“People don't understand how close D&D and wrestling are,” said Brennan Lee Mulligan. And he’s speaking from an informed perspective, ushering Dimension 20 : Titan Takedown into the world this week.
In the new four-episode season of the long-running anthology actual play show, Mulligan hosts four WWE superstars — Xavier Woods, Kofi Kingston, Bayley, and Chelsea Green — to a game set in a professional-wrestling-themed reimagining of Greek mythology. And despite its brevity, the season has become a playground for wrestling-loving Dimension 20 veterans, who were welcomed into a suite of extra skits and bits to celebrate their own fandom.
The parallels between professional wrestling and actual play Dungeons & Dragons are easy to find, and when Polygon chatted with Mulligan via video call last week, we started with the obvious one. Did he feel like his entire career had come down to this: playing every heel?
“The Dungeon Master should just be called the All-Heel,” Mulligan said. “It is the heel of all heels; you play every heel, and it is your role to be big and blustery and then lose, and that is what the people want to see. It's a delight. I flew into it with all of the love and ardor I could muster.”
For more of Brennan’s thoughts on Titan Takedown , the kayfabe all around us, and the unexpected advantages of having new players in your actual play, read on.
Polygon: Are you a wrestling fan from way back or is it something you 've been introduced to later in life or for the show?
Brennan Lee Mulligan: Later in life; I had the pleasure, the honor — I wish that everyone in the world could be so lucky as to be pals with the magnificent Danielle Radford [comedian and co-host of the Tights and Fights podcast]. Danielle is a wrestling and comedy super maven.
I have always been tangentially a fan of wrestling, as a lot of people are tangentially fans of D&D, where they're like, Oh, that looks fun, but no one has invited me specifically to participate. I don 't have an on-ramp. I'm not at a friend's house where they're watching it, my parents aren't watching it. So it's this thing that seems cool, but that I'm not getting drawn into.
Working in comedy, there are so many comedians that are huge wrestling fans. And Danielle took me by the hand — especially ramping up as this season was approaching — and went like, Here 's the historic matches, here's the lore, here's the jargon, here's the encyclopedia. She created this beautiful document for the season, came through and said, "Here's the matches you need to watch to understand these four players."
After years and years of being like, Oh, that seems cool, but I don 't see an organic way into participating in that, Danielle could not have thrown more of a royal red carpet out for me and all the D20 people that wanted to finally be involved. And it was a joy, a privilege, and an honor.
**I 've always been in a similar boat, but the appeal of wrestling clicked for me when I found out what kayfabe means. I thought, **Oh, it 's like the Muppets **. It 's a performance of a performance. **
Hey, listen, kayfabe is all around us. Anyone who has ever had to visit their grandma knows that you are not the same person everywhere, right? You go, [ soft, cheerful voice ] “Hi, Grandma. It's good to see you!” We present these masks; we present these sides of ourselves. Kayfabe is a really useful concept, and I love that it's entering common parlance. It's a useful term, especially in the age of social media [ mildly deranged voice ] where we are all performers, Susana, all of us are performers…
Oh god, interviews are already the most kayfabe space I occupy, this is a level of metatext I 'm not sure I'm capable of processing.
Dimension 20 has always included players of different levels of experience with Dungeons & Dragons. But recent seasons like Dungeons and Drag Queens and Titan Takedown have really leaned into new players as performers. What's in your playbook for introducing not just a player to a game they haven’t played, but a performer to this kind of performance they haven't done before?
The best thing I always say is: Don't worry about the rules. And I try to really remind people that I am a living encyclopedia. I'm like, "You should just step out into open air and I'll build a bridge underneath you. You can't go wrong. Don't be afraid." And also just trying to remind people that it's story first, game second.
What I mean by that is, it's not that the game doesn't matter — it's that people will literally come with a game mentality of being like, “Wait, so how do we win? Can we die? What's going on? What happens when we die, we lose the game?” And you're like, “No, you make another character…”
It's very funny, because it's not even a debate. It is story first. The game is story first. There's no lose condition, there's no win condition. The game ends when you're done telling your story, it's built into the bones of the thing. And so: Reminding people of that [is the first step]. But the truth is a lot of that "being a novice to the game" [stuff] is incredibly beneficial to the show. It's really helpful. It creates an on-ramp for people that can come and find a season really approachable.
It's so funny, we did Dungeons and Drag Queens , which was a lot of first-time players, and what's so funny is you think, Oh, this is going to be like a Reese 's Cup; your peanut butter got in my chocolate. Fans of drag and fans of D&D can cross-pollinate and find these other mediums and performers. It was so funny that a lot of people approached that season as people that were not drawn from either, but it was a good on-ramp to learn about both.
That you are novice to each other creates this really interesting opportunity to be able to jump into the beginning of something and go, Oh, they 're explaining the game to these performers and it's an easy on-ramp for me coming in. I think that with Titan Takedown , it was really great, because you see apex performers at the top of their mastery of this skillset, learning something new, but being absolutely so entertaining and charming that it's a wild ride while you're learning along with them.
Maybe this is a question wrongly asked, because all gaming groups are going to be different in their own ways, but were there any unexpected differences between introducing a group of drag performers to the game and introducing a group of wrestling performers to the game?
Yeah, I think I would say no. I'd say that they're just wonderful. They're just really wonderful.
Dungeons and Drag Queens just won Best Web Series at the Queerty Awards, onstage with Monét and Bob and our incredible producer, Ebony Hardin — who's the supervising producer for Dropout, but was also our day one production coordinator and producer going forward in Dimension 20. They're just phenomenal people.
You meet them on day one and you see these people that are quite famous, and they're just the most down to earth and funny and gregarious. Like Bob and Monét's rivalry, taking shots at each other, the cameras aren't [even] rolling, it's just delightful. And the same was true for these wrestlers, they were just the most warm and incredible [presences]. And again, to watch that facility and charm — I would say the cool thing was the storytelling.
If you're someone that's approaching this as a D&D fan that is seeing wrestlers for the first time, you might think of them as these obviously athletic, incredible performers. You see the big, larger-than-life persona. What I grokked right away was [that] their facility was storytelling. The understanding of setting something up and paying it off. The understanding of those turns, of moments where something shifts. There are storytelling moments in [ Titan Takedown ] that you really see how confident and skilled they are at bringing a character through an experience. I think that's going to be really gratifying for people to come in and see.
Titan Takedown _premiered on Dropout on April 2, with new episodes airing Wednesdays through April 23. _
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