As a longtime tabletop role-player, watching Dimension 20’s Dungeons and Drag Queens is identical expertise as introducing a pal to a favourite tv present you recognize they’ll dig. All the enjoyment of watching the one you love present, and the enjoyment of watching another person study to like it as effectively.
The precise play setting, helmed by sport grasp Brennan Lee Mulligan with gamers and RuPaul’s Drag Race stars Alaska Thunderfuck, Bob the Drag Queen, Jujubee, and Monét X Change, returned for a second season this week. Scorching off the success of their season 1 journey, the Questing Queens came upon what comes after you change into well-known heroes.
You’re known as to extra journey, is the reply, however Dungeons and Drag Queens season 2 is deepening and broadening its mandate, and in doing so including one more nice aspect of sharing your favourite together with your pal: You possibly can see the twist coming they usually can’t.
[Ed. note: This story contains light spoilers for Dungeons and Drag Queens’ first season, and lighter still spoilers for the first episode of season 2.]
Picture: Dropout
From the start, Dungeons and Drag Queens has straddled the audience of skilled and understanding TTRPG gamers/precise play watchers and the viewers of oldsters who’ve by no means engaged with the pastime or the medium in any respect. You solely have to have a look at the comments on any Dungeons and Drag Queens YouTube clip to see it. They’re filled with Drag Race followers who began watching to get extra of their faves, and stayed subscribed due to how successfully the primary season introduced the attraction of TTRPGs and the precise play medium (and, it ought to be stated, vice versa).
The brilliance of DaDQ’s first season — what makes it extra than simply the fun of “two issues that don’t often go collectively” — had been the delicate methods Dimension 20 adjusted itself on the expectation of an viewers new to the precise play medium and even the TTRPG pastime itself. The season featured a extra easy (however nonetheless twisty) story than different seasons, bringing sufficient rule-explaining again into the edit in order that non-TTRPG gamers might get a way of the stakes. And Mulligan’s personal improvisational chops obtained an actual exercise from a set of gamers within the technique of discovering in what methods they preferred to interact with a TTRPG world, hatching capers like deciding on a whim to, for instance, steal from a high-level shopkeeper and unsuccessfully making an attempt to run.
It was pleasant to observe the queens problem Mulligan in ways in which his common casts don’t, and season 2 is already persevering with that theme. As a substitute of long-form improv comedians drilled in “sure, and” and enjoying within the area, Alaska et al. are improvisational performers from a extra adversarial, let’s say… tit for tat custom, and it provides the seasons a few of their greatest metatextual moments. As on this week’s episode, the place Jujubee described her character Twyla pulling a size of “fae-twine” from round a bundle, saying, “And I preserve the twine as a result of I believe it’s going to come in useful later.” Then she locked eyes with Mulligan and snapped, “Proper?!”
It’s not the traditional second when a participant focuses too arduous on an immaterial element, however a participant inventing the significance of a element entire material, pointing proper at their DM, and declaring that they higher make it vital later in the event that they know what’s good for them. A gauntlet clearly thrown.
And to a seasoned fan of Dimension 20 — and a seasoned TTRPG participant — it’s clear what Mulligan is doing on this first season 2 episode. Now that the characters and their gamers have the fundamentals down, he takes them proper to a masquerade ball (each TTRPG participant ought to know the pleasure of taking your character to a elaborate get together as an alternative of a forbidden dungeon) and introduces a smorgasbord of plot threads. Suitors, shifty returning NPCs, secret messages you won’t be capable to belief, new revelations in regards to the drawbacks of your sudden fame.
Picture: Dropout TV
Dungeons and Drag Queens season 1 was about establishing the attraction of TTRPG gameplay, and season 2 is showcasing precisely how that gameplay can deepen and broaden as soon as there’s a basis of characters, world-building, and plot parts to name again to.
And that’s the place the dramatic irony is available in.
Like several creative, Mulligan has themes to which he’s persistently drawn, and longtime viewers shall be hip to them. An NPC who’s constructing beachfront-ready property on the highest of a mountain vary whereas letting coastal mansions go for a track? Mulligan’s gotta get up actual early within the morning to get that foreshadowing previous me. However have the Questing Queens seen? Will they discover? When will they discover?
There’s nonetheless loads for them to find, and for me to take pleasure in watching them uncover, as they’re launched to one among my favourite hobbies.
