Brennan Lee Mulligan & Aabria Iyengar Detail Exandria Unlimited: Calamity (2024)

Critical Role'sExandria Unlimited: Calamity returns viewers to the world of Exandria for a Dungeons & Dragons actualplay show. This miniseries, telling a prequel story about The Calamity at the end of the Age of Arcanum, includes players Aabria Iyengar, Luis Carazo, Marisha Ray, Sam Riegel, Travis Willingham, and Lou Wilson, and is expertly Game Mastered by Dimension 20's Brennan Lee Mulligan. Together, the cast will tell the story of The Calamity from the perspectives of a group of (mostly) wizards of Avalir, ensuring that there is no happy ending and that this tale, unlike many of Critical Role's other tales, is one of tragedy.

Game Master Brennan Lee Mulligan and player and former Game Master Aabria Iyengar recently spoke with CBR about the miniseries Exandria Unlimited: Calamity. The pair dove into what it's like to GM at the Critical Role table and the shared actualplay TTRPG community. They also explained how they approached balancing the different aspects of Dungeons & Dragons and their favorite NPCs this season.

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CBR: Both of you are established Game Masters, and you've now both taken on that mantel at the Critical Role table. So I'm dying to know what is that like?

Aabria Iyengar: Well, I think it's amazing to now be on both sides of the table for CR. It was wild and terrifying and exciting to sort of be handed the reins as the first person outside of the main cast to tell a story in this world that resonates throughout everything that Matt [Mercer] would later come back and do. Now, to be a little gremlin on the side also making questionable choices that have repercussions across Exandria, as someone who grew into playing D&D, in part, by watching Critical Role, is very surreal, and at all times, it's very, very cool.

Brennan Lee Mulligan: Being at that table is wild. To echo Aabria, I remember watching the conclusion of Campaign 1 after having played D&D all weekend with my friends, and I remember because we had just played the week before... I'm also now realizing that I've just sort of disclosed how bad my apartment cleaning-up abilities are because we did play the weekend before, and then it was Thursday, and all this stuff was still out. Well, anyone that can do math can figure that out. It was watching that conclusion and being like, "Oh, my god, this is unbelievable, the type of storytelling that is capable in this medium."

As someone that , I think if you had told me six or seven years ago, "Hey, do you think you'll ever be playing at the Critical Role table? Do you ever think that your profession will be storytelling in this medium?" I think if you had suggested that I could have a job doing this, I would be like, "Well, that's a very mean-spirited joke you're playing. It's very hurtful that you would say such an obvious lie." But lo and behold, here we are. I think surreal is the word of the day, for sure.

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Aabria, I want to dive a little bit more into your transition from GM into player. I'm curious to know what that transition was like for you, and then, Brennan, if she's as much of a chaos gremlin as she seems to say she is.

Iyengar: Don't you... Don't you...

Mulligan: You don't want me to hurt the brand by saying the truth, Aabria?

Iyengar: That I'm very chill and fine and think about all of my choices deeply before making them. No! Oh man, the transition has been very, very cool. You never really know how many touches you're going to get at this. The promise of ExU was always that it was a massive world and a bunch of storytellers getting to get their hands into Exandria. So I very much walked away from all of that going, "Well, I've made my mark. I got to come back and tell a little bit more with Kymal, and maybe this is just my little corner piece. I'm so happy with the sandbox I've been granted."

Then the moment they were like, "Oh, do you want to come and be a player for Calamity?" With all the extra context in preparation for my season, and also I'm a Critter, so I've watched all of CR but also having studied the Tal'Dorei guide, and Tal'Dorei [Campaign Setting] Reborn in advance of my season, the word of that rocked me in a way, like, "Oh, you're going to do that. Yeah, there's no way I'm not. Yes, please. This is going to be the coolest thing ever." I remember immediately sending a message to Brennan like, "How do I make it worse, please? I want to be a problem." Then I got to, and that's fun. So we did it. We're self-actualized. Maslow, eat your heart out.

Mulligan: Yeah, we're gonna stick it to Maslow by self-actualizing. Maslow's hierarchy, that was cautionary. He said, "Don't do these things." [laughs] Yeah, I totally agree. I think that everything Aabria's saying, I totally agree with. The transition was very fun for me. Also, in the broader context of everything... I played with Aabria for the first time in a season with Matt and Marisha [Ray] over on Dimension 20. Then Exandria Unlimited was coming out during the same time that I, for the first time, got to play on the players' side of my own table over at D 20, on the summer that "Misfits and Magic" was coming out at the same time as ExU. There's been this... Scientifically, you would refer to it as "bopping around."

Iyengar: [laughs] Sorry, that one got me -- scientific term, "bopping around."

Mulligan: As the physicists would say, these particles seem to be bopping around. [laughs] So it feels like getting invited to do Calamity just almost felt like another stitch in a tapestry. Do you stitch tapestries? It felt like another interaction with thread and fabric and the weaving of this space. In terms of like, "Okay, so now this group of friends that I really love, I'm going to go run something in their world with the person who ran a game for me off in Dimension 20-land for the first time, and she is the starter of this thing that I'm doing, but she'll be at the table for this along with Marisha, who is the person that came to the show that we did with Aabria first..." It just feels very like a couple of these shows are the vessels for a really exciting artistic community, if that makes sense.

I can only think about as like great moments in comedy, where there were these clubs or performance spaces that would host performers, that would go to all of them and do stuff there. It feels like, again, the idea that the relationship between all of us as creators and storytellers is so positive. We're all so psyched to work with each other. It does feel like that exciting time of -- are you gonna make fun of me if I say artistic movement? It feels like that. It feels like the burgeoning of, "Oh, a city has a new music scene," or "A comedy art form develops a couple of theaters in the same city, and now everyone's..." It feels like not only is this the coolest -- Critical Role has an Amazon show, and it's the biggest it's ever been -- but even in the feeling of it being the biggest it's ever been, it still also feels like the start of something that's gonna get even cooler as it keeps going.

Iyengar: Yes!

Mulligan: So that's my feeling.

Iyengar: Well said.

Mulligan: Thank you. I really had to hack my way through the jungle on that one. I got there eventually.

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I want to dive more deeply into this big world of Exandria and talk about what it's like to step into a world that has such lore established about it that you get to contribute to, but you're also a little beholden to what other people have contributed to. What's it like to tell a story in such a world?

Iyengar: My ExU season was lovely in that I got in and out of Emon and then was like, "All right, everything from here down is made up. So I don't owe anyone anything. I can just be weird in the corner."

Mulligan: What's so funny is I have the exact same experience of Calamity because if you talk to me about what was the most stressful... If someone was like, "Do you want to do what Aabria was doing?" That seems so hard because to me, the idea of coming at the end of canon with everything having happened already, is weirdly so much... How do you put it? It feels challenging, the idea of wrestling with the pre-existing stuff. I know that the whole time travel thing of it is that things in the past can contradict things in the future more easily, but that's not my experience of running it.

My experience, if I had to run something after the events of Vox Machina, or after the events of all three main campaigns, is I would be like, "Oh, there's such a tremendous amount of lore" -- maybe even also just due to the proximity, the fact that certain characters are alive, certain places still have the same name. I think, to agree with Aabria, the way that it's felt the best way to run this is to kind of delineate a sandbox, is to give yourself a thing and go, "Here's my parameter." It's like any group project -- if you're all signing a Happy Birthday card, go find a little corner of the card that nobody else wrote "Happy Birthday" on yet, because it's just gonna be a little bit more space.

Even with deeply not wanting to contradict any canon lore in the thing, I still... This last week, someone was like, "Wait a minute, how are there half-orcs during the calamity?" I wen "GAH NO!" [scream laughs] I had this moment of being like, "I missed one!" There's just so much lore, and it's such a rich and beautiful world, you want to do the best job you possibly can.

Iyengar: I will say, as a player, I don't feel any of that compunction and have been moving through Calamity with the express goal of averting it and making a problem. I want to get a strongly worded email from Matt that's just like, "What have you done?" Oh, Calamity's over.

Mulligan: We have to ex post facto change the branding to like Marvel's What If...? These guys did too well, and they ruined the timeline, so this is now Alternate Universe Critical Role.

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I feel like fans would be into that.

Mulligan: Hey, probably so. I would watch that. Our friends over at Not Another D&D Podcast... had a whole thing called the Nannerfly tour, which was a very cool idea. They did a tour of live shows where they redid really significant rolls and moments in the campaign. What if that roll had gone bad, or what if that moment had gone differently?

Iyengar: So cool.

Mulligan: Very cool.

Let's dive into The Calamity, then. What is it like to tell a prequel story that has an ending built into it that fans are likely to know, coming into the story aware of where the story's going?

Iyengar: My favorite has been watching fan reaction, especially after Episode 1, that was like, "Don't get attached! Do not get attached to these characters!" No, love us. Know what's coming. It was very fun as a player to know where things have to end up, and then as a character to absolutely shut all of that out of your mind and go like, "I have a goal and a purpose, and there is nothing on my radar that is big enough to distract me from it." So it's just very fun playing the like, "I don't see the giant thing behind me that is the end of the world. I'm gonna do my little thing in this corner and isn't that the most important thing that's ever happened. No? Well, oop." It just feels so good to play with meta-information versus character goals, so good.

Mulligan: There's really something going on in this miniseries that I think is award-worthy or should be studied in colleges. The performance of these six PCs, doing what they are doing, I think is maybe one of the hardest performance challenges I've ever seen. I say challenges -- everyone seems to be having a blast. The difficulty of what they're doing does not seem to be keeping them from having a good time, but I can see the underlying code, and it is breathtaking because D&D makes you want to win. You have a character with abilities. You're rolling dice. You want the numbers to be high.

Character bleed, which is a term we use to describe the emotional state of the character and the performer kind of bleeding together. There's a little bit of exchange there, right? You never want that to go too far, but also, you want it to happen a little bit because that's kind of the point, to share the experience of a fictional character. So the degree that bleed can happen means that most people want to live parallel to their character. When the character wants to win, you want the character to win. When the character is having a hard time, you're feeling that hard time. When you get a stimulus, if something happens, even if your character has a different backstory than you, you often use your reaction of, "Something bad happened? Well, we're the good guys!" and you do the thing. You kind of live your aspirational selves.

This is not that. The players know that we're telling a tragedy, and maybe I'm pushing my character to want to win, but I'm also making choices that are, on a literary level, tragic. Everyone that watches this series, I want them to go look at the traditional meaning of tragedy because tragedy doesn't just mean it's sad. Specifically, it's sad, and the reasons it's sad have to do with the qualities of the characters that we told you they had from the very beginning and that we follow down that pathway. So it really is a sort of rub your tummy pat your head [demonstrates said dexterity] of like character really wants to win, player knows that this character is incredibly flawed and is going to tap dance backward through the story showing you all of these foibles, idiosyncrasy, and sometimes deep flaws in these characters. It is a storytelling feat -- to improvise your way through a tragic story is something I've never seen before.

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Iyengar: It's so cool watching. This table is crazy good. I think, in watching, I've caught myself so many times just being agape at exactly this, knowing as a player what we're trying to land. The moment you see any character -- for me, especially with Lou [Wilson] and Luis [Carazo] -- really landing these different ideas of what a fatal flaw is and what hubris is, you see the personality trait and how it got them to this moment of extremely high status, and that sort of top-down view. Also, the way in which, pushed just a little too far, will absolutely lead to their downfall. Every time I catch it watching them, I am just floored by how good everyone is and how much everyone knew the assignment.

So much of that goes to Brennan as a storyteller, both giving us the tools from the top to create characters that can do that and then the way in which he breathes life into moments and creates opportunities and pockets for our characters to have those beats and reaffirm... It's a really grounding way to pull a player out of their head and get them back to what the character cares about. I don't know how many... Maybe you have to run a game to see it, so shout out to all the other GMs out there that can see the incredible lift that Brennan's doing to make space for these characters to do this thing. Especially in such a short form -- we don't have a lot of time to get those ideas out there, so the ability to tell a lore-heavy and incredibly dramatic story while also breathing space into character beats so that the audience and the table cares about one another before it all is said and done is masterful.

Mulligan: We're big fans of each other.

Iyengar: Yeah!

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On that note, Brennan, D&D is this game that allows for so many different types of play, from role-play to combat to exposition, so how do you go about finding a balance or rhythm for each episode of Exandria Unlimited: Calamity as you're prepping it?

Mulligan: That's a great question. It really comes down to... Balancing the elements of the story first comes from balancing the parameters that are inflexible. I think about that in terms of media all the time, right? When you're solving an equation, the first thing you do is find the constants and the variables. So the constants are, we have four episodes. The constants are, The Calamity happens. The constants are, we have six players. The constants are... and you keep making that list of here are all the things that are true. As you begin to go and identify those, in a weird way, in terms of how much combat, how much lore, how much exploration, how much role play, how much comedy, how much tension, how much horror, all of that, weirdly, those elements come in towards the end of the process because you're delineating so many other things first.

As a Game Master, you're trying to look at it and go... There are even some constants that are narrative, right? So, for example, without giving anything away about the miniseries, the history of Exandria -- the video they made and all the lore books they made -- Vespin Chloras is the Archmage that releases the Betrayer Gods. That's part of the established canon history of the world. Then we have our six player characters that are these rulers of the Age of Arcanum, which is a time defined by its hubris, right? There's an element in the lore that the Age of Arcanum is this age of magecraft, where these mages thought themselves higher than the gods, etc. So, there's an interesting thing that I feel like you have to do right there, even just given those two constants, of going, "How do we connect the story of this thing that was started by Vespin Chloras to the story of the larger Age of Arcanum so that they do not feel disconnected, but they actually feel of a piece and of a tapestry with each other."

Once you have all those constants addressed, then you get to be creative with the mix or the balance in the space that's left. So a lot of the balance is actually already sort of managed for you. There are things that were creative choices, but also there's no way to get around, right? So, for example, I like to do character vignettes at the start of a game. There's no other way to do this world because if the characters all start in one location, we will not get the cross-section of this magicratic society. Yes, we're introducing each character and giving them a moment to shine, but while that's happening, you also get to see the Golden Scythe and the Meridian Labyrinth and the Archsept. There's these things that seem stylistic, but they're actually structurally addressing a constant, which is we have four episodes. All this stuff has to get expedited.

So those are my thoughts about managing... In terms of the game elements of like exploration, horror, you're trying to balance that as well, also with this idea of all of these constraints and parameters. So I think everyone did the best thing. I felt constantly supported by the table of people knowing here's the moment for this, and we're keeping an eye on pacing and timing and moving things forward. Even for combat in this last episode's... Spoilers for anyone who had it, we had the shortest combat maybe in Critical Role history. Aabria just fully killed, merced this dude.

Iyengar: Oops. [laughs]

Mulligan: But listen, this is like a DM principle I have, which is that I do not scale combat. I do not run my worlds like, for lack of a better word, like video games, where the challenge is always commensurate with your skills and abilities. You're going to levels we're... Actually, there are a lot of games that do that, like Final Fantasy. If you go to a place you're not supposed to be in Final Fantasy, you'll get jacked up, and that's the same. I love that verisimilitude. So it's like, "Hey, if you get the drop on one wizard while he's alone, this is gonna be a short combat. You're about to win." Conversely, if you go to someplace that's way too dangerous for you, you're all going to die.

Iyengar: Can't imagine that happening. What?

Mulligan: So I fully believe in the worldbuilding that has to do with challenges existing in reality to the difficulty level that they would really be. If characters would realistically clean up in a fight, they get to clean up.

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I don't want to keep you too long, so let me just ask one final question. I'm dying to know, who's your favorite NPC this season?

Iyengar: [almost before the question is finished] Bolo. [laughs] Incredible. She's perfect. I am devastated that I didn't go and chase her down because I wanted more Bolo time. It's that problem of pacing. I know we have a bunch to do. I do want to go send my character to go talk to her. I know we can't... I stay in the room.

Mulligan: I don't know if you know this, but there is a... I don't know if this is in the DSM or if this is psychological, but I will refer to it as a mania. There is a mania that players have for characters that they know you didn't write beforehand. I could spend days coming up with the coolest NPC. I could spend days coming up with the funniest NPC. I promise I can write comedy ahead of time. I can make funny characters. All of it will be but a candle compared to the flaming inferno of love that PCs have for when they go, "Hey, wait a minute. I hear a noise under the table. I look under it, is there anybody under there?" and you go, "It's Prankel the Kobold." They go "PRANKEL!" They adopt him, now he's in the party. It's all people talk about because you go Prankel, and you're like, "What does Prankel sound like?" You go, "Hey, I'm Prankel the Kobold" [in southern accent]. "He sounds like a little cowboy?!" "Yeah, he's got a cowboy hat," and then that's it. Then you're locked into that potentially for years. That can be your life for years. So, yeah, Bolo. The answer is Bolo.

Iyengar: Watching you in that moment, there was a little thing. I remember talking to Lou about this very briefly at the end of Episode 1. Watching you the moment, you said "Bolo," and we were all like giggling about it. Watching you get into character and go dead behind the eyes before starting to speak as her is my favorite thing I've ever seen. It was like, "What is gonna... Oh god, she's great!" [laughs]

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Mulligan: In my head, I just went to this place. As soon as Sam said, "I don't quite remember her name. I think her name is Bolo," it just immediately conjured to me all the times that a very successful friend had brought someone to a party or gathering that was hard to be around, and you would go like, "Why is your date or friend or significant... What is the vibe in this moment?" I remember a friend gathering of a board game night and someone brought a date who truly did have that dead-eyed stare and was like, "So why do you guys like these games?" You're like, what a question to ask at a board game night!. Unbelievable.

So shout out to Bolo from Aeor and I hope I've locked Matt into a vaguely Slavic accent for all Aeorians from this time forward. I'll tag one other thing on here which is Bolo is of course my most beloved NPC, but I might also have to say that it's very fun to play one of Matt's creations. So playing... Purvan was great too, actually, but I think so far playing the Lord of the Hells has been very, very exciting as well. Spoilers for people that don't get to that second episode.

Iyengar: I like that now, because twice makes a tendency, like dear all future ExU GMs -- is it ExU if you don't get to be a god a little bit?

Mulligan: It feels like the ExU DM Myers-Briggs of which god you pick to be. It's like, "Okay, Aabria is going spider queen. Yeah, that feels right." I know that they're very popular Betrayer Gods, but for me, look there's very popular ones, but for me, there's an element of like okay, Chained Oblivion, you know, Cthulhu, all-consuming... I'm like, "Lord of the Hells, you're a saucy little... What's your deal, buddy? You seem like a... honeyed words?" This guy's literally a chained ball of mouths, and you're out here talking to people. Why? That's so fun for you. Why do you like to talk so much?

The first two episodes of Exandria Unlimited: Calamity are available now on YouTube. New episodes air June 9 and June 16 on Twitch and come to YouTube the following Mondays.