For Dimension 20’s next campaign, Burrow’s End, Aabria Iyengar needs you to trust her

11.10.2023 - 13:13 / polygon.com / Erika Ishii

It’s been a challenging month for Aabria Iyengar, possibly the most terminally online game master in the wild world of professional actual play. She’s appeared on just about every major show as either player or GM, but she’s returned most often to comedy platform Dropout’s anthology series Dimension 20, where she was the first-ever guest GM in 2021 and now leads the show’s landmark 20th season, Burrow’s End.

The trailer sparked both surprise and speculation among the show’s biggest fans. Familiar faces Brennan Lee Mulligan, Erika Ishii, and Isabella Roland welcome Rashawn Nadine Scott (also seen on Dropout’s Make Some Noise) and Jasper William Cartwright (Three Black Halflings) to the Dome. But the trailer contained not a single joke. Also, the cast is playing as an extended family of stoats, small mammals that most closely resemble weasels. And it’s all in the service of a game of… Dungeons & Dragons?

Polygon sat down with Iyengar for a conversation about the development of the season, when to lean into audience expectations versus thwarting them, why she chose D&D for this season in the first place, and how the first episode provided hints for only part of what comes next.

To start, one fan wish was granted: WhenDimension 20 DM Brennan Lee Mulligan visited Critical Role to run Exandria Unlimited: Calamity, his opening word was the alarming “fire.” When Critical Role DM Matthew Mercer did a reciprocal guest turn for Dimension 20’s The Ravening War, his narration began with the word “water.” And now Iyengar, who played in both miniseries, takes her elemental turn to start with “earth.” But that, Iyengar says, was where fan service ended: “One audience expectation done, everything else: Just buckle the fuck up and you’re gonna have to trust us a little bit on this, because this one’s gonna feel different.”

And feeling “different” has absolutely been the goal since the beginning of development early this year. The show is most known for putting players with strong comedic and improv chops into games of D&D set in unexpected places, often with an underlying social commentary at its heart. Iyengar’s prior seasons didn’t focus on D&D, but instead used Kids on Brooms (Misfits and Magic) or foregrounded mechanics from Jane Austen-inspired Good Society (A Court of Fey and Flowers).

Some fans assumed that Burrow’s End would also use an indie system, given Iyengar as GM and the adorable furry characters. But while stoats are adorable, they’re also opportunistic predators that Iyengar notes “will pick a fight with something way bigger.” We find out very early in the episode that the titular burrow is a former rabbit warren — the prior generations of stoats didn’t create this space, they took it over. As Iyengar