Dimension 20 Best Season to Start? 6 Campaigns to Get Into Dropout’s D&D Show

After performing for nearly 20,000 fans at a sold-out Madison Square Garden in January 2025, Dimension 20 cemented its status as one of the internet’s most popular tabletop live-play shows. But despite the show’s increasingly mainstream profile, figuring out where to start can still be intimidating. Most seasons require a paid subscription to either Dropout.tv or its YouTube channel, and the catalog now encompasses dozens of campaigns spread across several different tabletop systems. That may sound like a lot, but that’s only because it is. Getting into any long-running actual-play series requires the sort of commitment usually reserved for sprawling anime franchises. Even D20’s longer campaigns are snack-sized compared to a single season of Critical Role, but you could still spend anywhere from five to 60 hours completing one story. It’s natural to wonder where you should begin, particularly because D20’s original season is also the beginning of its longest-running campaign. This guide is meant to help interested newcomers choose where to start. Not every D20 campaign is created equal, and even devoted fans commonly bounce off entire seasons. These six campaigns offer some of the best possible starting points, depending on exactly what you’re looking for. 6 The gateway show: Escape From the Bloodkeep Rekha Shankar, Matthew Mercer, and Amy Vorpahl play Escape From the Bloodkeep on Dimension 20Escape from the Bloodkeep, Episode 1 (Dimension 20) GM: Brennan Lee Mulligan Players: Erika Ishii, Matthew Mercer, Ify Nwadiwe, Rekha Shankar, Mike Trapp, Amy Vorpahl Dimension 20’s second season remains one of its most accessible. It has a simple hook, runs for only six episodes, and is available to watch in full for free through D20’s official YouTube channel. Escape From the Bloodkeep is an affectionate parody of The Lord of the Rings told from the villains’ perspective. When the Lord of Shadows is abruptly assassinated by the forces of good, his six closest advisers must decide what to do next. Should they continue their master’s mission, run for their lives, or switch sides entirely? That premise sounds like a recipe for a much darker story. Instead, Bloodkeep becomes an ensemble workplace sitcom with a considerable body count. Many of its best jokes land precisely because they’re coming from performers who grew up loving Tolkien’s work. There are plenty of murders, but the resulting comedy is closer to slapstick than splatterpunk. Bloodkeep is also an excellent watch for anyone interested in playing or running a tabletop role-playing game. One of its central lessons, particularly for aspiring game masters, is that you can never reliably predict what your players will do. Mulligan has discussed how dramatically the players’ choices changed his original plans for the campaign. Revealing exactly how would spoil the fun, but the result is a useful demonstration of a fundamental TTRPG principle: No matter how carefully you prepare, you will eventually have to make something up on the fly. 5 For pure comedy: Never Stop Blowing Up Image: Dropout TV GM: Brennan Lee Mulligan Players: Ally Beardsley, Ify Nwadiwe, Isabella Roland, Rekha Shankar, Alex Song-Xia, Jacob Wysocki A recurring complaint about Dimension 20 is that its casts are often too funny for the genres they’re supposedly exploring. Even when a campaign aims for dark fantasy or cosmic horror, it inevitably becomes a comedy as well. Sometimes that tension works against a season, as it occasionally does in Neverafter. The flip side is that when D20 commits fully to being funny, it can produce something extraordinary. Never Stop Blowing Up is in contention for the single funniest season of the entire series. The campaign is a gleeful collision between 1980s action movies and modern isekai. It uses a heavily customized version of the Kids on Bikes system designed to reward maximum cinematic excess, producing something like a rules-light version of Feng Shui. Never Stop Blowing Up begins with the employees of a failing small-town video store being pulled into the world contained inside a magical VHS tape. Each becomes a different variety of action-movie hero or antihero in a universe governed by genre conventions. Violence is a way of life, physics are merely a suggestion, every gun magazine is bottomless, and the consequences of the characters’ actions only need to last until the credits roll. Once the players understand the system and discover how thoroughly they can break it — which is both intentional and half the fun — the campaign turns into an Expendables movie with an infinite budget. Wysocki and Nwadiwe compete to outdo each other’s body counts, Shankar is at her most unhinged, and Roland, who was eight months pregnant during filming, repeatedly laughs herself sick. Never Stop Blowing Up comes remarkably close to replicating a particular kind of tabletop experience: the moment when a group’s jokes begin feeding upon one another until everyone at the table has accidentally created the funniest thing in the world, even if nobody outside the room could possibly understand it. Watching the season somehow makes you feel like you’re in on somebody else’s private joke. That makes it one of D20’s most essential campaigns. 4 For D&D players: Fantasy High Freshman Year Image: Dropout GM: Brennan Lee Mulligan Players: The Intrepid Heroes (Emily Axford, Ally Beardsley, Brian Murphy, Zac Oyama, Siobhan Thompson, Lou Wilson) Fantasy High was Dimension 20’s original campaign and remains the closest thing the series has to a flagship. Its world has expanded across three full campaigns, numerous live shows and specials, and a Webtoon adaptation that deemphasizes some of the story’s explicit connections to Dungeons & Dragons. The main reason a newcomer might hesitate to begin with Fantasy High: Freshman Year is its size. The first season alone runs for 17 episodes, and it serves as the opening chapter of D20’s longest-running story. Watching the three main Fantasy High campaigns and their related specials requires a considerably larger commitment than sampling one of the show’s self-contained side quests. If you’re willing to take the plunge, however, Fantasy High begins with an irresistible premise: What if The Breakfast Club took place inside a game of Dungeons & Dragons? From that simple idea, Mulligan and the players construct both a surprisingly well-realized fantasy setting and a loving, direct, and occasionally merciless parody of D&D’s entire fictional ecosystem. The campaign takes place at Aguefort Adventuring Academy, a school that trains children to become adventurers — defined here as wandering maniacs who use violence to reshape the world around them. You would have to be crazy to establish this school, teach there, or attend it, so every season is packed with dangerous eccentrics who routinely attempt to solve their problems through murder. Fantasy High is essentially the Western answer to Assassination Classroom. Several players were still learning D&D during Freshman Year, so the campaign naturally explains many of the game’s basic systems as it progresses. That makes the season a surprisingly effective introduction to both Dimension 20 and D&D itself. The broader Fantasy High saga has its uneven stretches. Its second campaign, Sophomore Year, had to contend with the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, for example. But if the sheer length of the story doesn’t put you off, Freshman Year remains one of the best places to begin. 3 For classic horror fans: Coffin Run Image: Dropout GM: Jasmine Bhullar Players: Erika Ishii, Carlos Luna, Zac Oyama, Isabella Roland Coffin Run rarely receives as much attention as D20’s biggest campaigns, but it is quietly one of the show’s most ambitious experiments, if only because it ventures directly into Mel Brooks territory. Some of its jokes wear thin, but at six episodes, the campaign doesn’t stick around long enough to wear out its welcome. The story follows four members of Dracula’s coterie who have been charged with transporting his corpse back to his castle across hostile territory. Along the way, they encounter enemy werewolves, vampire hunters, and Dracula’s distant relatives, who see reports of his death as an opportunity to seize his assets. For Coffin Run, Jasmine Bhullar takes over the GM’s chair and fills the campaign with immaculate Hammer-horror atmosphere. The result captures a variety of B-movie fun that has largely disappeared: Imagine Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, except Abbott and Costello are also monsters. As Dimension 20 campaigns go, Coffin Run is a genuine sleeper hit. Anyone with an affection for classic monster movies should give it a look. 2 For science fiction fans: A Starstruck Odyssey Image: Dropout.tv GM: Brennan Lee Mulligan Players: The Intrepid Heroes (Emily Axford, Ally Beardsley, Brian Murphy, Zac Oyama, Siobhan Thompson, Lou Wilson) Elaine Lee is a writer, playwright, and actor who created several independent comics during the 1980s and ’90s. She is also Brennan Lee Mulligan’s mother. Her best-known work is almost certainly Starstruck, a sprawling adult space opera based on a stage play Lee wrote and starred in. Its comic-book incarnation has been published at various points by Marvel’s Epic imprint, IDW Publishing, Dark Horse Comics, and Heavy Metal magazine. In A Starstruck Odyssey, Mulligan adapts his mother’s setting into a tabletop campaign with Lee’s cooperation. The closest comparison might be Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels: Starstruck takes place in a distant future where spacefaring humanity has spread across the galaxy and used advanced technology to become deeply and permanently weird. Both the tabletop campaign and the comics take place during the AnarchEra, a lawless period between the collapse of one government and the establishment of whatever comes next. In the AnarchEra, almost anything is possible if you possess the skills and firepower necessary to survive the consequences. Mulligan’s version doesn’t replicate the comics’ experimental structure or Michael Kaluta’s distinctive artwork, but it is anchored by a series of enormous choices from its players. The Intrepid Heroes portray the crew of the Wurst, a band of mercenaries being crushed by debt and haunted by past mistakes. Under an unlikely new leader, played by Beardsley in one of their strongest D20 performances, the crew slowly begins to reverse its fortunes. The result is a chaotic rags-to-riches story that earns its happy ending. Its satisfying conclusion has not stopped D20 fans from clamoring for another trip into the AnarchEra. 1 For Harry Potter fans in recovery: Misfits & Magic Misfits & Magic Episode 1/Dropout.tv GM: Aabria Iyengar Players: Erika Ishii, Brennan Lee Mulligan, Danielle Radford, Lou Wilson Played on the Kids on Bikes system, Misfits & Magic is a direct, pointed satire of the Harry Potter universe, made right at the moment when J. K. Rowling was beginning her headlong dive into Twitter infamy. Other seasons of D20 have been made as specific parodies, but where those are loving, this one is sharpened to a fine point. M&M is set at a very British magical academy, where for the first time, four American teenagers have been recruited as new students. Almost as soon as they set foot on campus, all four of them begin to rebel against magical society's strange rules and customs, sometimes because they seem wrong, and sometimes just on general principle. The first season of M&M is only four episodes long, and like Bloodkeep, it's available in its entirety on YouTube. It's a fast watch with a simple gaming system, which rapidly developed some of the most viral moments of any D20 season. If it grabs you, an 11-episode second season ran in 2024, which tracked the "Magical Misfits" as they each made their own way into adulthood.