The Unsleeping City was one of the first campaigns in Dimension 20, the Dropout TTRPG series that brings together a host of gifted comedians and performers for wild fantasy worlds and stories. Set in a version of New York City where the mystical is hidden just under the surface, the series highlighted the emotional depth that could be coupled with Dimension 20‘s non-stop comedy.

Four years since the previous season in the setting, The Unsleeping City is has been brought back for “Gauntlet at the Garden,” a massive live event that was held on January 24th at Madison Square Garden in New York City. TVBrittanyF got the chance to speak with Brennan Lee Mulligan shortly before the Madison Square Garden show, where he discussed the biggest surprises of The Unsleeping City, the true magic of New York City, and which other Dimension 20 campaigns would also be best suited for live shows.

TVBrittanyF: You’ve got a deep connection to New York City, given the time you spent living and going to school here. What does it mean to you to not just be bringing back the NYC-set Unsleeping City, but to be doing it in Madison Square Garden?

Brennan Lee Mulligan: I can only say that the best tool I have had to protect myself from how meaningful this all is… has just been the incredible task of just working on the show itself. Having everything lined up with the incredible artists and crew members and technicians and everyone who’s bringing the show together in this way, it is a gift. Having the work to retreat to is a real gift. Because I feel like if I was forced to be in a position where I had to just sit and anticipate it, I would unravel like a cheap sweat. If someone was like, ‘go sit in that room for an hour,’ I would explode into a million modes of light.

Thankfully, there’s a lot of stuff to do, which is the only reason I’m alive and talking to you right now. It’s beyond meaningful. The Unsleeping City is a product of loving New York with all my heart and having moved away and trying to write a love letter to this so much. My life in Los Angeles is amazing. I love Los Angeles, I have a wonderful family and community there. Los Angeles is an amazing city, and especially after the fires I’m just thinking a lot about the city and how much I love it and how much I love all the people there.

However, a part of you always misses your hometown. In my experience, I’ve been missing my hometown quite a lot. Coming back here in the freezing cold to be here in the city, it’s amazing. We went to some other building for an interview earlier , and we looked out and there were a group of people juggling in front of the public library. And we were like, ‘look at those people that go get their juggling stuff and go to the library.’ And then someone said, ‘no, that’s not their juggling stuff. That’s municipal juggling equipment.’

I love this city with every fiber of my being. The juggling stuff’s just there! Like you take out a book from the library, you can take out brightly colored pins. I just love it with all my heart. It’s so human and so rich, and it’s impossible to talk about how magical New York City feels. You have to invent magic. You have to create a magical setting, to be able to communicate how much this place feels like magic. I need to talk about wizards and gnomes and dragons and spirits, because that’s the feeling of being in that place.

It really is a special place. I’ve lived all over the world — the joys of being a military brat growing up — but I always wanted to come to New York City. I mean, it’s where Spider-Man lives!

That was an incredible PR win, by the way [Laughter]. It’s just so funny because it’s like all these little things that add up. The city has a very distinctive skyline and a degree of population density that other American cities don’t get to. To see these factors come together across history — no one intended it to be this way, but just this is an incredible place.

Look at Astoria Queens. I don’t know if this is still true, but there’s a period of time when Astoria Queens had the largest amount of first languages spoken of any zip code that had a census review in the world. So globally, there were more first languages spoken in Astoria than anywhere else on the planet. And God damn it, that doesn’t make you proud? That’s amazing. It’s exceptional. It’s historic. So, yeah, my love for the city runs very, very deep.

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You’ve got other live shows coming up too, like the Starstruck Odyssey episode in Las Vegas and the Fantasy High show at the Hollywood Bowl, both of which I’m very excited for.

How are you doing, by the way? Were you guys okay with the fires?

Yeah, my wife and I live in North Hollywood, so we didn’t have to evacuate. I hope you were all okay too!

Yeah! We had a friend evacuate to our house for a while. Yeah, it’s been really tough. We all feel like everyone knows, like, a dozen people who lost something. It’s very tragic, and it’s simultaneously incredibly wonderful and reifying to see that 95 plus percent of people will come together and give everything of whatever they have to each other. And then it also isolates that less than five percent who are jacking rent prices up and need to be reported and frankly, banished and ostracized from polite society.

Exactly! Now we know who to put alone on that island with Elon Musk.

Exactly! [Laughter]

What other seasons of Dimension 20 do you think would be perfectly suited for a live show like this?

There are worlds in Dimension 20 that have not yet been announced that I think would be great for live show settings. I’m very excited for Starstruck, because I think that world has an energy to it which really works for live shows. If you look at the structure of Starstruck, it was a classic sort of road trip story where villains arose and were defeated, as we’re telling this larger story. It was very episodic. Very Cowboy Bebop, very in that space mercenary way where you’re like, ‘oh, here’s Sheriff Warner Codge, here’s Arcadia Prime.’ These villains arise and fall as the big overarching Gnosis subplot is occurring, with these subplots appearing underneath it.

So I think that, for our purposes. Starstruck is a setting that is really ripe for live show format story time. I also think fFantasy High is going to be awesome. Fantasy High is another one that’s so rich, where when I look at the possibility of Senior Year somewhere far off in the future, I think there are some threads that are maybe better off tied up in a live show than they are necessarily taking an episode out of what would be the finale season. There’s just so many bits in three years and multiple spin off seasons, and it’s just a lot of stuff. So that’s very exciting too. I think Fantasy High live is gonna be really fun.

Coming back to the world of Unsleeping City, I’m curious what elements of this setting and this story really caught you by surprise when they played out a few years ago. What was it about these characters that really threw you for a loop?

I think it’s really fun to look at how this was the second campgin we did. The first season of The Unsleeping City was the second season of Dimension 20. All of The Unsleeping City was in conversation with Fantasy High. When you’re making a season, you’re like, what have we already done? What’s the metaphor from The Great Gatsby? You’re rowing right boats born ceaselessly back into the past. So The Unsleeping City is like looking at Fantasy High but not looking at the things that came after it. It’s so funny to think about the pantheon of different worlds and fantasy settings and other things like that came after that.

I couldn’t have anticipated when I was working on it that this one would feels so human. It feels so emotional, and the moments feel so grounded. I’m like, ‘the one with the guy who puts magic items up his ass and can tell what they are is the grounded one?’ Yeah, it’s deeply human.I think there’s something about the fact that, by virtue of these six magical New Yorkers going on adventures as they have to live their lives… the crew of the Wurst in Starstruck, that is their life. They live there. They are at the mercy of those adventures. In Fantasy High, these kids are in high school for heroes. It’s a fundamentally absurd premise. In The Unsleeping City, threats to New York City arise, and these six characters are the most qualified to answer them. But when those threats aren’t there, they still have to figure out how to fill your days with meaning.

That is right in the pocket for people, and what they’re doing. When you see Sophia and Pete struggling with sobriety, or you see Kingston struggling with his feelings about wanting to be a father, you see the things that the characters grapple with. Especially in season two, those things are so deeply human. In a weird way, there’s a metaphor there. I think a lot of people look at a world that has things happening all the time in it that cause great alarm and dismay, and people realize, all of us, the billions of people that want no part in how these dark tidings are unfolding, we all might have to find spaces in our lives to band together arm in arm.

Whether that’s mutual aid, whether that’s direct action, whether that’s labor organizing, whatever you need to do to strengthen your community and make a brighter future for you and the people you care about. We need to do it We all now have that thing that the dream team in New York City has. Sometimes I am called upon for great heroism in the midst of a life that I have to devote to finding need and purpose and community. I think that that’s why it’s struck the chord that it has with people. It makes me very proud to be a part of team of crew and cast bringing this story to life.

Dimension 20 is now streaming on Dropout