O
ne chilly day last January, Brennan Lee Mulligan was walking by Penn Station, pondering the distance between the hot dog stand at the subway entrance, to the stage at Madison Square Garden. He was having an “out of body experience,” he remembers, describing the journey — through the doors, past security, up the elevator, through the dressing room, and onto the stage. He was there to run a game of Dungeons and Dragons in front of a sold-out audience of nearly 20,000 people, something that would have been completely unimaginable a decade ago, when he would pass by the arena on his way to his job as an improv coach at Upright Citizens Brigade. So to get past the anxiety, excitement, and disbelief, he just focused on getting there. “It’s like 150 steps,” he says. “But I can’t process anything other than those steps. Everything else is just, ‘Well, if you ever actually internalize any of this, you’ll just explode into confetti. So don’t do that.’”
A UCB alum selling out MSG would be a feat under any circumstance; to do so with a 50-year-old table-top roleplaying game made headlines. Dimension 20, the D&D show he created for streaming service Dropout back in 2018, was finally having a mainstream breakthrough. But to those paying attention to the industry of D&D live-plays — podcasts and video series encapsulating an entire campaign, a series of adventures with a group of characters that can take years to complete — it was a natural progression. In a culture overrun with brainrot, AI slop, and callous internet actors “doing it for the lolz,” D&D liveplays offer an antidote. For the players and the Dungeon Masters (also called Game Masters) — the people like Mulligan who helm the games — it’s a place to explore different parts of themselves. Role-playing a character can let them work through choices they might be scared to make. Stories can be prepared, but since most decisions ultimately fall to the roll of the dice, there’s an exciting spontaneity for the millions of people watching at home. “Authentic” is overused to the point that it’s almost lost meaning, but it comes up often in my conversations with the people involved in making these shows, as well as the people who watch them. “You’re doing it because you like make-believe, and that’s a great energy to breathe,” Mulligan says.
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The D&D world is a vast ecosystem of main campaigns, short series, and one-offs, as well as books, comics, video games, and podcasts, and it’s not unusual for players to jump around to collaborate with other groups. But it still turned heads in August when Mulligan announced that he was going to join Critical Role — a D&D liveplay empire worth millions, which recently launched its second Amazon animated show — as their DM for Campaign 4. Some fans were shocked; others excited. But for Mulligan, it was just an extension of what he’s done his whole life. “It’s bringing me back to campaign notes from when I was 14,” he says. “I have maps that I drew when I was an early teenager.”
“I LOVE ORCS. I JUST love them,” Mulligan tells me one afternoon at a low-key bar he likes on Los Angeles’s east side, on a strip that we joke feels like Brooklyn, because it’s just that easy to run into people you know. His wife, the writer and actress Isabella Roland, is in New York promoting her new film, De(a)d, and he’s been caring for their baby daughter. Dressed in jeans, a flannel, and a New York Public Library T-shirt, his red hair combed back, he looks like the kind of guy you’d be excited to see holding a clipboard when you’re dropping your kid off for camp. He apologizes for ordering a hot dog. “I’m doing my dad thing today, I neglected to eat breakfast,” he admits, thinking back to the pep talk he gave himself before going out. “I’m being interviewed by Rolling Stone. I said, ‘Keep it together, Brennan! You don’t have to snack in everything you do!’”
“There’s so much good fantasy out there, and your job is to figure out what little dish I can bring into this vast banquet,” Mulligan says.
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He’s telling me about Campaign 4, and — careful to not give any spoilers — the world he created for it. Dimension 20’s schtick, so to speak, is to set each season in a different mashup world that might feel more accessible to those not steeped in Middle Earth — Fantasy High was LOTR meets John Hughes movies; The Unsleeping City was LOTR meets The Nutcracker meets hardboiled detective novels; A Crown of Candy was LOTR meets Game of Thrones meets Candyland. (It’s not D&D unless there’s a little Tolkien in there — how else could you have orcs?) But Matt Mercer, Critical Role’s longtime DM — who’s playing this season, rather than leading it — is a little more serious, and Exandria, the world in which the first three campaigns were set, was more traditionally D&D.
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Over those three campaigns — more than 1,500 hours recorded over the better part of a decade — Mercer created tomes of lore and backstory. Rather than try to live within that world, though, Mulligan went about creating a new one. Campaign 4 takes place in Aramán, which Mulligan describes as “love letter to Exandria.”
“There’s so much good fantasy out there, and your job is to figure out what little dish I can bring into this vast banquet,” he explains. “And for me, knowing what I know about human nature and loving what I love about fantasy, I want to see the orcish revolution.”
He decided to set the story 70 years after this revolution, when the orcs — “foot soldiers of the god of war and suffering,” as he describes them — rose up against their oppressor, sparking a class war between gods and mortals. “[The] gods go, ‘No, no, no, we have to go help the god of war and suffering and destroy the orcs.’ And all these dwarves and elves and humans go, ‘What? We have to save the god of war and suffering?’” It’s a story of class solidarity — the gods would rather protect one of their own than save their followers. “If the gods truly are a family and they see themselves as their first and greatest priority, what does that mean for mortals?” The gods ultimately lost, but getting rid of them doesn’t mean that the problems are over. “Lo and behold, [they] suddenly find themselves at the helm of their own destiny,” he says. “And oh no, are there still problems? Oh, no!” And that’s where Campaign 4 takes off.
This season, then, is something like LOTR meets modern America — or what we may face when our gods of war and suffering finally fall. “This campaign deals with characters who are in a world of epic fantasy, but who nevertheless are reckoning with constant change. It feels very personal and germane, and it feels very resonant, but it also feels [exciting] to do that with sorcerers and sword play and castles and ruins.” At its heart, though, it’s a way for people to wrestle with their own humanity. “The first place I start is ethics and people and human nature and what it means to be alive,” he says. “People will sometimes joke about philosophy degrees. Baby, I’m putting that degree to work every goddamn day!”
TO SAY THAT CRITICAL ROLE is Dimension 20’s biggest competitor isn’t exactly right, in that, in the world of D&D, there isn’t that kind of competition. Sure, in the game, an elf might have to fight a goblin to the death, but at the heart of the community is a deep love for play and storytelling and cooperation, precluding any real rivalry between the shows.
Mercer, in fact, is good friends with Mulligan. Their styles are different — Mercer, a successful voice actor, is “crunchier,” more focused on traditional worlds and characters and precision to the rules. Mercer is the DM’s DM, someone so familiar with the mechanisms of the game that Wizards of the Coast — the company that owns Dungeons and Dragons and lords over its ever-evolving rules — hired him as a consultant. (The “Mercer Effect” is a recent phenomenon wherein amateur DMs feel like they’ll never live up to the standard he sets — he’s just that good. Mulligan jokes that he has a different definition: “The Mercer Effect is me and all my friends having a fucking job.”)
Mulligan, on the other hand, has over the past few years become the more mainstream star of the industry. His easy demeanor is affected equally by a natural silliness, years of improv training, and a deep caring for humanity and community — his late college philosophy professor, Tom Davis, helped him build the moral and ethical framework that he uses to this day. Mulligan still keeps a photo of Davis above his desk, to watch over him as he creates the fantastical worlds he gets to share with his friends.
Like Mercer, Mulligan also has a very deep understanding of Dungeons and Dragons. After getting bullied in elementary school, his mom, the comic book writer Elaine Lee, homeschooled him. To encourage a social life, she put flyers up in a local game store in New Paltz, New York, and got a group of college kids to show him the ropes for D&D. (“I’ve never asked my mom if there was money involved in that,” he says, contorting his face to feign curiosity. “It seems like someone had to have gotten paid, right?”) They taught him the ropes, and it wasn’t long before he was DMing a home game for his stepbrother and their friends.
That campaign, which they dubbed “Horizon,” went on for several years, until they were old enough to leave home. Their final session lasted three days straight, and he remembers the group — in their pajamas sitting on a pile of sleeping bags, the musk of seven kids overtaking the air — finally reaching the end. “Everyone became gods and ascended and saved the world,” he remembers. He put on Annie Lennox’s “Into the West,” which plays during the credits in Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. As she reached the chorus’s crescendo — “What can you see, on the horiiiii-zon” — the entire group lost it. “I don’t mean like a dramatic tear,” Mulligan says. “I mean, snot is pouring out of people’s noses.” He began to understand the intense impact playing make believe could have. “The coolest superpower human beings have is the ability to make meaning.”
Mulligan was also, it turned out, incredibly smart. He finished high school by 14, got an associates degree at a local college by 17, and by 18 was living in New York City attending the School for Visual Arts. After he graduated, he became involved with the Upright Citizen’s Brigade, taking classes and then eventually teaching them, while working at a bar in the Financial District. He was, of course, still DMing a campaign that lasted his entire time in New York.
But after about a decade, it felt like it was time to move on — the apartment he shared in Brooklyn was breaking up, as friends hit their late twenties and moved in with significant others. Mulligan, then single, found himself at a crossroads. In 2015, he won $50,000 on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, losing on a question about Pharrell Williams’ age. (“I’ll spill some tea,” he says. “You want a scoop? They reach out to improv theaters. They look for telegenic people.”) It was enough to pay off some debt and fund a move to L.A. “America!” he proclaims, his hand on his chest, his voice deep and theatrical. “The only way my life turned out good was a game show.”
“IT ALL BEGAN WITH a Tim Curry impression.”
It’s not the first time Sam Reich has told this story, and he seems to have it down to a tight five. It was about 2017, and he was looking for new cast members for College Humor’s new TV-MA streaming site Dropout.TV, which he was heading up. Mulligan applied. “I remember watching his character reel, and the first character up was called ‘Tim Curry eating pizza.’ I loved it,” he says. “And we didn’t hire him.” Instead, they gave him a job writing questions for the game show Um, Actually. A game show got him to L.A., and another game show got him in the door. As other cast members got busy, they started putting Mulligan in sketches. “Immediately the audience fell in love with him,” Reich says. “To this day, I don’t think I’ve seen the audience rally around someone as quickly and vehemently as they did Brennan.”
After College Humor was dropped by its corporate overlords in early 2020 and the creative team regrouped under the Dropout brand, Reich, the new site’s CEO, was looking for content. Reich knew Mulligan had been running a D&D game with some of the other actors, and Mulligan suggested it could be adapted into a show for the new site. Until that point, live-plays had generally been uncut live streams of a group around a table, but what if they brought their editing and graphic style to the form? Reich was into it. It didn’t take long to realize it was going to be a hit.
“I love making people laugh,” Mulligan says. “I love it as much as I love making people cry or making them gasp or making them go, ‘Fuck you, eat your fucking dice!’”
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“I wasn’t even in the room when the first two episodes of Dimension 20 were shot, and after they were, everybody came out of the room vibrating,” he says. “Dimension 20 was completely original. It burst out of the gate as our most popular show.” He credits his company’s early success to it. “There is totally a world where, without Brennan and without Dimension 20, Dropout does not exist. We subsisted on Dimension 20 fans when College Humor imploded. They were our audience in year one.”
The audience may have come for the comedy, but they stayed for the pathos. “I love making people laugh,” Mulligan says. “I love it as much as I love making people cry or making them gasp or making them go, ‘Fuck you, eat your fucking dice!’” Given that people are allowed — encouraged, even — to explore different parts of themselves, the drama always feels personal, authentic. (There’s that word again!) “I have so many friends who came out of the closet after their [characters] did,” he says. Though he’s talking broadly about D&D, Ally Beardsley, one of the Intrepid Heroes (as the group of adventurers is called) came out publicly as nonbinary after playing a trans character, Pete Conlan, in The Unsleeping City. “[Pete] has wild magic — uncontrollable and dangerous in the game mechanics — which we used to explore the painful chaos of leaving a family that doesn’t accept you,” Beardsley wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post.
In August, around the same time Mulligan was announced as the DM for the new Critical Role campaign, news broke that he was also signing a three-year contract with Dropout. He’ll stay the executive producer on Dimension 20 — a new season is now underway — but the contract was a way to get some other long-discussed projects off the ground. “Making it into a contract is an understanding of the fact that we’re all so busy that unless things are contractual, it will always just be a daydream,” he says, noting that three years is just a start. “Read this: I will be a Dropout man for the rest of my days.”
ONE OF THE THINGS THAT makes Mulligan so charming — both onscreen and off — is his tendency to slip into a dramatic monologue, done in a rich baritone with a friendly smirk. He both takes it seriously and is in on the joke, but to watch it happen feels inevitable. Sometimes, in Dimension 20, that’s to give a speech about the dangers of capitalism, or the importance of doing your best on any task — “anything worth doing is worth giving your all,” as he puts it. But during our afternoon together, it comes out when he’s telling me about the gift Mercer gave him at the outset of Campaign 4. “He gave me two swords, full swords with scabbards, awesome, beautiful blades forged” — he trails off and looks into the distance — “by whom I do not know. But given to me by the Smith of Exandria, the All-Hammer himself. And I pulled the swords from their sheaths, and they are named blades, as all blades of true force should be.” The facade cracks a little — he starts to smile. “The first one is called compartmentalization. The second one is called dissociation.” He’s back down in the bar. “I [told Mercer], ‘I cannot tell you how much this means.’ He’s just the sweetest guy of all, man. He’s the best.”
Monologues and swordsmiths aside, compartmentalization and dissociation are important concepts to Mulligan. Many fans develop parasocial relationships with internet creators, where they consume so much content it feels like they actually know the person onscreen. For those in long-running D&D campaigns, wherein hundreds of hours of you interacting with your friends are available on demand, it can be intense. For some, that can be uncomfortable (“I’m a person that, more often than not, doesn’t like being perceived,” Mercer admits, for example) but Mulligan seems to have come to terms with it.
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“I am myself in the shows that I do,” he says. “Yes, I’m also a bunch of gnomes and goblins intermittently, but I’m me. There’s a thing internet people do, where they go, ‘These people don’t know [me].’ And I had to throw that away because it stopped feeling true. Where I went, ‘I don’t know, man. You watched 400 hours of Dimension 20, you might have an inkling of what my deal is.’” He also acknowledges that he may be guilty of having these relationships with other people: “Man, Ursula K. Le Guin matters a lot to me, and she has no idea who I am!” (To be fair, Le Guin died in 2018. But the point stands.)
Mulligan has learned to embrace what his friend Tigre Bailando, a sculptor and performance artist who died in 2022, described as his “digital corona.” A corona is a term for the halo visible around a planet or other celestial object; for Mulligan, the digital corona is the part of himself visible to fans — not exactly himself, but the version he is comfortable sharing with the world. “I’m just like a janitor taking care of this digital corona, being like ‘Oh, you guys love this corona, that’s great. I worked hard on it.’ And [I have] a lot of genuine gratitude for what the corona has done for my life, but I think if you start to feel those things at home or amongst your peers and collaborators, it ends up getting confusing. I am the custodian for the digital corona, but that’s not me.” Compartmentalization and dissociation, in other words. The weapons he has to keep himself whole. And of course, they came from a friend.
