Dimension 20’s Brennan Lee Mulligan and Ally Beardsley on the ‘whirlwind of events’ that made them huge

In Dimension 20’s last live show series, the crew of the actual play phenomenon leaned into improvisation — determining each show’s setting and characters through random draws right in front of the audience. But for their much-hyped Madison Square Garden live performance on Jan. 24, the setting and characters were predetermined, and the venue was among the best-known in the world. 

When Polygon sat down with game master Brennan Lee Mulligan and player Ally Beardsley last week and asked whether they planned to lean in a more theatrical direction for the one-night-only, sold-out show “The Gauntlet at the Garden,” they were quick to answer. 

“Oh yes, we are,” Beardsley said, with relish. 

Mulligan put it simply: “We’re going to get rowdy.” 

Without revealing details on the events of “Gauntlet,” Polygon can confirm: Mulligan and crew did indeed get rowdy. Before the eyes of almost 20,000 screaming fans, Dimension 20’s “Gauntlet” delivered shocks, experiments in interactivity, and a WWE show’s worth of pyrotechnics. That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to fans of the series, although staff at Madison Square Garden may have been surprised by a full-house audience that showed up on time for a main act that went on promptly at 8 p.m.

But then again, “The Gauntlet at the Garden” has been surprising people since it was announced. The show made headlines last April when it sold out the most famous venue in New York in a mere four days, a shock to Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing algorithm, to Dimension 20’s stars, and to the actual play community as a whole. It was undeniable proof of the genre’s reach and impact, not to mention the tabletop role-playing hobby itself.  (The show was recorded, and will eventually be released alongside other Dimension 20 shows on the Dropout streaming service.)

Maybe the most magical promise of “The Gauntlet in the Garden” lay in its premise. For NYC’s famous Garden, Dimension 20 brought a show based in its Unsleeping City setting, which debuted in the show’s third season in 2019. An urban fantasy version of NYC in which the angel of the Bethesda Fountain and the Dragon of Bleecker Street are friends, and an undead Robert Moses and a barely veiled metaphor for Amazon’s attempt to move its corporate headquarters to Queens are foes, this Unsleeping City show was performed in the most thematically resonant venue possible. 

Since Polygon’s offices are in New Yawk, and this writer is a born New Yawker herself, we took the cast’s East Coast jaunt as an opportunity to sit down with Mulligan and Beardsley to discuss capturing that New Yawk feel, how well real settings mix with fantasy games, and how it feels to have “made it” in the place where, if you do, they say you can make it anywhere. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

[Ed. note: Due to other commitments, Beardsley was not able to be present for our whole interview slot, so Polygon started out speaking to Mulligan solo.] 

Polygon: The last time I talked to you was for the five-year anniversary of Dropout, and you said you’re not great at reflecting in the moment — you compared yourself to a man running from a bear. But in the last year, you guys have sold out Madison Square Garden and had your U.K. tour. It’s been a wild ride. That has to have prompted some kind of reflection — how has that changed how you view the show? The audience? The job?

Brennan Lee Mulligan: Susana. Susana, how dare you presume, after I was so clear with my bear metaphor, that I have reflected at all! [in a reflective tone] It’s a really fascinating thing. Meditating on everything that’s changed is — I suppose it happens, or it has to happen, right? There has to be a moment where you reflect on, or speak or think about, what’s going on. 

The whirlwind of events has been so fast and furious. It’s not that I am unaware of all these massive changes, but I don’t think there have been many periods of deep reflection. And the chapter of my life that I’m in right now, especially on a personal level — my wife and I were married in 2023, and we had a child. And when you are asked to be present in the moment, as being a parent will force you to be, weirdly — I know that there’s a connection between being present and reflecting, but I think the act of reflecting is fundamentally looking toward the past. You are trying to consider what has happened.

I joke with people about becoming a parent, and say, “It’s done wonders for my anxiety, because I simply don’t have enough energy to be worried.” There’s a certain level of exhaustion where you’re like, “If I get hit and knocked out, then all the better to be horizontal.” [laughs] That’s the level of energy that you’re operating from. 

I think the feeling I keep returning to — in place of reflecting, or being struck by the enormity of how bizarre life has become, in a surreal, fortuitous way — is just really centering in gratitude. And in a bizarre way, the gratitude actually hasn’t changed, because my point of focus is not necessarily the expanding reception of the show. 

The thing I am first and foremost, primarily grateful for is the ability to do this show at all. Audiences come, and with them comes the ability to sustain the show. And for that, I am eternally grateful. The actual physical number of bodies that will be in Madison Square Garden, or that [attended] the U.K. and Ireland tour, the amount of people that subscribe to Dropout — all that’s amazing, because it means that we can hire more artists and hire more people.

And we know that we’re a good company that takes care of people that we work with, so the bigger the company gets, the more we can isolate people from an industry that can at times be much crueler than we keep things. 

To the degree that I have ambitions, I want to try to take care of as many people as possible. To that end, things like Madison Square Garden that are big achievements that allow us to grow, allow us to protect more people. 

I do try to stay rooted in a way that feels mentally healthy, and in a way that preserves the nature of the work that I do for the people who enjoy that work. I really stay focused on: This was the biggest success it could be the moment I could [both] do it and afford two to three burritos a day. I can do this and take care of a family. That is the bar of success.

And as it gets bigger and bigger, it’s almost like you’re watching that from outside of yourself, going, This is nuts. This is really crazy! But I think for myself — as a part of process, and a part of trying to be a diligent craftsman, and to protect my family and the cast and crew of the show, the people that I care about — I try to stay in a “Time to make the donuts!” mentality of really focusing on the work that’s right in front of me.

Because in a weird way, I think that, especially in this age of internet viewership and parasociality, people want to know they’re seeing something authentic. So that’s a big part of it, is me going, OK, I need to protect my ability to be unaffected by how big the show has become. People are coming here for the dude who goes on rants about how gnomes work, so I have to keep that guy in one piece for people to be able to come and seek the experience they’re seeking.

Authenticity on the internet can be really draining.

Mulligan: It’s a fascinating thing. And, like, yeah, what is authentic? And what does it mean to perform authenticity? I mean, people much smarter than myself have written a lot about it. 

When I was a kid, I used to get picked on and bullied, a lot. I was taken out of school because I was getting put in too many trash cans, you know? That bullying was really bad, and one of the things that I reflected on when I did reflect on [laughs] the past was that a lot of the reason that bullying happened was, I did not really have a strong set of skills to alter my personality to fit. It was sort of like, “I’m a square peg, and if I’m near round holes, I’m in trouble. I’m just not going to fit in.” 

I’ve talked to the wonderful Aabria Iyengar about this before. She’s talked about being able to adapt or shape-shift to accommodate the circumstances she was in. And she was like, “I feel like you never did that.” I would’ve loved to have been able to do that, and I really couldn’t. I don’t know why. I just couldn’t. And weirdly, what used to be a tremendous liability — which is that I don’t really know how to alter myself — has ended up making elements of internet content creation pretty easy. Because I don’t have to do a lot of work to summon my authentic self up.

Which is not to say there’s not parts of myself that are private, or just for my family, or just for my loved ones. But it is to say that for the most part, I’m kind of like this in real life. I’ve had friends that have said versions of, “These people on the internet, they don’t know the real you.” And I kind of shrug and go, “I don’t know, they kind of do. I am pretty consistent. I order the same meal every day.” I think you’re getting the guy. 

The painful part, of course, in parasociality, isn’t that people don’t know the real you, it’s the imbalance. It’s that someone meets you that has a connection to your work and you don’t know them. Which is why when I tend to meet fans, I’m always like, “Tell me about yourself. Where do you work? What do you do?” It feels like correcting an imbalance, almost.

As a writer, I’ve had people who meet me and say, “Oh, you do just talk like you write.” And it’s like, “Yeah, I do. Where do you think it comes from?”

Mulligan: Yeah! I’ve had stuff that I’ve written go out on the internet and people will be like, “Oh God, Brennan writes like he talks, I can read this in his voice.” They come from the same place! I use the language how I use it. Totally.

As a New Yorker whose dad worked for the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development for over 25 years and had Robert Moses’ biography The Power Broker in his bedroom for my entire childhood—

Mulligan: Let’s fucking go.

—the moment where Bob Moses, New York City’s epitome of an inhuman, corrupt, power-hoarding city planner, showed up in your Unsleeping City arc as a lich — that was the moment the series transcended for me. 

[Ally Beardsley arrives]

Mulligan: [To Ally] We’re talking about The Power Broker and Robert Moses. Robert Caro, the author of The Power Broker, has got to be the most influential biographer. I mean, in terms of someone who went like, Oh, that’s how you remember this guy? No, this is how you remember this guy. It’s crazy. It’s an incredible book.

Ally Beardsley: Woooow, I haven’t read it yet.

Full disclosure: I also have not.

Mulligan: It’s a fucking doorstopper of a book. Let me be clear. It’s a hefty fucking tome. You can see it on bookshelves really easily, because it’s the size of a fucking block of wood.

Beardsley: Like Infinite Jest or something. Did you read it in prep for the season, or?

Mulligan: I read it long before, long before, because my dad talked about Robert Moses all the time growing up. Recently, I went on 99% Invisible, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan’s podcast, to talk about it, and I had to write and apologize and be like, “Dogs, it’s been a long time since I’ve read it.” It’s an incredible read, but the level of detail is exhaustive. I mean, this dude, talk about having the receipts. Robert Caro has the fucking data. It’s crazy.

Is it easier to run and play a game in a setting that exists, because you can’t get more detailed world-building than a place that is actually real? Or is it harder because you can’t just make stuff up?

Mulligan: Well, I think you and me [to Ally] have different answers here, probably, because I am from New York and Ally is from Inland Empire in California. And so the reality for me is, you’ve hit on something here. Time to part the curtain behind the Wizard of Oz and expose the humbug behind it. The Unsleeping City is one of my favorite settings because of the light lift. There’s a lot of Dimension 20 seasons, and The Unsleeping City was like, Oh, take the city I love, and add magic.

Beardsley: Totally.

Mulligan: You could almost improvise your way through the world-building of the Unsleeping City, because so many of the set-pieces — like, Bethesda Fountain is one of the most magical places in the city to me. So of course that was going to be the source of one of the things, because it’s just literally reporting and literalizing a felt sensation of magic from a real place.

You can just go through the whole city doing that over and over and over again. So you’re exactly right. The world-building on the DM’s side? Waaay easier than a Calorum that has to be made from scratch.

Beardsley: Totally, with maps, et cetera.

Mulligan: But playing it is probably a very different story if you’re trying to evoke the experience of living in a city that you know from media rather than from lived experience.

Beardsley: Yeah, but I think it was an easy lift for me as well, because I was just playing a transplant to a big city — queer runaway from a small town to a big city. So I just mapped all my experience from LA onto New York, and it felt—

Mulligan: It felt very truthful, for whatever it’s worth. It’s so funny, because you and Lou, as Californians, play these characters — Vox Populi and the Vox Phantasma — who are deeply tied into the city, and I think exactly evoked it.

I never would’ve guessed that Lou was not from New York City from the way he plays Kingston.

Beardsley: Yes!

The moment he first slides into that character and cups his hands in front of his chest, I thought, I know that guy. I see that guy on every fucking street in this city.

Beardsley: Yes, totally! So funny.

Mulligan: I think Ally and Lou are performers at a level where… Artistry is a real thing. People can tap into something and have a deeply felt understanding of truth such that Lou, without having been a New Yorker — even if you have lived in New York your whole life, New York is such an expansive city. Which New York have you lived in your whole life? So I think Lou’s an incredible artist. And so is Ally, in terms of invoking something very truthful, as artists using the power of imagination to flesh out truthfulness.

I went to Oberlin College, which has a long-running Vampire: The Masquerade LARP set in New York City. I had a bunch of friends in it who had never been to New York City in their lives.

Mulligan: Awesome.

I remember explaining, “You can’t call Port Authority by its full government name. No one calls it ‘The Port Authority Bus Terminal.’”

Mulligan: [laughs, puts on a New Yawk tough-guy voice] “Ohhh, I gotta go down to the Port Authority Bus Terminal.” That’s so funny.

Beardsley: [same voice] “I’m strollin’ here!”

Mulligan: [with amazement] God, a bunch of Oberlin kids being a bunch of — [tough-guy voice] “Hey, I’m a fuckin’ vampire, alrigh’?”