168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dimension 20 first aired almost six years ago, on September 26, 2018. Since then, the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dungeons & Dragons Actual Play series has spanned 22 seasons꧑, covering a wide range of genres.

As we approach the 250th episode and finale of the latest se♏ries, Never Stop Blowing Up, we spoke to Dungeon Master Brennan Lee Mulligan and players Isabella Roland, Ify Nwadiwe, Rekha Shankar, and Jacob Wysocki about campaign preparation, playing two characters at once, and embracing chaos.

The Origins Of Never Stop Blowing Up

“Within all the many seasons that we've been lucky enough to make, the gorgeous thing is realising that inspiration for a season can really come from anywhere,” Mulligan tells me. “We've been fortunate to start some of our seasons with a great idea for a setting and others, we've taken inspiration from casts that were available. Never Stop Blowing Up began as a desire to do a season where the genre, the game system, the cast, and everything was built for limitless, full-bore comedy. And in thinking about different genres to play in, the action world felt like something that was really ripe. It's such an over-the-top, campy, macho, surreal genre.”

Further cementing the idea was the fact that Mulligan’s wife and co-star in the campaign, Isabella Roland, describes action comedy as her♛ favourite genre “by far.” Given that she played this campaign while eight months pregnant, it feels fitting that she was allowed to really let loose in a setting she adores. “It came together all very organically,” Mulligan explains.

[We had] a genre, a system, and a cast where we could just say, we have come here to be goofy. Thus Never Stop Blow🔜ing Up was born. - Brennan Lee Mulligan

This campaign uses a homebrew variation of the Kids on Bikes system. Each player has a set of skills which fit the genre, and they start by rolling a D4 to make checks in any skill. If they roll the maximum on a die it &ldqu🍃o;blows up” and they can roll the next highest die and add that number as well.

Such an effect can be chained, so a roll of four on a D4 followed by six on a D6 then allows a player to add the roll of a D8 to the already high total of 10. At the end of the turn, the highest die you rolled becomes your new starter di🉐e for that skill. This means a couple of lucky rolls can have players able to clear high ability checks from early on, a mechanic which got newcomer to the dome Jacob Wysocki off to a spectacular start.

“It was nice,” Wysocki says about his early luck with rolls. “I was very nervous… and I think that helped just kind of shake off the nerves. It's like the dice gods, the story gods are on my side. There's an outside influence that wants me to succeed. So I think I just rode that wave.”

While Wysocki has played D&D plenty of times before, including on Zac Oyama and Jasper William Cartright's Rotating Heroes Podcast, this is his first time in the Dimension 20 dome.

While the♌ core game system was easy to understand, each player had to create two characters, one who was linked to the ‘real life’ video store location, and another which served as their action hero identity after they were sucked into the VHS T༒ape of Never Stop Blowing Up Jumanji style.

The character influences for the action heroes 🐽can be easily traced to movie counterparts, something confirmed by the players. However, each one we spoke to had a different way of approaching their character creation.

Creating Two Contrasting Characters

For Rehka Shanker, the real-life character came first. “My inspiration for Usha firstly came from just the type of character I like to play,” she explains. “Which is sort of like hapless goofballs that are marginalised or strange, but have a core empathetic center to them. And then in terms of the other character, G13, I just thought, well, what's the opposite of that?

“Usha, as a comically old character in our show, doesn't know anything about technology. So I thought, okay, the opposite of her would be a tech wizard. So maybe a hacker. I thought it would be interesting to have someone who was so good at computers and hacking that he really had no loyalties to anything else. He was just kind of in it for himself, whereas Usha has a family she cares about.”

Wysocki also created his ‘real world’ character first. “I had this really dumb kernel of an idea of a person who could communicate with an alien. And then I built out the punk aspects and the relationship aspects with [Ally] Beardsley through the basic creative process.” Wysocki’s character is the nephew of Beardsley’s, so they hashed out the core of their characters together. When it came to their action counterparts Wysocki also went for a direct contrast. “I just came up with 007. It's the opposite. It's the clean cut guy. It's the guy who wears the suit. It's the guy who has a plan, who has an apartment. I just wanted to play into the opposites.”

For Ify Nwadiwe the process was reversed as the action movie hero came first. “It's very simple for me,” Nwadiwe explains.

Fast and Furious is one of my favorite franchises and once Brennan told us what the concept was, I was like, well, I'm gonna be Vin Diesel no matter what. - Ify Nwadiwe

"And I wanted to do Wendell because I usually play these bigger, larger than life characters, super confident, super brash. I was like, oh, what's the version where I play like a more nervous kind of nerdy kid that I think would blend well with a character like Vic Ethanol? [My inspiration] was myself in Wendell and in Vic Ethanol, Vin Diesel.”

Action Heroes Meet Real Housewives

Roland also pulled inspiration from action movies first🔯. However, she chose to combine it with inspiration from another of her loves, The Real Hoཧusewives series.

“I knew I wanted to play John McClane, because Die Hard is one of my favorite movies of ⛄🔯all time,” Roland tells me. “Then when I heard we were talking about a California suburb [for the video store setting] I just kept thinking about this woman named Vicky Gunvalson, who is a real housewife of Orange County. She has a Midwestern accent, is crazy as hell and always going through a divorce. She was my muse and I had to follow my gut.”

Not to be outdone, Mulligan also showcased a larger-than-life action hero inspiration, in the form of a costume which embodies everything an ‘80s action hero should. ꦯWhile players often decide to embrace their characters in their outfits, this is a rarity for him.

Mulligan's Costume And Dungeons And Drag Queens

“It came up in a conversation about production value, although I know I should probably give a more fun answer,” he tells me. “We knew that we weren't gonna have minis because the action genre is so outrageous and the violence is so over the top that having that sort of tactical combat didn't feel like the right choice. So we said, ‘okay, what's another element that we can add production value and keep the show exciting and have a kind of ramping tension or danger in the season?’ and had this idea of a guy becoming English and increasingly more blown up. You see this kind of game master figure get increasingly disheveled and singed and injured throughout the course of the season. I thought it was a really great way to sell the concept of this genre.”

DM costu🎃mes are surprisingly rare in Dimension 20. The most notable other examples are Brennan Lee Mulligan in Dungeons And Drag Queens Season One, and Aabria Lyengar in A Court Of Fey & Flowers.

Mulligan credits his on-point look to head makeup artist Denise Valentine. “She is a full stop genius and just one of the most brilliant creative minds I know about. She was behind my look for Dungeons and Drag Queens season one.” he tells me before casually confirming, “We've actually shot season two, which is very exciting.”

While we don’t yet know if this will be the next series of Dimension 20 to air, we do know that the Never Stop Blowing up finale marks the 250th episode. “[It] is staggering and humbling,” Mulligan says of the achievement. “And it's just incredible that we've gotten away with it for this long, they really keep letting us make this show. It's incredible.”