[webseries review] dimension 20: escape from the bloodkeep (2019)
this is so unreasonably wholesome. the moment of this campaign that’s a microcosm of the whole thing is brennan just exclaiming in mock dismay, “this was supposed to be the evil campaign!!”
this is the first non-intrepid heroes adventure we watched, and tbh i was kinda halfway thinking we should just watch all the intrepid heroes stuff first and get to the side adventures if/when we got to them, but i’m so glad we didn’t end up going that route. obviously the fact that this is a loving parody of lord of the rings helped a lot, as did the fact that we still had our incomparable dungeon master brennan lee mulligan.
it also helped that i already knew a lot of the players from other dropout & youtube content. trapp of course i knew as the wonderful host of um actually. erika ishii was already probably one of my favorite performers on dropout just in the various gameshows/etc i’d seen her in, so i really appreciated getting to see her sink her teeth into something more juicy (see it’s funny because her character is literally a spider queen). i know matt mercer is famous for critical role, but since i haven’t gotten into that i’ve really only seen him on um actually where he’s flexed his d&d knowledge on a number of occasions so it was cool to get to see him in his element, and i’m even more interested in eventually checking out critical role than i already was. rekha & amy i’ve seen in a ton of dropout stuff and they’re just incredibly smart & funny, and the only person i didn’t really recognize was ify, but he grew on me basically immediately, and he has a play in the last battle that is legit one of the coolest & most creative tactical moves i’ve ever seen in dungeons & dragons. so, yeah! that’ll work.
as alluded to in the first paragraph, the tone of this thing is just this wonderful combination of wholesomeness & warmth and just terrifying evil? like, erika’s character lilith is a spider queen who wants to conquer the world, but she’s also an amazing mom? and i’m sorry, but i think her son jason is my favorite character in the whole damn campaign, i’m sorry, brennan’s npcs are just so great! but i love that they’re that great without actually detracting from the players’ characters. you also have trapp’s character sokhbarr lovingly caring for gross monsters, matt mercer’s legally distinct nazgul character leiland having weird good boy energy (and ending up in the devoted service of the literal infant dark lord heir apparent), and just… i could keep going with each character, but yeah!!
this is an extension of the tone that pretty much every dimension 20 campaign has of combining the mundane with the fantastical in surprising ways, and the players always being just incredibly wholesomely supportive of each other. seeing that applied to basically the faceless enemies of the lord of the rings movies (or books, if you must) was just such a fucking vibe!! my only complaint is that none of them were orcs, and actually the orcs were one of the big “bad guys” of the campaign? and like, i get it, structurally it makes sense, but dang it, i love me some orcs & gobbies!!! and not because i’m thirsty for them.
i mean, not just because i’m thirsty for them.
