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https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/rs-gaming/dungeons-and-dragons-dimension-20-madison-square-garden-1235258992/

It’s a frosty January night in New York City, but Madison Square Garden 
is red hot. You feel the heat when pillars of flame spit out from black 
butane tanks that encircle a half-domed stage. The thunder of swag rock 
is drowned out by the dog-whistle cheers of 20,000 people alive with 
electricity. Under the tiled roof where Knicks and Rangers banners hang, 
between walls that often echo with Billy Joel and Taylor Swift, an epic 
game of Dungeons & Dragons played by Dimension 20 is about to get rolling.

An arena spectacle with WWE auras is unusual for Dungeons & Dragons, the 
famously nerdy tabletop game of fantasy heroics and lucky (or unlucky) 
rolls of dice. It’s also unusual for Dimension 20, a show where Los 
Angeles comics play serialized D&D games. It is the flagship show of 
Dropout (formerly CollegeHumor), a streaming service whose organic brand 
of comedy and feverish fanbase make it agile against lumbering corporate 
giants. At the center of Dimension 20 is Brennan Lee Mulligan. His 
ringmaster’s charisma, chameleonic voices, and occasionally viral 
socio-anarchist zingers work in concert with his encyclopedic knowledge 
of Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition to qualify him as arguably the 
greatest Dungeon Master alive. Normally Mulligan’s games are filmed in 
an L.A. studio, on a domed set that looks like a spaceship’s interior 
where players sit around a U-shaped table. But tonight they’re inside 
the Garden, standing where Frazier upset Ali, waving to a roaring crowd 
on a 360-degree stage illuminated by a pattern of LED triangles under a 
waterfall of golden stars. Tonight, these jesters are turned into rock 
stars in the heart of midtown.

Since its launch in 2018, D20 has survived a gauntlet of uncertainty, 
rocked by layoffs from its corporate owners just before a pandemic sent 
them all playing virtually in isolation. Now Dimension 20 thrives as one 
of the most popular tabletop role-playing games (TTRPG) shows on the 
internet. Their sold-out MSG event, “Gauntlet at the Garden,” slated to 
premiere on Dropout later this year, affords Dimension 20 bragging 
rights as the hosts of the single-biggest live game of D&D ever. That’s 
even bigger than when fellow D&D troupe Critical Role sold out their 
Wembley Arena show in October 2023. While MSG is a one-night-only affair 
that D20 just might outperform themselves later this year — they have 
more live events set for Los Angeles, Seattle, and Las Vegas — a 
capacity crowd in the “World’s Most Famous Arena” for a tiny streaming 
show centered around a 51-year-old game is proof that an online audience 
can and will log off and show up. It is revealing of Dimension 20 
itself, an oasis of warmth in an unmagical and increasingly frightening 
cold world.

“Everyone understands storytelling on a profound level,” Brennan Lee 
Mulligan tells Rolling Stone. “Every culture in the world uses it to 
talk about what matters, to talk about being human. What makes people 
come back [to watch us], season after season, rests on characters people 
love and stakes they feel in their spine. They feel the weight of these 
journeys.”
Mulligan sets the scene during “Gauntlet at the Garden” at MSG.Cole 
Wilson for Rolling Stone

“Gauntlet at the Garden” is ineffable for what might still seem like a 
niche hobby, a game still played mostly on kitchen tables. As the music 
fades and the cast take their seats, the jumbo screens that normally 
display Knicks scores now sport the blown-up faces of Dimension 20. 
Surrounding the headliners are grumpy arena security, who spend the 
night wearing baffled expressions watching a sea of adults cheer and 
laugh and applaud over imaginary characters engaged in battles no one 
can actually see, and rolls of acrylic dice just 16 millimeters in size. 
D&D is a game of the imagination, but with the right pieces, the allure 
for stories that unfold with total spontaneity is no fiction.

With his castmates before him, Mulligan, a 37-year-old improv performer 
with bouncy theater kid energy, ginger-red hair, and an AM radio DJ’s 
voice, greets his hometown of New York City. “Hello, one and all!” he 
booms, ringing through arena speakers like the voice of God.

Actually, playing God is kind of Mulligan’s deal on Dimension 20. He is 
its resident Dungeon Master, or DM. It’s a complex task requiring many 
hats at once: story writer and narrator writer, rules referee, ensemble 
actor. (Mulligan is a virtuoso of impressions, with midwestern dads and 
drunk bachelorettes a few personas he’s adopted as DM.) DMs, like 
Mulligan, kick off games of D&D by verbally describing the story — who, 
what, why? — before painting more vivid descriptions of the worlds the 
characters exist. The players, in turn, describe their actions and 
converse in-character, and so it can go for hours, even days, across 
campaigns that can last years. That’s the cadence of D&D, and to watch 
others engaged in it is akin to watching actors at a table-read, except 
without a script.

“On a primal level, I’m asking: What’s going to make my friends happy?” 
Mulligan says. “Telling stories with friends is perennial. It refreshes 
itself because people are refreshing themselves.”
“Everyone understands storytelling on a profound level,” Brennan Lee 
Mulligan tells Rolling Stone. “Every culture in the world uses it to 
talk about what matters, to talk about being human.”Cole Wilson for 
Rolling Stone

To be a good DM is to have a third eye for creativity. It’s not just 
describing worlds that aren’t real with the clarity of a dispatched 
reporter. It’s bringing to life characters born in that instant. It’s 
unspooling lore and unraveling plot twists with little preparation. 
“Gauntlet” had rehearsals for lighting and music, but no one knows how 
the story will end. Not even Mulligan. “There is no way to practice,” he 
says. “You can do lots of planning, but you cannot practice. Nothing 
recreates the environment of being there, in that room, with that 
audience, until you are there.”

Around Mulligan are the “Intrepid Heroes,” D20‘s stars from the L.A. 
comedy scene. There’s Lou Wilson, a teddy bear of a man who announces 
for Jimmy Kimmel Live; Siobhan Thompson, a peppy Brit with cat eye 
glasses and a blonde bob with writing credits on Rick and Morty; Zac 
Oyama, a soft-spoken soul whose sharp cheeks house a boy band smile; 
Ally Beardsley, a nonbinary individual with a cropped mullet and a 
skateboarder’s zen; Emily Axford, a New York native with undertones of 
Bettie Page and Tina Fey; and Brian Murphy, an ex-MTV host with 
horn-rimmed glasses and gelled hair whose habit of bad dice rolls can be 
appropriately called Murphy’s Law. (Axford and Murphy are married, and 
played versions of themselves on Adam Ruins Everything on truTV.)

After a roll call where each reveals their imminent reprisal of 
fan-favorite Dimension 20 characters — including a Staten Island 
divorcee, a wisecracking pizza rat, and a drug dealer still coping from 
a breakup  — the game begins. With painterly narration, Mulligan whisks 
the audience (mentally) back to The Unsleeping City, a story first 
explored in 2019. It is an urban fantasy, a glittering New York like the 
one just outside on Seventh Avenue. But in Mulligan’s vision, a secret 
parallel world is teeming between the cracks of concrete.

“We go to other worlds not to escape, but to imagine what this world 
could be and should be,” Mulligan tells me later. “We tell stories about 
heroes to understand how to become them. We’re looking at frightening 
times. My goal with Dimension 20 is to make the best show I can. If I 
thought stories did not motivate action, I would stop telling them.”
Thompson, as Misty, asks audience members to bless the die for the final 
roll of the night.Cole Wilson for Rolling Stone

DIMENSION 20, SO NAMED FOR its multiversal anthology format and the 
twenty-sided die of D&D, is a leader in “actual plays,” also called live 
plays, where people play Dungeons & Dragons for an audience. Other 
prolific actual plays like Critical Role, Acquisitions Incorporated, and 
The Adventure Zone star voice actors or comedians — professions suited 
to D&D‘s role-playing. Dimension 20 seizes on the synergy, what Mulligan 
says is “such a clear marriage” of improv comedy and fantasy. “It is 
something that seems so clear in hindsight, but has become a surprise in 
this boom of actual plays,” he says.

Dungeons & Dragons was created in 1974 by midwestern gaming legends Gary 
Gygax and Dave Arneson. Players adopt alter egos, from warriors to 
sorcerers, who traverse worlds of mysticism and monsters. The outcomes 
of challenges, like slicing orcs with axes or smooth-talking tavern 
maidens, are decided by dice. The higher the rolls, the better the 
result. Twenty is the highest possible number, and to roll it naturally 
(a “natural 20”) is a soaring success. Roll a one, however, and that is 
a critical failure. Whatever players do, it’s up to the DM to reinforce 
the guardrails and impose stakes, building suspense, exerting godlike 
control while yielding to the power of chance created by players. Such 
is the joyous tension of the game.

“The game is the tool. Story is the most important part,” says Thompson. 
“Sometimes failing and losing is more interesting than succeeding.” At 
MSG, Thompson reprises her role as Misty Moore, a Broadway diva prone to 
calling strangers “dah-ling.” In fan art, Misty is often illustrated in 
color palettes of glamorous gold and white. As a Bard (her character 
class) Misty casts magical spells through singing — and at Level 12, 
she’s very good at it.

Zac Oyama, who role-plays a himbo firefighter named Ricky Matsui, says 
he considers it “kind of a gift” that D&D allows their improv training 
to shine. “It lets you know what you’re supposed to do,” he says. “If 
you jump across a skyscraper, you roll one and fall, it’s funny. You 
embrace that. Rolling in the middle is boring.”
Siobhan ThompsonCole Wilson for Rolling Stone
Lou WilsonCole Wilson for Rolling Stone
Emily Axford (left), with Ally Beardsley (center) and Zac Oyama (right) 
in the mirrorCole Wilson for Rolling Stone
Brian MurphyCole Wilson for Rolling Stone

It’s surreal to see the golden age of actual plays when you know the 
baggage that used to follow D&D. In the 1980s the game was engulfed in 
the Satanic panic, attracting accusations of perverting youth with 
witchcraft. In 1982, a young Tom Hanks starred in Mazes & Monsters, a 
made-for-TV movie about a deluded college student who becomes 
dangerously obsessed with D&D. In the climax he nearly leaps off the 
Twin Towers, believing it to be a gateway to a magical realm. While this 
notoriety is a key chapter in the game’s cultural mythos, today, D&D is 
valued intellectual property owned by Hasbro.
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