Dimension 20‘s Brennan Lee Mulligan brings TTRPGs, professional wrestling, and Greek mythology together for the bombastic new season, Titan Takedown. Set in a world where the gods and heroes of ancient Greek myth are reimagined in the style of WWE stars, Titan Takedown follows four righteous wrestlers (Xavier Woods, Bayley, Kofi Kingson, and Chelsea Green) as they embark on a fantastical adventure.
The quartet plays as the empowered Julius Mortem, Thea Kitterloo, Adonis Thanaformus, and Tabatha as they struggle to beat the Gods they’ve come to hate. During a Q&A attended by TVBrittanyF, Brennan Lee Mulligan discussed the unique energy that the wrestlers brought to the table, the appeal of using Greek mythology as a basis for the setting, and
A key element of Titan Takedown is a focus on the thematic connection between the worship of wrestlers in the ring and deities from an altar. According to Mulligan, that natural sense of fandom was felt on set among the extended crew of Dimension 20. “We do a lot of pop culture mash-up on Dimension 20,” Mulligan explained. “You take something like ancient Greek myth, that kind of fantasy tactical tabletop combat, and then you just add an element Greeco-Roman wrestling. We can kind of hinge on Zeus as Macho Man. You can do that vibe.
“It creates a saddle for people who are sitting at a table rolling dice for the first time to have a familiarity with storytelling language. So Zeus comes out, and then everybody gets to go ‘oh, got it! I’m right in the pocket, I recognize the storytelling format.’ Our fans are going to recognize the storytelling format.” Mulligan elaborated on the idea of the ‘hinge,’ describing the storytelling combat as “a hinge on a door where these things that are perpendicular can close and suddenly they’re parallel. They’re in alignment with each other.”
The wrestling careers of Titan Takedown‘s cast made scheduling difficult but gave the players an inherent connection to the concept. After setting up a Zoom call with the cast, Mulligan found the iconic imagery and elements of Greek mythology to be a good starting point for the creation of the performers’ characters. “It was nice to be able to pitch a setting. When you make a setting from scratch, you end up in that funny position that I think all GMs get in where you’re like, ‘Okay, so there are seven gem elements of the floating city of Naz’rah.’ [It can] feel like I’m alienating people. I’m losing them. With this, there’s an element of ancient Greek myth. Just even pointing to Disney’s Hercules was helpful. There are these really big cultural touchstones that are a great buy-in to people who are like, ‘Oh, shit! Yeah, Hercules, Zeus. I get it.’”
“Dungeons & Dragons, professional wrestling, and Greek mythology all have this larger-than-life-ness. It is a feeling of — you can call it tall tale, you can call it epic myth, you can also call it camp — here’s this big kind of storytelling. Everyone was pitching in their characters right away. People are going to watch this and mistakenly come away going, ‘Oh, those people are learning D&D for the first time. That might be true, but everyone’s characters came in all cylinders, firing.
“Chelsea had never played before but was like, I am going to be the sister of the goddess of love, but I am the goddess of love specifically for one’s cats, and she gets more credit than me. That’s a built-in storyline. That is a rivalry hooked in from the beginning. So what people need to give credit to these performers for is that all of these wrestlers are writers. They understand stories in their bones; they get it; they get the arc; they get the character; they get having something that you need that you’re not getting. It was just a joy. So that character creation just flew by and everyone did an awesome job.”
One of the biggest appeals of Titan Takedown for Mulligan and the rest of the cast and crew of Dimension 20 came with the chance to play with wrestlers that they admire as creatives and performers. It’s something that’s been consistent with other former guest stars of the show, like Matt Mercer in Escape from the Blood Keep, Hank Green in Mentopolis, the McElroys in Tiny Heist, and the extended cast of Dungeons & Drag Queens. Mulligan explained that this impulse “came from a genuine place of just wanting to reach out to people that we are fans of. There is a dotted line between people at the apex of performance arts that lend themselves to larger-than-life performance.”
Tackling the TTRPG space can be tricky for even the most gifted performers, something Mulligan noted wasn’t a problem for the assembled cast. “Not only are these performers so captivating and charismatic, they’re athletic and fearless and over the top. Weirdly, if you go to a wrestler or a drag queen and ask them to be vulnerable on camera, playing at a table is a way scarier pitch than other performances. But these groups of performers aren’t frightened at all… after doing twenty-plus seasons of the show, the challenge is to learning a new skill set to make this the best experience possible for a new type of performer. That’s what keeps it captivating, and I think that’s why the show stays fresh and exciting for us.”
Dimension 20: Titan Takedown is now streaming on Dropout
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