Aabria Iyengar On The Bear Battle Map & Finally Killing Brennan Lee Mulligan

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• The twentieth season of Dimension 20, Burrow’s End, is heading towards a shocking finale with the stoat family at the center.
• Aabria Iyengar returns as the Game Master and explains the battle map pitch process and sharing it with Matt Mercer during her arc in Critical Role Campaign 2.
• The First Stoats’ death in the recent episode was a surprising twist, leaving unanswered questions and setting up an even greater threat for the remaining episodes.

The penultimate episode of Burrow’s End, the twentieth season of Dimension 20, foisted the stoat family into a position of leadership within Last Bast and face-to-face with their first human. Questioning everything they have been told, the family still attempts to prepare for the worst while also believing the First Stoats may have been lying after learning how the meltdown actually occurred. However, with countless more humans on their doorstep, the question becomes: who will hold the Last Bast in the end?

Aabria Iyengar is the mastermind behind this season as the Game Master for this darker season of Dimension 20. The Burrow’s End cast includes returning cast members Brennan Lee Mulligan, Siobhan Thopmson, Erika Ishii, and Isabella Roland. The cast also includes longtime Dimension 20 fans but first-time players in the dome, Jasper Cartwright and Rashawn Nadine Scott.

Screen Rant interviewed Aabria Iyengar about the penultimate episode of the current Dimension 20 season, Burrow’s End. She explained how Matt Mercer inspired the iconic bear battle map for this season and finally achieved her dream of killing Mulligan’s Dimension 20 character. Iyengar also shared how the interaction between the stoats and Dr. Steel could have gone wrong, the shocking death of the First Stoats, and its aftermath.

Aabria Iyengar Talks Dimension 20: Burrow’s End

Screen Rant: Aabria, this season is insane, and I have so much to talk to you about, but the first thing I would talk to you about isn’t even from this episode. What was the bear battle map about, dude? That was terrifying. That was gorgeous. You have to tell me about that process.

Aabria Iyengar: Thank you. Okay, so the problem is Zoom did, in fact, clip out the word you yelled, so I don’t know what you reacted to.

The bear battle map.

Aabria Iyengar: Oh my gosh, yes. Oh, that’s right. We haven’t talked.

We haven’t talked about it.

Aabria Iyengar: So my friendly, cute little animal season got weirdly interrupted by a nasty boy bear. I have been dreaming of a map, like a fight that takes place on the inside of a living thing for so stinking long. It was so funny when we were first talking and all the hype after the trailer dropped came and everyone was like, “Cute little stoat season, but maybe a little scary.”

And I was like, “I don’t know how to tell everyone that the second episode is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever done.” And we were trading emails about it, hearing that art people in the art department were like, “We have protocols if someone kind of gets nauseous while working on this, it’s just so nasty.” And I love my little bear polly so much. It’s like a nasty Polly Pocket.

Yes. I did not get the chance to tell you I fully had to pause and walk away for a minute. I was like, “I need a minute. I cannot believe that you just did this.”

Aabria Iyengar: I’m so sorry. It was one of those really funny things where I got a call from a friend who was like, “I was eating dinner,” and that’s all the text said, and I was like, “What is the…?” Oh yeah, it’s kind of an evening release, so maybe don’t eat any spaghetti for the rest of this season. It’s a little gross.

Is that your first battle map? Because I don’t think you’ve really used them on Dimension 20 before.

Aabria Iyengar: So that’s my first Dimension 20 battle map very specifically after Ravening War and seeing the cool stuff Rick and the art department made for Matt when he came in to jump back inside Calorum and I was like, “Okay, I really need to pop off with some of the bigger ideas I’ve had for maps.” I’ve done map stuff over on Critical Role because Matt has a giant map room, so I was learning to build maps for EXU, which was really fun and good because normally I’m just sort of a theater of the mind kind of guy, because I came into this late and was like, I can’t burn all of the money I’ve ever had on maps, even though that’s now my instinct.

So yeah, it was one of those things where you’re like, “Cool, if it’s not me with a hot glue gun and some puffy paint, what is possible?” And Carlos and I had a bunch of really cool meetings where he came over and I have a whole… When we talk again later and everything’s out there, I’ll show you my big whiteboard. I left it, it’s still up of the original pitches. The Bear was the original thing I pitched as was the map from six/seven, our sort of two-way puzzle that turns into the ritual room that I originally asked.

I was like, “Hey Rick, I don’t know if you would care but maybe cut a giant hole in the table for me.” And he was like, “Hey, no, absolutely not.” It was the most deadpan thing in this big meeting full of cool and we’re going to try to pull this off. And then I tried to sneak it in and he is like, “We’re not doing that. Aabria, we’re not going to cut a hole in the table for you.” And then I had a little meltdown and I was like, “I bet you would do it for Brennan, and you would do it for Jasmine.” Just do it for me. And he is like, “No. I would tell them no also, so we’re going to build something else.” But anyway, it is very cool and it’s been very, very fun to sort of take the biggest idea…

Trying to think about when you say hi, we’re going to hard commit to maps and minis, trying to push the form a little bit about what does it mean to have an encounter map? What does it mean to see a big thing that you think is the villain and then have the reveal that everything’s happening on the inside? What does it mean to have this sort of really fun puzzle with not a lot of a fight encounter on the top and have that turn into a big final confrontation with the first notes? So it’s been very, very fun. I like it so much. Sorry, I’ve been talking for a long time. I’m very excited.

I’m going to talk about the map before we jump into the penultimate episode. You said that you were learning maps over at Critical Role with EXU. Did you talk to Matt about this map at all since you couldn’t talk to Brennan for obvious reasons?

Aabria Iyengar: Yeah, it was really funny, especially because while we were doing all of the pre-production for this, I was guesting as Deanna in the main campaign and after one of the Molaesmyr episodes where everything got really gross and very annihilation and nasty, the moment we stopped filming, I was just like, “Matt, let me talk to you for 10 seconds because we’re working on this map.”

And yeah, definitely, there’s something so beautiful about being able to pick the minds of the greatest game runners out there to be like, “So here’s what I’m thinking. Here’s what we’re working on, here’s what’s being built. What do you see? Here’s what I’m trying to aim for.” And getting to collaborate with just geniuses is a really fun side effect of getting to work in this space. And yeah, it was agony not being able to talk to Brennan about it, but there’s always something so fun about surprising your friends with… It feels like a Project. “Look at this thing I built. It’s nasty and it’s for you.” Yuck.

I love it. By the way, I would put you up there as one of the top Game Masters.

Aabria Iyengar: Thank you.

Okay, I have to talk to you about the First Stoats before we get into the lore and craziness of it. How did it feel for them all to die immediately?

Aabria Iyengar: It was so funny. I was sitting there and when you play in encounters where you’re like, “Oh, I’m expecting a lot of lore drops too. How do I make sure that all the lore is getting out there without dragging down the pacing of a high tension fight?” And it was so funny to come out of the gate and then just be like, Tula goes, “For the what? Oh, oh, no monologue. Oh, you’re just going to stomp them. Got it. Well, interesting. Well, they’re dead now. Would you like a free wolf? I guess that you could just have that now.”

It was so fun.

I loved everything moving into the sort of face off and this idea that this was our big bad and this was the thing you had to face down against these sort of shadowy leaders that no one really understood and how easy it was for our party and the audience to map a bunch of societal ills onto them because they don’t have a lot of information, so it’s easy to assume because they’re scary and wear clothes of authority figures from the human world and have weird teeth and are a little nasty and bigger. But it’s very easy to go, “Those are my big bads. This is going to be a big… It’s over. Oh, it’s over, it’s over.”

And the last things that they said to us were like, “If we die, we die, but don’t let last fast fall.” It felt like a really fun, not like rug pull for the party, but that moment of realization at the end of this big conflict that you were like, “Well, there’s still several more episodes in the series, so what does that mean about what these people were to the sort of arc of the story?

And I like that it was sort of a fake out of a climax that you’re like, “No, the bad thing’s coming and now you have even less information than you thought you were going to come away with because questions weren’t answered, questions weren’t asked.” So now they died believing something even worse than them was on the way and you have to figure out what it is and get 20,000 stoats ready. Good luck.

This family rolled up within 24 hours. It’s like, “We killed all your leaders and I guess we’re in charge. And also everything you thought might be a lie, but also maybe isn’t.”

Aabria Iyengar: Right. It was so funny coming into as Bennett, I was like, “Oh, I’ve got to have someone with that perspective. Great. I’m going to poof Sybil away and we’re going to bring Bennett in to have… What do you mean you cast command on him upon entry?” Okay, this can’t be another fight, but you got to see how this looks right. He did rock up, sort of assume a lot, ask not as many questions as you think you did and then kill all the leaders. And then the funniest part was the like, “Well, maybe we should leave.”

And you’re like, “No, you can’t destabilize and then go, help.” So it was very fun living in the consequence of violence instead of just lionizing the violence itself. And I think that’s a thing I wanted to talk about, especially in terms of what D&D does and what it inspires in people. This party has leveled several times. It is easy and very available for them to lean into their magical abilities and their marshal abilities to solve whatever problem jumps in front of them, but that doesn’t solve the problem. That was an act.

Solving the problem is helping the society and it wasn’t just liberating them from the first stoats, it’s figuring out what’s going on and making the best choices in the face of an impending bigger crisis. So it was very, very fun and the party handled it so beautifully and I’m just so excited as we enter into the end game to see how all of that pays off. There’s been a lot of pretty political themes and interpersonal themes, but we’re now getting to the point where the family is resolving all of their stuff and now they can kind of look to the last problem on the horizon for this story at least.

I love it. I also am now just picturing them following Tula’s advice and dipping.

Aabria Iyengar: Yeah, right? What if they just took off?

The rest of season is just running away.

Aabria Iyengar: I would laugh so hard if it was just a series of survival checks as they just run into the forest and I’m like, “Okay, I guess we’re just… You’re done. I don’t know. You guys want to have one really, really, really long adventuring party because I think we’re at a plot.”

Oh my God, that’d be hilarious. Then we got a huge lore drop. You were able to find a way to actually get all the lore in which well done.

Aabria Iyengar: Thank you. Thank you.

Can you talk to me a little bit about developing that? Because again, it’s one of those things where it’s like, “Oh, we’re coming in at the end of someone’s story. This is really interesting.”

Aabria Iyengar: Yeah, there is a thing where all of that information was seeded in different ways throughout the sort of time in Last Bast and the struggle of any improvised story is I at no point want to force them to, “Here, I have to give you a big heaping spoonful of lore,” as you’re trying to figure out what you care about in your first sort of interactions in Last Bast. So I showed stuff when there were things to show, but mostly it was interpersonal things within the family and a lot of stuff with Sybil and Lucas. So when it came to the truth of the first stoats, they got to the big fight and didn’t have a little bit of information.

Of course everything can happen without all of that lore drop happening, but it felt important to talk about how the first stoats got there in order to draw some of the parallels I was hoping the audience and the party would see between. I don’t think there’s much difference between Tula’s protectiveness over her family and her willingness to do tremendous violence in order to protect her children and her sister and her mother and her brother-in-law. I don’t think that’s any different than the feeling the first stoats had about Last Bast of being willing and capable of doing acts of great violence in order to protect the people you care about.

And I think there’s something interesting to be said there within the society. So it felt like ironically enough, humanizing the first stoats a little bit, gave a little more context to not only what’s coming but how this group of five stoats got to where they are as our party and the plot intersects with them and it was really fun and I just wanted them to know a little bit more about my little girl, phoebe. She’s great.

So curious about her because, truly, when I was taking notes on this episode, one of my things was, who is the big bad? Is it Phoebe? Is it humans in general? Is it Dr. Wenabocker, Dr. Wenabago?

Aabria Iyengar: Poor Dr. Wenabocker. RIP. Yeah. I think there’s something really interesting in playing a little bit of moving the goalpost and who the big bad is. Of course, with enough information and drilling down, you can figure out who any different faction believes the big bad is. But I don’t think that there’s always objectively good and evil clearly delineated in the world. And I wanted to try to replicate a little bit of that of like, well, the people you thought were the big bads think this other thing is the big bad.

And they don’t know if this secret variable in Phoebe… Is Phoebe an ally to the first stoats? Is Phoebe a McGuffin to the human? What are all of these different levels of power and power bases doing with one another and who considers who a friend and an enemy and worth protecting and worth watching? And I think that little bit of intrigue is just that nice little layer going into an end game. I don’t think I answered your question at all.

Well, to be fair, my question is basically: who’s the big bad?

Aabria Iyengar: You’ll find out.

Can you tell me a little bit about Dr. Wenabocker though? Because he’s alive, and he apparently just told everyone, “No, I got attacked by people.” Which is understandable; I don’t know how you walk out of that and go, “Five stoats straight up attacked me and stuffed me in a closet.” That wouldn’t work.

Aabria Iyengar: So poor Dr. Wenabocker, what if you are a high value head scientist of a nuclear facility in a country that I will not define because you can’t make me do it. We will not lean into geography, and five weasels, but not even as big as weasels, like five extended hamsters come and absolutely run your shit. Sorry if we can’t cuss. Yeah, I think it’s one of those things where you’re like, “I got to make sure no one knows that I got attacked by a bunch of rats and for a while I thought they won.” Well, we’re not going to talk about that at all. There’s a whole nuclear thing happening. No one’s going to worry about that. Ignore the scratches. We’re fine.

I’m so curious about him. Does he want revenge on the stoats or is he truly just like, “That was weird,” and moved on with his life?

Aabria Iyengar: It’s so funny. I do want to talk about this way more. Hey, why don’t we have this conversation-

Next week.

Aabria Iyengar: Next week. There is just a little bit more of a payoff there that I don’t want to give away too much of. But yes, the sort of struggle of Dr. Wenabocker is very core to the end game of this season. But man, I think Wenabocker would’ve been a much milder little sort of side plot point. But Carlos came in and on top of all of his producer duties and all the ways in which he helped as we were coming into pre-production and while we were filming, he just crushed the tapes so much.

I texted him with a weird idea and wrote a very basic script. And then what I got back was so stinking good that it definitely caused me to go back. I was like, “I need to go back and work on the story more because I think there is more to this.” He made some additions and just elevated in a way that was like, “Oh, there’s a little more to this.” So we’ll dig in and add a little more stink on. It’s very cute, scientist.

I love that. He was so great.

Aabria Iyengar: So good.

And then this kind of curtails into the next topic I want to talk about. I think what’s so interesting is that because we’ve been living in the stoats’ minds with this for so long, we’re like, “Of course Wenabocker wants revenge,” and then you take a step aside and you’re like, “He’s a person that got attacked by a bunch of rodents, you’re not looking for revenge.” You’re like, “That was weird.” And move on to the next thing. So that’s so interesting. Then we had our first interaction between stoats and humans. I want to get into the meat of that, but everyone’s reaction to Rashawn going, “Hey girl, hey.”

Aabria Iyengar: I have to say there is just something so fun when you have people with your cultural touchstones at the table and having another black woman there to just have that little moment of, “You are a stoat and I’m a guy, but you’re going to say, ‘Hey girl, hey,’ and you’re going to like…” And it was really fun to have that moment of we connected a player to player while also in the trappings of this very crazy situation and I was just like, “Oh man.” I definitely went home that day and was laughing really hard about what would I do if I was just out minding my business and doing my work? And a little stoat comes up to me and not only speaks English but speaks slang.

What if a stoat was cool at you? And it was just the funniest thing. And everyone at the table, Rashawn especially, is just so funny and quick on their feet and can bring these moments and points of high levity and absurdity that doesn’t break the world in any way, but it does feel like a really nice tension relief valve for a stressful season that is sliding into its end game. It was just so good and so funny. And I’m pretty sure we had to edit out a lot more of my laughing from the final cut because that one got me very good.

Yes, watching people’s jaws drop and Brennan just losing it was like… I needed that moment.

Aabria Iyengar: So good. The ability to surprise your friends is a thing I will… That’s the high I chase, to make your friends laugh, to make them shocked, to make them feel something is very cool. So the reactions were all great. That was so funny. It’s so good.

Oh, we learned that the stoats aren’t speaking English or whatever human language they’re speaking in wherever they’re set, they’re speaking human, and then they interact with a human. Can you talk about getting into that headspace of a person that’s straight up talking to stoats? Because you’ve spent so much of the season stoatifying people things to flip that on its head.

Aabria Iyengar: Yeah, it felt like the really fun exercise back because so much, not so much, but a fun bit that I got to play with as a DM throughout the season was doing the if I had described this with normal clear English words with all of their context, everyone at the table and everyone in the audience would know exactly what I was talking about. But context sets are different. Language isn’t just knowing what the words are. It’s having the reference set. It’s very much the Star Trek, Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, that idea of metaphor and having a shared sense of what context things have, allows for language to flow easily.

So after tormenting the table with that a bunch, it was really nice to give it back to my NPC as a human going, “Okay, I am a scientist, so I approach everything with…” It’s that idea of this is a scientist that’s coming back into an irradiated zone 20 years after a meltdown, doesn’t know what to expect, is finding ways in which the woods and the flora and fauna within it have changed markedly and monstrously. And then you meet a little stoat, and the weirdest thing of all isn’t that it’s somehow monstrous or hyper violent or has weird horns or extra teeth or some annihilation problem. It’s that you meet a little creature and it’s exactly as smart as you.

It can have a conversation. It has memory and history and context. And I think that is in the same way that Eldridge Horror is about this unfathomable thing that you couldn’t even imagine, that you couldn’t even wrap your mind around. There’s something terrifying, to me at least, of the idea of something that you took for granted being incredibly different in a way that forces you to reevaluate these sort of hierarchy of supremacy of intellect in your world, especially for a scientist for whom taxonomy of things is like the entire name of the game.

Yeah, that makes me curious. Could that interaction have gone completely differently had it not been approached in such a communicative nature? Is that something where it could have been, they immediately came off as a threat to these guys and it immediately turned into we have to exterminate these?

Aabria Iyengar: Yep, definitely. So there’s a moment in the previous episode when we play the tapes and everyone like Brennan gets up and Erica runs under the table and pops up behind me and I go from being very like, “This is my cool horror thing,” to shrieking and asking them to stop looking because I had a big flow chart that was up in a physical note because yeah, I have my Google doc and all of my reference stuff on the computer, but some things like bigger beats, I like having just an eye line and a bigger font.

I wear glasses I can’t see that well. So I had a big flow chart for what was going to happen with our darling scientist, Dr. Steele, depending on how the stoats approach. And yeah, it was a little bit of a thumb up on the scale towards curiosity, but that could have slipped into a threat and a deeply unfair fight if that had gone differently.

Interesting. And then what’s been the most surprising part of seeing how the table has had the stoat family evolve throughout the season?

Aabria Iyengar: Coming into it, the way everyone in our character generation had sort of built the parameters and ideas of how this family would get along. This idea of a family that is tight-knit and loves and protects each other, but has those big problems of bad things happen external to them and because they’re not processed well, there’s a tension within the group too, so now we have multiple generations. And we talk about generational trauma, big shout out to Erica for making the coolest possible character.

They came in and literally said, “I want to play generational trauma so hard. I will be a path of…” To play an ancestral barbarian, you were like, “Oh, so even after death, this idea of generations of family violently protecting their family.” It just became this mythologized sense of you don’t escape the rungs in the ladder of your family and how oppressive that could feel, not just for Tula and her kids, but also for Ava. She’s also caught in that in the same way.

And Thorn is married into it and Viola is now engaging with it in a new way for the first time being an expectant mother. So all of that was sort of table stakes as we walked in and then giving them time and space to explore and resolve or worsen different aspects of their relationship based on the sort of stimuli I was throwing towards them from the outside. How does a bear fight get you to talk a little bit more about your family trauma? It is very cool and seeing where they are now getting ready to hit our finale episode, it was just such a beautiful arc of we do what we need to do, being in that sort of white-knuckle, we just have to survive.

And then you get to a place where you’re like, “It isn’t survival. If we don’t resolve this, we can’t keep pushing these conversations. We can’t keep hoping that a bandaid will cover the rift in our relationships because something bigger or worse is happening. We need to deal with it now.” And watching everyone move through those arcs, some of those scenes, you don’t see a cut to me because I am mouth agape, tearing up. Everyone just crushed it. And gosh, I just laid that at the feet of a brilliant table that knew exactly how and when to press with one another and just got to such a beautiful place. They’re just so good.

I completely agree. And then I’ll ask one last question for this episode before we do our full big crazy breakdown.

Aabria Iyengar: Yeah.

Tula has been dead the whole time.

Aabria Iyengar: The whole time.

What inspired that?

Aabria Iyengar: Caitlin, I struggle. I have tried to kill Brennan in the dome so many times and I haven’t pulled it off and I figured the only way to win was to kill him before we even started. And yeah, it was very cool that while we were doing our character gen when we were rolling for stats, Brennan rolled kind of poorly the second time on his do-over and I was like, “I’ll give you another roll, but let me pitch something to you.” And we went outside and talked on the little staircase outside the green room and having someone that had already been incredibly transformed by the blue was just a really nice… It’s nice to have a fun little table reveal, but it also just has that stakes of what is the blue capable of?

How sentient is it? When does it choose? Why does it choose and why Tula and not Jeffrey, which is such a beautiful thing for Brennan to sit on that in all of Tula’s conversations, if you go back and watch, that extra bit of context makes so much of that, it makes sense. It makes her weariness make sense. It makes her worry make sense. She knows that death is real because she has met it and not just as a grieving widow but herself. And I think there’s something even more fearsome in the peacefulness of her death that…

Yeah, I think it explains why she is so motivated by fear and not wanting to leave her family behind. And the way duty stirred in her heart again is just, it’s so important to who Tula is as a character and a caretaker and it was so nice to make the revenant, the mother of young children of just love or revenge brings you back from the dead, which was it? And why? So it was just very cool. And then Brennan, of course, crushed it and I think I technically get my W for having killed Brennan Lee Mulligan in the dome. Sort of.

I love that because I’m picturing you after Ravening War going, “I didn’t get to kill his radish, I’m going to kill his stoat.”

Aabria Iyengar: Yep! Yep. I’m going to kill that stoat. It’s also really funny that looking back at the last year of stories, I think I’ve been circling around a lot of thoughts about death and life in the context of D&D, playing Karna that was also revenant. Deanna has also come back from the dead. This is something that I’ve definitely been thinking about and trying to figure out what I want to say and what I think about telling stories in a world where you know that the gods are real and the afterlife exists, and if you die, that’s not forever.

So what is death and how does that change who you are when the thing that we are all fighting to avoid so hard is something that is a little bit more reversible than you think? It’s a very interesting little wrinkle to add into your idea of your characters you play in game.

I love it. I cannot wait for the finale. This is easily one of my favorite seasons of Dimension 20. You were like, “It’s not cute. Wait.” I was like, “Okay.” And then I was like, “I can’t even be mad. She warned me.”

Aabria Iyengar: It was so hard up top just being like, I don’t know what I can tell you. It’s going to get so weird. I don’t even think if you watch the trailer and I was like, “Hey, the early comps, Secret of Nim and Watershed Down are very quickly going to give way to A Brave New World, and 1984, and Animal Farm, and one other comp that will be very obvious after the finale. It’s just one of those things where you’re like, I think you just have to…

Please just trust and hold on to whatever the story is giving you. And don’t put too many presuppositions onto it. And I hope everyone likes it because I really do, and I’m really, really proud of it and I’m so proud of everyone both in front and behind the camera in pre-production and post-production and was there on the day. Everyone put their absolute heart and soul into it and elevated it. So it’s very nice that I get to sort of be a bit of the face of this season, but this season wouldn’t be one of my favorite things I’ve ever done without everyone that elevated and turned it from good to great. So it’s very cool. I’m very happy.

About Dimension 20: Burrow’s End

Burrow’s End takes place in the Blue Forest, where a certain family of stoats, comprised of matriarch Ava, adult sisters Tula and Viola, Viola’s husband Thorn Vale, and Tula’s children, Jaysohn and Lila find their once peaceful existence threatened by forces both natural and otherwise.

Check out our other Dimension 20 Burrow’s End interviews:

The finale of Dimension 20’s Burrow’s End debuts on Dropout on December 6.

Source: Screen Rant Plus

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  Dimension 20

  Release Date:

  2018-09-18

  Cast:

  Brennan Lee Mulligan, Lou Wilson, Ally Beardsley, Zac Oyama, Emily Axford, Siobhan Thompson, Brian Murphy

  Genres:

  Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy

  Rating:

  TV-MA

  Seasons:

  15

  Writers:

  Brennan Lee Mulligan, Michael Wm. Kaluta, Elaine Lee

  Streaming Service(s):

  Dropout TV

  Directors:

  Michael Schaubach

  Showrunner:

  Brennan Lee Mulligan