Brennan Lee Mulligan on 'Dimension 20: Cloudward, Ho!' and bringing steampunk to the dome

Dropout's Dimension 20has run the gamut of speculative fiction genres,关键字3 from urban fantasy in The Unsleeping City to space opera in A Starstruck Odyssey. In its newest season, Cloudward, Ho!, the tabletop anthology series leaps into yet another genre: steampunk.

SEE ALSO: Brennan Lee Mulligan talks 'Dimension 20: Cloudward, Ho!'s breakout NPC

Cloudward, Ho! incorporates several familiar steampunk genre trappings, from airships and mech suits to Victorian-era aesthetics. But the new genre also allows Dimension 20 to take some new risks, ushering in new mechanics, new inspirations, and new ways of approaching Dimension 20's community-focused, anti-capitalist core themes. Mashable spoke with Dimension 20 creator and Game Master Brennan Lee Mulligan about what steampunk brings to Dimension 20, and what viewers can expect from Cloudward, Ho!

What led Dimension 20 to go full steampunk?

"The Zephyr" in "Cloudward, Ho!" Credit: Kate Elliott

After Fantasy High: Junior Year, the third installment in the Fantasy High series, Mulligan and the rest of Dimension 20's Intrepid Heroes cast — Emily Axford, Ally Beardsley, Brian Murphy, Zac Oyama, Siobhan Thompson, and Lou Wilson — were "in the mood for adventure," Mulligan told Mashable in a Zoom interview.

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"They were like, 'Let's do something high-action and bold and colorful and exciting.' So steampunk really spoke to us," Mulligan said. "H.G. Wells and [Hayao] Miyazaki, biplanes in the clouds and the Golden Age of aviation — that felt like where we wanted to be."

Thus the land of Gath was born, and with it, the lost land of Zood, which Cloudward, Ho!'s characters seek out. Atlantis and Castle in the Sky served as major touchpoints for Cloudward, Ho!and its central arc, but they're far from the campaign's only inspirations. Other Miyazaki films, including Porco Rosso, proved useful due to the director's focus on aviation. Cloudward, Ho! also draws on the works of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, James Gurney'sDinotopiaseries, and Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black's The Spiderwick Chronicles. (The zoological treatise element of the latter suggests extra-exciting new creatures ahead.)

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With such rich source material to draw from, and such a vast world to explore — Gath has over 20 continents! — Cloudward, Ho! also provides Dimension 20's creative team new opportunities to stretch themselves.

"It's hard to fathom how stunning the artwork is this season," Mulligan said. "[Production designer] Rick Perry and his team have truly outdone themselves."

That's already evident in the teaser for Cloudward, Ho! episode 2, which features an astoundingly detailed model of the airship Zephyr.

For Cloudward, Ho!, Mulligan also brought on game designers to craft aerial combat rules and stat blocks for the season. Designers Hannah Rose, Mazey Veselak, Dan Dillon, and Brandes Stoddard have all collaborated previously with Mulligan, helping create the Witch Class for the narrative podcast Worlds Beyond Number, which Mulligan hosts alongside Dimension 20 staples Aabria Iyengar, Erika Ishii, and Wilson.

Steampunk themes helped build Cloudward, Ho!'s generation-spanning party.

Brian Murphy, Siobhan Thompson, Ally Beardsley, and Brennan Lee Mulligan in "Cloudward, Ho!" Credit: Kate Elliott

Steampunk adventure tropes also shaped the dynamics of Cloudward, Ho!'s party. Four of the six characters are older, seasoned adventurers, while two are new faces to the skies. The youngest character, Ally Beardsley's Olethra MacLeod, starts the game at Level 2, while everyone else begins it at Level 6. (The experience divide echoes how A Crown of Candy's Jet, Ruby, and Liam all started at Levels 1 and 2, as opposed to the older characters' Level 3.)

That power balance decision came from the idea that some of these characters would be aging legends with formidable legacies — Mulligan cited Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen as a touchpoint here — and that others would be joining the crew for the first time.

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"A crew having to incorporate new members is a really classic moment of this [genre]." Mulligan said. "Who are the people that have this long-standing adventurer relationship, and how do you bring in the new blood? [That's] a classic trope of this kind of storytelling that was really fun."

SEE ALSO: The 'Dimension 20' cast chooses their ultimate Intrepid Heroes squad

Even the decision to start some characters at Level 6 as opposed to Level 5 came from steampunk genre tropes.

"The source material we're drawing from doesn't have a lot of what fantasy has. Fantasy has a lot of starting powerless and quickly becoming very powerful. Luke goes from a scruffy nerf herder to blowing up the Death Star in the span of one movie," Mulligan explained. "Whereas for these characters, I think the genre is filled with more [people] starting very competent and continuing to get sharper. We don't get to these higher demigod levels in steampunk as a genre. There's some older gaming stuff around 'epic Level 6,' something I had heard about a lot growing up in gaming. So there was an interesting element of wanting to say, 'Level 6 is where you're super-duper heroic, but you are not superhuman yet,' and that felt like a sweet spot for us to be."

Capitalism is the bad guy (again) in Cloudward, Ho!

Zac Oyama, Emily Axford, and Lou Wilson in "Cloudward, Ho!" Credit: Kate Elliott

The divide in Cloudward, Ho!'s party is not just one of time, but of how people relate to aviation in Gath.

"In Gath, aviation is invented, and the people who are inventing it are miscreant, criminal, eccentric inventors," Mulligan said. "Over the course of time, that new technology is gobbled up by empire and capital and industry, and so it naturally created this generational divide."

The role of capital already shines through in Cloudward, Ho!'s premiere, where industrialist Longspot Gotch, father to party member Maxwell Gotch (Murphy), is intent on squeezing every last penny out of the doomed voyage of Professor Olethra MacLeod. His money-centric approach to the miracle of aviation reiterates a common theme in Dimension 20: Capitalism is the bad guy.

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"I love all the memes that are like, 'In Brennan's stories, capitalism's always the bad guy,'" Mulligan joked in a behind-the-scenes video for Dimension 20's Gauntlet at the Garden. "And it's like, yeah, but in a cool, novel way each time, like no one's bored of it, right?"

Steampunk, with its focus on new technology and who gets to use it, seems like just the kind of "cool, novel way" Mulligan can continue to explore this theme.

"Fundamentally, steampunk is a reaction. The aesthetic is that of machines and the industrial revolution," Mulligan told Mashable. "A lot of steampunk tends to come in these two flavors. There's the extremely dark, brooding gaslamp steampunk, and then there's also the ones that are more in that Miyazaki vein, with conversations between nature and technology. Miyazaki really dwells on the horrors therein, but not to the preclusion of the beauty and importance of nature and the revelry of innovation, of invention, of flight."

He continued: "The Luddites were a labor and capital movement, and there was some smashing of machines, but it's not that machines are bad. It's about who owns them, what we do with them, and if we use them for destruction, or if we use them for affirming the wonder and majesty of human cleverness and innovation."

SEE ALSO: The 'Dimension 20' cast reveal which campaign they would most like to revisit

Balancing these flavors of steampunk — destruction and capitalism versus wonder and hopefulness — became a key tenet to building out Gath. Episode 1 already gives us a taste of several varied landscapes, from the Western-style canyons of Pilby to the rusty wastes of Scrapsylvania. ("You've got to hit them with the lore up top," Mulligan said.)

"I wanted to make Gath so enormous, because if I create a world that is only gloom and empire, am I breeding a sense of despair in my world that I don't want to be reflected in my work? But also, if I don't honor the real problems of real life, is there even something to work on here?" Mulligan said. "So the thing with Gath was, let's create a world where there are some elements of that gaslamp steampunk empire that's worth resisting, but also continents that exist that are untouched by it. What if we imagine places that were successful in their rebuffing of imperial efforts? So Gath is a big, wild world filled with lots of different things going on that stretch the boundary of imagination."

With the entire toolbox of the steampunk genre at its disposal, expectCloudward, Ho!to keep stretching those boundaries even more as the season takes flight.

Dimension 20: Cloudward, Ho! is now streaming on Dropout, with a new episode every Wednesday at 7 p.m. ET.

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