PV: Three times, OK. What are some things that people familiar with Fantasy High can expect to see from this particular live show at the Hollywood Bowl? No spoilers, of course.

Well, listen, we’ve been very clear: this is Battle at the Bowl. This is Rumble in the Chungle, okay? And this is a canon event. One of those two characters [Fabian Seacaster and Chungledown Bim] will die, and it will be canon in the show.

It’s very exciting to go to a place as historic as The Hollywood Bowl. [There are] thousands of people in attendance to watch one of the show’s most beloved characters fight a gnome with a beard made of mustaches and pockets full of spaghetti. A character that was made up on the spot, that should never have mattered. It’s wild. So I think what we can expect is: we are going to have a fucking ball.

We cannot wait. The show is going to be stacked with awesome crowd interaction stuff. We’re going to have the time of our lives. It’s going to be a really funny show. To sell the show as hard as I can, I don’t know if they’ll ever let me do something this stupid again.

PV: I want to talk about that idea of the character that “should have never mattered.” Because in mythology, there’s this trope of having a character that seems so silly or unimportant but then ends up being so much more. Yoda would be a great example.

Yes. And that’s also a part of, you know, fandom does have this ability to put a hand out and touch the object of creation that they are so enamored with. It is in what they choose to love and pay attention to. Yoda’s a great example; I think another great example is Boba Fett. That guy said, like, two things. He was only implied to be badass; he got eaten by that Sarlacc right away. Right away. But people are like, ‘This guy fucking rules! I love him, he’s awesome, and you will not tell me that he does not matter.’ That’s maybe one of the first instances of true fandom creation, where the people who were not the authors impacted this creative world by loving something in it so much that it has to matter.

PV: I love that. Getting back to the live Dimension 20 shows, one of the biggest you’ve ever done is the return to the Unsleeping City at Madison Square Garden. That world is a fictionalized New York City, and I read that you lived in New York for years and years. How did your New York experience come into that campaign?

Unsleeping City [Ed: The third D20 campaign] is a full love letter to New York City. I’m from New York. I grew up there when I was very, very little, and then spent time upstate. My mom lived in High Falls, my dad lived in Hell’s Kitchen. When I was 17, I started going to college in New York and lived there all the way up until I moved to LA when I was 29.

My dad and I have always shared this deep, profound love of the city and of its history. The Unsleeping City is not just a testament to how great New York is (although it is extremely great; best city in the world) it’s also a love letter to New York and its history. Moving through the city with my dad, there was always this thing where he was like, ‘You know what used to be here? You know what that is? That’s who that statue is. Do you know what this thing is?’ Something I really owe to my dad is an ingrained understanding that everything is deeper and more magical than it first appears. He’d say, ‘That’s not a Dunkin Donuts; that’s where the pool hall used to be when the Dead Rabbits in the Five Points came to this place.’

So [the campaign] really is this attitude of like, you’re standing in the middle of the greatest story ever told, and it’s all right here. You need to learn to see it. That’s on you, because it will only diminish your life if you walk around thinking that you’re not in the middle of something incredibly magical.

PV: That brings up my next question: As a DM, there’s so much ‘under the surface’ stuff you develop for your campaigns. You build these intricate worlds, and not everything you plan makes it into the sessions. Are there any pieces of campaign lore that you wished had made it on camera or into a live show that didn’t get the chance to?

In the original A Crown of Candy, we had two full adventure arcs that were cut for completely logistical reasons. We had to. We were planning on doing a 20-episode season, and it had to get knocked down to 17, and we lost two full battle sets. There was going to be an entire adventure in for Terra, with a cool grotto of assassins, and then there was going to be a full colosseum fight in the Meat Lands with a bunch of giant meat monsters. One of them was an actual silicone chicken fillet with googly eyes on it. Those are the two big things that had to get cut that we were supposed to see that season.

PV: Damn. Well we’ll try to get a ‘Release the Cutlet Cut’ hashtag going. Speaking of hypotheticals, is there anybody that you have not seen at the table, particularly from the Dropout crew, that you’d like to see there?

Oh, God. Everybody. I mean, that’s the sad part, right? I want to play with everyone. There are so many talented people. I would say, that, just because we’ve recently talked about it, Vic Michaelis would be awesome to play with. They are just so beyond talented.

But also, I mean, there’s not only other people that I want to play with for the very first time, but they are all the people that I have played with before and just want to play with again and get back to the dome as well. I had such a great time playing with Oscar Montoya, and I would love to DM for him as well. The list is truly endless.

PV: Fair enough. And while we’re talking about more areas you want to explore: Dimension 20 has covered so many genres and parodies - a Harry Potter spoof, a Lord of the Rings parody, space operas, and gothic horror. Is there a particular genre, parody, or satire you’d really like to do in the future?

There’s something very fun in the idea of like, a gallows-humor, doomed season. I also love the Armando Iannucci kind of comedic tone. A comedic political intrigue show would be very, very fun, just because everyone is just all fools and depraved imbeciles, you know? There’s also a desire for big, genre fiction tropes that I think would be really fun to go back to.

PV: Like what? I don’t think we’ve done anything like Underworld. Or a modern-day, kind of Twilight parody mash-up. Modern-day vampires and werewolves kind of thing.

Then, you know, we did a little bit of Greek myth, but I think there’s something really fun about Tall Tales as well that I like. There are spaces in between deity mythology and fantasy, this realm of mythic, folkloric, Tall Tale that’s really cool that I would like to do something with eventually. Things like King Arthur, Robin Hood, or Paul Bunyan.

PV: I’ll keep an eye out. Well, on the subject of the future; Cloudward, Ho is debuting on Dropout June 4. What made you want to get into the steampunk genre?

The players, honestly. We had just done Fantasy High: Junior Year the season before, and people were like, ‘We just did a sequel season; let’s do something brand new. And we want high adventure. We want a journey. We want heroic characters. We want something where you throw a fist in air.’ You know that bit from The Neverending Story where the kid’s riding the luck dragon, and he just goes:

[Brennan pumps his fist into the air]

Yeah, we just wanted that feeling for 20 episodes. I think Cloudward, Ho was about making a big, high octane adventure with some cool heroes with lots of fun abilities. Steampunk was just a cool thing. I love that retro-futurism, whether it’s like in BioShock or like Miyazaki’s movies, how aviation figures into a lot of those. That idea of a world that has elements of the freaky steampunk, the gaslamps the characters who are more machine than man. It’s that dark side of the Industrial Revolution, but also that feeling of Amelia Earhart, the joy of aviation, the human spirit taking to the sky. There’s something about that that’s also like a vibe that I just wanted to base a world around.

But also, there’s this thing that we all have to reckon with, which is the direness of the Industrial Revolution, the horrors of pollution and climate change, the horrors of capital and the ownership of labor and everything like that. You’re trying to make space for that in your ideology and also say, ‘Oh my God, thank God I can get on an airplane and go see my mom who lives in another part of the world.’ I want us to figure out a way to do that. I’ll take high-speed rail. If there’s a bullet train that gets me to New York in, like, a few days, and that’s better for the planet, I’ll do that. But there’s something in that idea of the parts of machines and innovation that are like, ‘Oh, my God, we can touch the clouds.’ How about that? That’s miraculous. So there’s there’s a lot of that in the season.

PV: Before we leave off, what else of yours should we be checking out?

I’ll just say that we are wrapping up Book One of our first campaign of Worlds Beyond Number. No one, I don’t think, has ever gotten to see me do a long-form campaign before. This is an ultra-high fantasy, gorgeously sound-designed and scored epic adventure for the three main characters. In terms of the scale, the epicness, the drama, I don’t think I’ve ever done anything like this. I think people who are fans of my work owe it to themselves to check out this podcast.

PV: Would you call it an “all splash pages” podcast?

Exactly.