See characters from individual seasons:
Spyre
Earth
Calorum
Other Major Campaigns
Other Sidequests
- Characters from Escape From the Bloodkeep
- Characters from Mice & Murder
- Characters from Misfits and Magic
- Characters from Shriek Week
- Characters from Coffin Run
- Characters from A Court of Fey and Flowers
- Characters from Dungeons and Drag Queens
- Characters from Mentopolis
- Characters from Burrow’s End
Dungeon Masters
The most integral part of a tabletop game, the DM is responsible for the world that the players evolve in, and plays all the NPCs in the game. This role is most often fulfilled by Brennan Lee Mulligan. Occasionally, however, a variety of guests will take over for a season or two. Brennan Lee Mulligan
Brennan Lee Mulligan
Seasons DMed: Fantasy High (Seasons 1, 2, and 3), Escape from the Bloodkeep, The Unsleeping City (Seasons 1 and 2), Tiny Heist, A Crown of Candy, Pirates of Leviathan, Mice and Murder, The Seven, A Starstruck Odyssey, Neverafter, Dungeons and Drag Queens
Seasons Played: Misfits and Magic, A Court of Fey and Flowers, The Ravening War, Burrow's End
Brennan, with the cast of Fantasy High behind him.
The main DM for Dimension 20. A writer and cast member at CollegeHumor before its rebrand as Dropout, as well as an improv and D&D veteran.
- Author Catchphrase:
- "This dude/guy is looking fucked up", after the PCs deal a great amount of damage to an enemy and/or get their HPs pretty low.
- "Incredible" and "Hell Yeah", whenever the PCs come up with something cool or succeed particularly well.
- "Give me a ______, if you'd be so kind", whenever he asks a player to roll for something.
- "[NPC] nods", when they're listening to the PCs. It becomes especially noticeable in "The Unsleeping City", where one character is named Nod, and Brennan is visibly trying to stop himself from saying "Nod nods".
- "This all checks out" as NPCs who heard the cast's ludicrous lies, but were forced to believe it by a high Deception check.
- "Kiddo", when he talks to the PCs as one of their parents or guardians.
- Cosmic Plaything: He isn't one (mostly - see below), but has one in the form of Gilear, who he heaps hundreds of bad fates constantly. He has gone on record to say that he will kill him, and even a fan request couldn't sway him.
- On the rare occasions when things do turn against him as DM, either through bad dice rolls or the players outfoxing him, he has shades of this, either getting annoyed or dejected, but will generally take it in stride. Emily Axford and Ally Beardsley in particular have a habit (whether through game knowledge or purely random good fortune) of completely undoing his plans, turning fairly deadly encounters into victories.
- Creator Thumbprint: If Brennan runs a campaign, expect scathing criticisms of capitalism or the state, tough and very masculine men with a surprising amount of wisdom and awareness, one character that is straight-up insane, a competent wizard who loves magic and studying it as much as they hate the idea of The Power of Love or The Power of Friendship being tangible forces, and very deep and complex theological/arcane elements of the world based on a stupid pun.
- Heel: Whenever something extremely dangerous happens in battle, he sometimes takes great pleasure in playing up his delight in harming the PCs for laughs. Of course, it's all a front, and he wants them to succeed.Emily: You are a sick son of a bitch!Brennan: (doing "bad boy" moves) Gonna kill that dog.[table erupts in mock outrage.]Siobhan: He's the bad guy!Brennan: (smirks) I'm all the bad guys. (flips camera the reverse V and waggles his tongue between his fingers)
- Hidden Depths: Brennan studied philosophy in college, and will frequently include complex philosophical concepts into his games.
- Immune to Jump Scares: In one of the few examples of a jump scare that can occur in tabletop RPGs, Brennan was completely unphased by the sudden appearance of Tad's shadow during his fourth-wall breaking appearance in the climax of the Misfits & Magic Holiday Special.
- I Take Offense to That Last One: He usually rides along the joke insults his players give him, and even laughs at many of them, but he's truly offended when Siobhan insinuates he likes capitalism.
- Killer Game Master: Significantly averted. Brennan really dislikes having his players get killed, and even saves Gorgug and Kristen from death by having Aguefort sacrifice him and Mr. Gibbons to resurrect them. The only time player characters actually die, they're always in character and grounded in the season's world.
- He does have a tendency to play up that behaviour for laughs (see the Heel entry above)
- Man of a Thousand Voices: Necessary for being a DM, and he nails it.
- Not So Above It All: He's said that he tries to have an aikido style of DMing that consists in redirecting the chaos that players (usually Ally or Emily) bring to the table into the narrative. However, he sometimes relishes in the player's poor decisions.
- He roleplays the Hilda Hilda scene fully, despite it being meant as a small mention by Emily, putting her on the spot with having to find good explanations for her ridiculous actions as an old woman; the whole scene also got a Call-Back in the climax of the season as one of Fig's nightmares.
- When Ally tried to have Kristen use her dance ribbon and get to the first floor before the bad guy, Brennan emphatically said "I'll allow it". The end result is Kristen taking 36 points of fall damage and breaking her ankle.Brennan: Don't pay any attention to this noise. (sound of an ungodly number of damage dice being poured onto the table)
- Not So Stoic: Usually always in character or composed, but there are times where he completely breaks:
- Lou's Nat 20 to oppose another Nat 20 has him, as well as the rest of the cast, screaming out of excitement and bewilderement at the improbability of it.
- Ally's poetic nat 20's have completely turned the tide of the story almost all season they've starred in so far. Whenever they roll one, he's usually flabbergasted or, occasionally, just resigned to the situation.
- Emily's antics have caused him to crack a couple of times, but he was completely astonished by her plan to disguise herself as the dwarf holding a gun to Riz's head to dissuade him.
- "Operation Slippery Puppet", where the crew of The Wurst defeat the alien monolith Plinth, completely bamboozles him despite his precautions against shenanigans: "Am I getting Ocean's 11'd on my own fucking show?! What the fuck is happening?! [...] How did you know there'd be a Plinth in this fight? [resigned sigh] Jesus, I'm fucking ruined."
- Oh, Crap!: In Mice and Murder, when Grant gets a natural 20 (+9 for good measure) in investigation, meaning that Sylvester will know every single clue in the room, whereas Brennan had intended to feed them clues bit by bit.
- Previously on…: At the beginning of every episode, there's always a recap of events that happened prior.
- Pungeon Master: Brennan has been increasingly good at showing off how adept he is at wordplay, but this is nowhere clearer than in Mentopolis, where almost every NPC he comes up with has a Punny Name related to brain functions. The cast loses it when Fight (of the "fight-or-flight response") has taken the alias "Ivana Popov".
- Rule of Cool: He'll bend the rules for a neat idea, such as allowing friends to be cast on a flask to charm the drinker rather than a target or allowing a wizard to use the barbarian-exclusive Rage feature if their character is emotionally invested enough in the fight.
- Rule of Funny: Sometimes applies this to player actions to if they throw him for a loop enough, foregoing making them roll and just running with it for the sake of comedy, most notably during the Hilda Hilda scene in Fantasy High: Sophomore Year. Averted during combats though, where he's willing to stretch the rules but always requires some roll and still has some limits to what he'll allow.
- Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: He has said of Emily, alumna of the Crazy Enough to Work school of playing tabletop RPGs, that she's a demon sent from Hell to kill him.
- Verbal Tic:
- He tends to begin sentences with the phrase "You see that..."
- "Here in this place" or "You see here in this place" tends to crop up when he's putting gravitas into narrating a scene or event.
- Brennan admits that he can only make the "bu-bu-bum" noise he makes while looking for something idly, and it's not something he can do consciously.
Aabria Iyengar
Aabria Iyengar
Seasons DMed: Misfits and Magic, A Court of Fey and Flowers, Burrow's End
Seasons Played Pirates of Leviathan, The Seven, The Ravening War
The first guest DM to appear on the show. A frequent collaborator with Dimension 20, Critical Role, and other actual-play shows.
- Creator Thumbprint: Aabria will go out of her way to avert Humans Are White if she's given the chance. Even when she's not DMing: According to
Word of God, both her player characters in "Pirates of Leviathan" and "The Ravening War" are black despite being a merfolk and a pepper respectively, neither of which have the concept of race as we know it. - Formula-Breaking Episode: Or rather, formula breaking season. The vast majority of Dimension 20's seasons are done via Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition, but Aabria was the first to introduce a new system to the dome, Kids On Brooms. This was followed by a number of later seasons to branch off from D&D, including a modified version of Kids On Bikes for "Mentopolis" run by Brennan himself.
- Not So Stoic: She was absolutely taken aback by Brennan's "what do you want me to tell your family?" speech in Misfits and Magic.
Gabe Hicks
Gabe Hicks
Seasons DMed: Shriek Week
The second guest DM to appear on the show. A game designer, most famous for their work with Roll 20, Paizo, and Critical Role.
Jasmine Bhullar
Jasmine Bhullar
Seasons DMed: Coffin Run
The third guest DM to appear on the show.
- Call-Back: She does an interesting variant on this given it's to a season she had no part of before, but one that player Erika Iishi had starred in. At one point she presents a group of vampire hunters imposing on the party and one of them is armed with a pet goose, calling back to an infamous moment from "The Seven" when Erika (as Danielle) summoned a swarm of them and did an absurd amount of damage. The show then cuts back to a clip of the aforementioned moment.Jasmine: And a goose with the stats of a raptor.Erika: Hoist by my own petard!
- Rage Quit: She playfully evokes this when Zac as Squing eats the paper granting her final bosses the legal backing to make Dracula's castle their own. However, given Jasmine doesn't actually leave the table and proceeds to give a satisfactory ending to the campaign, it's clear that it's just a gag.Jasmine: You can keep them Brennan!
Matthew Mercer
Matthew Mercer
Seasons DMed: The Ravening War
Seasons Played Escape from the Bloodkeep, Pirates of Leviathan
The fourth guest DM to appear on the show. A professional voice actor and seasoned dungeon master, most famous for running all three campaigns of Critical Role.
- Born Unlucky: It doesn't show up much when he DMs, but both of Matt's stints as a player showed off how absurdly unlucky his dice rolls tend to be when he isn't running the show. One battle episode of "Bloodkeep", he got stuck fighting a halfling the entire episode.
- Man of a Thousand Voices: The most out of any DM to appear on Dimension 20 so far. He even brings his own sound effects to the table!
- Oh, Crap!: Has a very brief moment of this toward the end of "Ravening War" as he realizes that every PC that could took Silvery Barbs.note
