Guide to the Best Dimension 20 Seasons for New Viewers

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.

Getting into any long-running actual-play series requires the sort of commitment usually reserved for sprawling anime franchises. Even the longer campaigns are snack-sized compared to a single season of Critical Role, but viewers can still spend anywhere from five to 60 hours completing one story.

It is natural to wonder where to begin, particularly because the original season is also the beginning of the longest-running campaign.

This guide helps interested newcomers choose where to start. Not every 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 what viewers want to watch.

The gateway show: Escape From the Bloodkeep

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 streams in full for free through the 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. They can 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 the best jokes land precisely because they come 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 players cannot be reliably predicted. Brennan Lee Mulligan has discussed how dramatically the players’ choices changed his original plans for the campaign. Revealing the exact details would spoil the fun, but the result demonstrates a fundamental TTRPG principle: no matter how carefully a game is prepared, the gamemaster will eventually have to improvise.

For pure comedy: Never Stop Blowing Up

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 casts are often too funny for the genres they explore. Even when a campaign aims for dark fantasy or cosmic horror, it inevitably becomes a comedy. Sometimes that tension works against a season, as it occasionally does in Neverafter.

The flip side is that when the show commits fully to comedy, it produces 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 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 character actions only need to last until the credits roll.

Once the players understand the system and discover how thoroughly they can break it, the campaign turns into an Expendables movie with an infinite budget. Jacob Wysocki and Ify Nwadiwe compete to outdo each other’s body counts, Rekha Shankar is at her most unhinged, and Isabella Roland, who was eight months pregnant during filming, repeatedly laughs herself sick.

Never Stop Blowing Up replicates a specific tabletop experience: the moment when a group’s jokes begin feeding upon one another until everyone at the table accidentally creates the funniest thing in the world, even if outsiders cannot fully understand it.

Watching the season makes viewers feel like they are in on a private joke, making it one of the most essential campaigns.

For D&D players: Fantasy High Freshman Year

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 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 the longest-running story. Watching the three main Fantasy High campaigns and related specials requires a considerably larger commitment than sampling a self-contained side quest.

For those willing to take the plunge, Fantasy High begins with an irresistible premise: what if The Breakfast Club took place inside a game of Dungeons & Dragons?

From that simple idea, Brennan Lee Mulligan and the players construct both a 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 as wandering maniacs who use violence to reshape the world. Every season is packed with dangerous eccentrics who routinely attempt to solve 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 basic game 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. The second campaign, Sophomore Year, contended with disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, if the sheer length of the story does not deter viewers, Freshman Year remains one of the best starting points.

For classic horror fans: Coffin Run

GM: Jasmine Bhullar

Players: Erika Ishii, Carlos Luna, Zac Oyama, Isabella Roland

Coffin Run rarely receives as much attention as the biggest campaigns, but it is quietly one of the show’s most ambitious experiments as it ventures directly into Mel Brooks territory. Some jokes wear thin, but at six episodes, the campaign does not wear out its welcome.

The story follows four members of Dracula’s coterie 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.

Jasmine Bhullar takes over the GM chair and fills the campaign with Hammer-horror atmosphere. The result captures a variety of B-movie fun: imagine Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, except Abbott and Costello are also monsters.

Coffin Run is a genuine sleeper hit. Anyone with an affection for classic monster movies should give it a watch.

For science fiction fans: A Starstruck Odyssey

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 1990s. She is also Brennan Lee Mulligan’s mother.

Her best-known work is Starstruck, a sprawling adult space opera based on a stage play she wrote and starred in. Its comic-book incarnation has been published 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 her cooperation. The closest comparison is 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 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 the next. In the AnarchEra, almost anything is possible for those with the skills and firepower to survive the consequences.

Mulligan’s version does not replicate the comics’ experimental structure or Michael Kaluta’s artwork, but it is anchored by enormous choices from its players. The Intrepid Heroes portray the crew of the Wurst, a band of mercenaries crushed by debt and haunted by past mistakes. Under an unlikely new leader, played by Ally Beardsley in one of their strongest performances, the crew 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 fans from clamoring for another trip into the AnarchEra.

For Harry Potter fans in recovery: Misfits & Magic

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 began her headlong dive into Twitter infamy. Other seasons have been specific parodies, but where those are loving, this one is sharpened to a fine point.

Misfits & Magic is set at a British magical academy where four American teenagers are recruited as new students for the first time. Almost as soon as they set foot on campus, all four begin to rebel against magical society’s strange rules and customs, sometimes because those rules seem wrong, and sometimes just on general principle.

The first season is only four episodes long, and like Bloodkeep, it is available in its entirety on YouTube. It is a fast watch with a simple gaming system that rapidly developed some of the most viral moments of any season. An 11-episode second season ran in 2024, tracking the “Magical Misfits” as they made their own way into adulthood.

 

Source: Polygon