actual play series is when a player surprises the DM. I’d love to know, what were some of the moments from the very first episode where you thought, “That was so amazing and surprising, I’m so excited to play more with these queens.”
Learning that the world of Kelvorda has a portal to our world attached to it, which is why Mark Ronson wound up there — huge apologies to the Ronson family.
But listen, you don’t play this many seasons with Ally Beardsley without getting ready to have anachronistic cross-dimensional pop culture references become true in your world. I’ve been down this road before, this ain’t my first rodeo.
In terms of other big surprises — there were surprises in all directions.
The Mark Ronson stuff, Paula Abdul, and then flipping around from that, you’ve got Jujubee summoning the cat tree Buddy Bear, and the speed at which the queens were using spell casting and putting a mystery together. These players were so engrossed right away, and that’s something that can take a little bit of time.
Some new players, if they’re not deeply engrossed in the game, kind of treat it as a ride at Universal Studios where you’re describing a plot hook and they’re like, “Wow, that evil wizard just burned that town. I wonder what we’re going to see next!” And you’re like, “No, it’s interactive! You can stop it!”
But right away, the queens were really putting themselves at the locus of control and agency within the world. That’s advanced. Anyone watching Dungeons and Drag Queens, thinking about how the queens are new to playing, you’ve got to know how advanced they were right out of the gate. That was also a wonderful surprise because I don’t need you to know the names of the rules — I know the names of the rules! The thing you can’t replicate is feeling at cause in the world, and they were all so good at that right away.
Dungeons and Drag Queens is coming out at a time when there’s so much hostility towards drag and the LGBTQ community as a whole. How do you think a show like this might speak to these issues?
At Dropout, it is our deepest core tenet and belief to make comedy and storytelling that is inclusive and welcoming. As a community of creators, we stand firmly, side by side, forever, with drag queens, with the entire LGBT community, with all of our amazing viewers and audience members, and their friends and family across the world.
That hostility is an ongoing form of bigotry and intolerance that continues to foment in this time. It is particularly pronounced right now, in this present political moment, because of ongoing unaddressed bigotry that has to do with homophobia, transphobia, all these other various issues. It’s the story of America in that there are these deep, entrenched bigotries that are both very, very real in terms of people who want to discriminate this way, but also are brought out for extremely cynical political ends.
Drag queens have existed forever. RuPaul has been famous for decades. But now we’re in this moment where Republican politicians come out to foment rage to drive voters to polls by reawakening these old, horrifying intolerances and bigotries. It’s deeply upsetting, and everyone at Dropout cares about it a lot.
We made this season of the show because we believe in this storytelling and these performers. We would have made this season regardless of this current political moment because Bob the Drag Queen, Monét X Change, Jujubee, and Alaska Thunderfuck are some of the greatest comedians and performers this world has ever known, bar none. It is an added bonus that we get to live by our values in this moment and let everyone who should know that we’re standing by them that we are standing by them.
That’s wonderful to hear. And to wrap things up with one lighter question: If you were ever to do drag, what would your drag name be?
I’ve got to give it up to the viewers of our show. The two that have really made me laugh are Getinda Comments and Anita Almonds.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.