Dimension 20 best season to start? 6 campaigns to get into Dropout's D&D show

After selling out Madison Square Garden last year, Dimension 20 is officially one of the most popular tabletop live-play shows on the Internet. While you'll need a paid subscription to either Dropout.tv or Dropout's YouTube channel to watch most of the show, the dollar-per-hour ratio is very much in your favor here, as there are a full 28 seasons of D20 to catch up on.

That may sound like a lot, but that's only because it is. Getting into any live-play series as a newcomer is a level of commitment that's usually reserved for anime franchises. While even D20's longer campaigns are snack-sized compared to, say, a single season of Critical Role, you're still looking at something that could use up 5 to 10 to 60 hours of your free time. It's natural to wonder where you should start, particularly since the first season is part of the single longest campaign.

This guide is meant to help interested newcomers pick a season for their first watch. Not every season of the show is created equal, and it's not uncommon for even big fans of the series to bounce off of entire campaigns. Here are six suggestions for your best possible starting points, based on what you're looking for.

1 The gateway show: Escape From the Bloodkeep

Rekha Shankar, Matthew Mercer, and Amy Vorpahl play Escape From the Bloodkeep on Dimension 20

Escape from the Bloodkeep, Episode 1 (Dimension 20)

GM: Brennan Lee Mulligan

Players: Erika Ishii, Matthew Mercer, Ify Nwadiwe, Rekha Shankar, Mike Trapp, Amy Vorpahl

The second season of D20 is also one of its most accessible. Not only does it have a simple hook, but all six episodes are up for free on YouTube via D20's official YouTube channel.

Escape From the Bloodkeep is an affectionate parody of The Lord of the Rings, told from the perspective of the villains. When the Lord of Shadows is abruptly assassinated by the forces of good, his six closest advisors must figure out what to do next. Do they pick up where the Lord left off? Run for their lives? Switch sides?

That sounds like a recipe for a much darker story, but instead, Bloodkeep ends up as a sort of ensemble sitcom with a body count. Many of the jokes at LOTR's expense land specifically because they're being made by people who've loved the franchise since they were kids. Sure, many of the best jokes involve at least one murder, but it's more slapstick than splatterpunk.

If you're also interested in getting into TTRPGs for the first time, one of the big takeaways from Bloodkeep, especially as a game master, is that you can never reliably predict what your players will do. While it'd be a spoiler to discuss it in detail, Mulligan has gone on record as saying that due to the choices the PCs made, Bloodkeep didn't unfold or end as he'd planned. It's a useful example of how, try as you might, running any TTRPG means you'll eventually have to make something up on the fly.

2 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

One of the most common criticisms of D20 as a series is that most of the regular players are professional comedians. Even when D20 is ostensibly aiming for another genre, such as dark fantasy or cosmic horror, it's always also a comedy. Sometimes that hurts the vibes, most prominently with Neverafter.

The flip side of that is when D20 is funny, it's really funny, and Never Stop Blowing Up is in contention for the single funniest season of D20. It's a gleeful send-up of both '80s action movies and modern isekai, in a version of the Kids on Bikes system that's been customized for maximum cinematic value. It's sort of like a really rules-light version of Feng Shui.

NSBU begins with the staff of a failing small-town video store being pulled into the universe inside a magical VHS tape. Each one ends up as a different kind of (anti-)hero in a world that runs off of action tropes, where violence is a way of life, physics are only a suggestion, every magazine is bottomless, and the consequences of their actions only last until the end of the movie.

Once the players figure out the system and how best to break it, which is part of the point and half the fun, NSBU becomes an Expendables movie with an infinite budget. Wysocki and Nwadiwe compete to outdo one another's body counts, Shankar is at her most unhinged, and Roland (eight months pregnant at the time of filming) nearly laughs herself sick.

NSBU is about as close as you can come to vicariously having a particular sort of TTRPG experience, where your jokes have started to feed back upon one another and you accidentally create the funniest thing in the world, albeit one that will only make sense to the people who were in the room with you at the time. It's the experience of somehow being in on someone else's private joke, and that makes it one of the most must-see seasons of D20.

3 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 is the original D20 campaign and is still arguably the core of the series. It's received a Webtoon adaptation, although that files off many of its specific D&D references, and it's likely only a matter of time before its setting receives some kind of official D&D sourcebook.

The only reason why a total newcomer might not want to start with Fantasy High's first season, Freshman Year, is that it's 20 episodes long and the intro to the single longest subseries in D20. With 3 full campaigns and 6 one-shot special episodes, getting current on Fantasy High as a new viewer can take a few weeks. That isn't a patch on the process of watching something like Critical Role, but it's still a big lift.

If you're willing to take that plunge, Fantasy High begins as a really simple concept (what if The Breakfast Club, but Dungeons & Dragons) and spins out into both a surprisingly well-realized fantasy world and a loving but direct and merciless parody of the entire fictional ecosystem of D&D.

Fantasy High is set at a school that trains children to become adventurers, defined here as wandering maniacs who use violence to shape the world. You'd have to be crazy to start this school, to teach at it, or to attend it, so every season is fat-packed with a cast of dangerous eccentrics who regularly solve problems with murder. Fantasy High is the Western answer to Assassination Classroom.

Freshman Year isn't a bad part of the series to serve as an introduction to Dungeons & Dragons, as a couple of the players are new, so many of the basic systems get explained along the way. FH absolutely has ups and downs, such as when its second season is interrupted by COVID, but there's a lot here to like. If its sheer length doesn't put you off, it's worth a try.

4 For classic horror fans: Coffin Run

Image: Dropout

GM: Jasmine Bhullar

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

Not many fans seem to discuss Coffin Run, but it's quietly one of the more ambitious seasons of D20, if only because it's going straight into Mel Brooks' sort of territory. While some of its bits can run thin, it's also a six-episode side series that doesn't have time to wear out any welcomes.

Coffin Run features four members of Dracula's coterie who are charged with transporting his corpse back to his castle across hostile territory. Along the way, they must deal with enemy werewolves, vampire hunters, and Dracula's own distant relatives, who are using reports of his death as an excuse to seize his assets.

This is Jasmine Bhullar's only season as a D20 GM so far, and she makes the most of it with some immaculate Hammer horror vibes. Coffin Run is the sort of B-movie fun that has largely been forgotten, like Abbott and Costello meeting Frankenstein. As far as D20 seasons go, this is a sleeper hit, and it's worth a look if you're into old-school monster movies.

5 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 wrote several indie comics in the '80s and '90s, as well as Brennan Lee Mulligan's mother. Lee's best-known work is almost certainly Starstruck, a multi-volume adult space opera that Lee based on her own 1980 stage play. As a comic, Starstruck has been published at various times by Marvel (via its indie-focused Epic imprint), IDW, Dark Horse, and Heavy Metal magazine.

A Starstruck Odyssey sees Mulligan adapting his mother's setting into a tabletop format, made with Lee's cooperation, and at least one session was played with Lee in the room. Starstruck's closest fictional analogue might be Iain Banks' Culture novels; Starstruck is set in a distant future, where spacefaring humanity has spread across the galaxy and used its advanced technology to become deeply, permanently weird.

Both the TTRPG and the comics are set in what's known as the AnarchEra, the lawless period between the fall of one government and the establishment of whatever comes next. In AnarchEra, you can do almost anything if you've got the skills and firepower to survive the aftermath.

Mulligan's take on Starstruck doesn't have the comics' experimental format or the benefit of Michael Kaluta's art, but it is anchored by some big choices by the players. They take on the AnarchEra as the crew of the Wurst, a team of mercenaries being crushed by debt and past mistakes, who slowly begin to turn it around under a new leader (Beardsley, really locking in for the first time). It's a rags-to-riches story that really earns a happy ending. There's a reason why D20 fans have been demanding a sequel for years.

6 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.