Battles have gone badly before in Dimension 20, but not like this

This year, Brennan Lee Mulligan has been involved with some of the most vivid experimentation in Dungeons & Dragons actual play, from helming a landmark tragedy for Critical Role’s Exandria Unlimited: Calamity to crafting a Byronic Bugbear for Dimension 20’s own Fey Regency rom-com A Court of Fey & Flowers. Mulligan attempts horror as a way to close the year. Never After, a 20-episode main campaign with “Intrepid Heroes” Emily Axford, Ally Beardsley, Brian Murphy, Zac Oyama, Siobhan Thompson, and Lou Wilson.

On Wednesday, during a two-hour prerecorded broadcast of the campaign’s third episode, the game went where the Intrepid Heroes have never gone before.

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for episode 3 of Dimension 20’s Neverafter. The video on demand of that episode is now available at Dropout.tv.]

Check out the latest episodes of Never afterIt ended with a series win: A total party kill. Speaking with Polygon earlier this week, Mulligan said he had been prepared for the possibility of a TPK, but that he did not expect it in the season’s first fight.

Mulligan declared, “From the start, Never after has been designed not just to scare, but to challenge its players — no mean feat, considering this table is a murderers’ row of some of the best role-players and tabletop tacticians around. In an episode of “The Simpsons”, Mulligan pointed out that this table was not just for scares but also to challenge its players. Adventuring AcademyEmily Axford, Emily Axford and Emily Axford are the only ones (Ylfa In Neverafter) “is one of the best D&D players in the world — endlessly creative, so fun to play with. She was also sent from hell to kill me.” So, in a way, Never Afterhe has the chance to increase both difficulty and potential consequences.

Mulligan’s goal, he said, was to “make an encounter that successfully sells the audience on the idea that you can make 5e scary” — especially since, after four years playing together, “the Intrepid Heroes have got really good at designing characters.”

The first two episodes introduced a world shattered by the so-called Times of Shadow, where Timothy “Mother” Goose (Ally Beardsley) seeks to rescue his son Jack — and possibly the entire realm of Neverafter — by means of a magical book he does not wholly understand. The journey brings Timothy to various fairy-tale characters who have had their stories interrupted at different times. Axford’s Little Red Riding Hood, for example, is accompanied on his rescue by the Frog Prince (Murphy). Conmen Pinocchio, Wilson, and Puss in Boots Oyama ply their trades while Rosamund, the sweetly optimistic Sleeping Beauty, (Thompson) is shown with briars growing from every part of her bodies. It’s Bloody Bloody Stephen Sondheim (a beloved non-player character previously seen in The Unsleeping City() With content warnings to correspond.

The second episode ends with the party learning two important things. First, they must all survive. Second, their first clue to their mission lies in the Kingdom Of Elegy. They head into the dark woods with comparative ease, as it’s Rosamund’s favored terrain. They reach an eerily abandoned village, which they slowly realize is the former home of Pinocchio’s warlock patron, Stepmother, who has eaten her daughters before fleeing.

Even more disturbing are the town’s inhabitants: mice who were once turned into humans by the whim of a Fairy Godmother, and whose reversion is tragically incomplete. Every one of them is still capable of speaking, which allows them to share the horrors that can happen when objects and animals are transformed into humans at will. At the end of the episode, the party plans their attack on the Fairy Godmother, dividing into Team Distraction and Team Extraction — the latter named for their goal of removing the shard speared through the fairy’s chest.

Unfortunately, for Fairy Tale Heroes the episode finishes with several disastrous stealth rolls that trigger all-out combat in episode 3.

Image: Dimension 20/Dropout.tv

On top of the usual risks of first-level combat in D&D, Mulligan introduced new mechanics to make combat “always a frightening proposition.” If a character loses over half their remaining hit points in a single attack, it risks the character taking a level of exhaustion — an ongoing effect in the 5th edition D&D ruleset that piles additional debuffs onto combatants. To add “terrifying deadliness,” critical hits also trigger a save that, if failed, leads to instant death. These rules apply to both enemies as well as the player characters, which directly led to the first-ever total party kill in the history of the show — Mulligan’s first in more than two decades of play.

Polygon hears from prominent DMs that TPKs can be surprisingly common in real play. Aabria Iyengar for example said that she had only experienced one. B. Dave Walters, a notoriously tough DM, noted that they’re surprisingly hard to pull off given the amount of resurrection magic in vanilla D&D. They also risk being “massively unfulfilling” for players, he said.

Matthew Mercer, who has experienced one near-TPK on stream, notes that he’s only experienced one “true” TPK, brought on largely by wanting to surprise his friends with monsters that he thought were “cool.” Looking back, he wishes he had waited until his players were an “appropriate level.” Another near-TPK closely resembled the situation in the Dome this week. Mercer said that during a private game, the party “abandoned the logic of focusing down opponents and instead divided their focus.” But those deaths served to move the narrative in an interesting direction. Mercer said that the resulting shift in the campaign was “emotionally fascinating.” Time will tell is the same holds true for our Intrepid Heroes.

Mulligan conceded that “this fight was not fair,” but the TPK was neither planned nor inevitable. They faced a Fairy Godmother who had been severely injured with very few hit points. Along with her, they were accompanied by uncanny human object abominations which adjusted the action economy for players. There were paths to victory: Mulligan noted that Axford’s plan to go directly for the Godmother’s shard, possibly with Timothy casting Sleep, could have succeeded had a stealth check by Pinocchio and Gerard not gone disastrously. Bad rolls, which nearly every death except one who rolled a 3, on a 20 side die, meant that the window for victory was narrowed quickly.

Image: Dimension 20/Dropout.tv

A common critique of shifting the genres in a D&D game is to ask, “Well, why don’t you just play a game or a system that isn’t high fantasy?” Why not explore the 1920s in Cthulhu’s CallOr, psychological horror inTen Candles, or perhaps a modern-day tale that takes place within one of the settings in Paradox’s World of Darkness? But this encounter was terrifying precisely because of how frighteningly it deviated from the logic, the known rules of 5th edition D&D.

Mulligan was insistent that he’s playing within the expectations of horror as a genre: “If we were doing high fantasy, I would not have created an encounter this challenging. But we’re in a horror world. I’m looking at the audience, looking at my players, looking at the crew, and going, Here’s how heavy my thumb is. Here it is on the scale, and we’re doing it before the encounter starts, for all to see.”

Lethality isn’t new to Dimension 20. You can find the Game of Thrones-inspired A Crown of CandyEvery player had a backup character prepared, but only two of them were used. Mulligan wouldn’t tell Polygon if the players had been instructed to bring a backup this season, though he did observe that the reaction to the TPK was different to situations where individual characters have died. “In Game of ThronesA bunch of people may die but not all. So what happens? You die you’re like, Fuck. I didn’t make itThis was in contrast to the previous, which felt more like a shared sense of “like”. Damn! I can’t believe it happened.”

Mulligan was tight-lipped about what might happen next, though the episode’s ending suggests he’s got some contingencies up his sleeve, including some mysterious red gems he’s been handing out to his players. This is a season unusually rich with secrets, including some that Mulligan is hiding from his players — and from the audience. Whatever happens, there’s a lot more to look forward to this season, both narratively and visually: Mulligan singled out editors Tyler Schuelke and Jared Nunn for praise in the enhanced postproduction editing, adding, “There are developments coming later in the season that all of those things play into.”

To everyone who is noting that Dimension 20 is upping their game, he says, “You don’t even know the half of it.”

The next episode of Dimension 20’s Never after Dropout.tv will air Wednesday, December 21st