For newcomers drawn in by the phenomenon of Dropout’s actual-play series Dimension 20, choosing where to begin can feel as daunting as navigating a sprawling anime franchise. The show has built an enormous back catalog over its run, and committing to any long-running campaign requires a level of dedication usually reserved for epic television sagas. Even Dimension 20’s longer campaigns remain snack-sized compared to a single season of Critical Role, yet players could still spend anywhere from five to 60 hours completing one story.
This guide is designed to help interested newcomers decide where to start. Not every campaign is created equal, and even devoted fans commonly bounce off entire seasons. These six offerings represent some of the best possible starting points, depending on exactly what viewers are looking for in their first tabletop role-playing experience.
The Gateway Show: Escape From the Bloodkeep
Dimension 20’s second season remains one of its most accessible entries, featuring a simple hook that runs for only six episodes and is available to watch in full for free through D20’s official YouTube channel. Guided by Brennan Lee Mulligan alongside players Erika Ishii, Matthew Mercer, Ify Nwadiwe, Rekha Shankar, Mike Trapp, and Amy Vorpahl, the campaign offers an ideal on-ramp for first-time viewers.
Escape From the Bloodkeep is an affectionate parody of The Lord of the Rings told from the villains’ perspective. When the Lord of Shadows is abruptly assassinated by the forces of good, his six closest advisers must decide what to do next: continue their master’s mission, run for their lives, or switch sides entirely. That premise sounds like a recipe for something far darker, but Bloodkeep instead becomes an ensemble workplace sitcom with a considerable body count. Many of its best jokes land precisely because they come from performers who grew up loving Tolkien’s work.
The campaign also serves as an excellent watch for anyone interested in playing or running a tabletop role-playing game. One of its central lessons, particularly for aspiring game masters, is that you can never reliably predict what your players will do. Mulligan has discussed how dramatically the players’ choices changed his original plans for the campaign, offering a useful demonstration of a fundamental TTRPG principle: no matter how carefully you prepare, you will eventually have to make something up on the fly.
For Pure Comedy: Never Stop Blowing Up
A recurring complaint about Dimension 20 is that its casts are often too funny for the genres they’re supposedly exploring. Even when a campaign aims for dark fantasy or cosmic horror, it inevitably becomes a comedy as well. The flip side is that when D20 commits fully to being funny, it can produce something extraordinary. Never Stop Blowing Up is in contention for the single funniest season of the entire series.
The campaign is a gleeful collision between 1980s action movies and modern isekai. Guided by Mulligan with players Ally Beardsley, Ify Nwadiwe, Isabella Roland, Rekha Shankar, Alex Song-Xia, and Jacob Wysocki, it uses a heavily customized version of the Kids on Bikes system designed to reward maximum cinematic excess, producing something like a rules-light version of Feng Shui.
The story begins with employees of a failing small-town video store being pulled into the world contained inside a magical VHS tape. Each becomes a different variety of action-movie hero or antihero in a universe governed by genre conventions, where violence is a way of life, physics are merely a suggestion, and every gun magazine is bottomless. Once players understand how thoroughly they can break the system—which is both intentional and half the fun—the campaign turns into an Expendables movie with an infinite budget.
The season comes remarkably close to replicating a particular kind of tabletop experience: the moment when a group’s jokes begin feeding upon one another until everyone at the table has accidentally created the funniest thing in the world, even if nobody outside the room could possibly understand it.
Gamer24h Analysis
Watching the season somehow makes you feel like you’re in on somebody else’s private joke. That quality makes Never Stop Blowing Up one of D20’s most essential campaigns, with Wysocki and Nwadiwe competing to outdo each other’s body counts while Roland, who was eight months pregnant during filming, repeatedly laughs herself sick.
For D&D Players: Fantasy High Freshman Year
Fantasy High was Dimension 20’s original campaign and remains the closest thing the series has to a flagship. Its world has expanded across three full campaigns, numerous live shows and specials, and a Webtoon adaptation that deemphasizes some of the story’s explicit connections to Dungeons & Dragons.
The main reason a newcomer might hesitate to begin with Fantasy High: Freshman Year is its size. The first season alone runs for 17 episodes and serves as the opening chapter of D20’s longest-running story, requiring a considerably larger commitment than sampling one of the show’s self-contained side quests. If you’re willing to take the plunge, however, Fantasy High begins with an irresistible premise: What if The Breakfast Club took place inside a game of Dungeons & Dragons?
The campaign takes place at Aguefort Adventuring Academy, a school that trains children to become adventurers—defined here as wandering maniacs who use violence to reshape the world around them. Fantasy High is essentially the Western answer to Assassination Classroom, with every season packed with dangerous eccentrics who routinely attempt to solve their problems through murder.
Several players were still learning D&D during Freshman Year, so the campaign naturally explains many of the game’s basic systems as it progresses. That makes the season a surprisingly effective introduction to both Dimension 20 and D&D itself, even if the broader saga has uneven stretches like Sophomore Year’s COVID-19-era disruptions.
For Classic Horror Fans: Coffin Run
Coffin Run rarely receives as much attention as D20’s biggest campaigns, but it is quietly one of the show’s most ambitious experiments. Guided by Jasmine Bhullar alongside players Erika Ishii, Carlos Luna, Zac Oyama, and Isabella Roland, the six-episode campaign ventures directly into Mel Brooks territory. Some of its jokes wear thin, but at just six episodes, it doesn’t stick around long enough to wear out its welcome.
The story follows four members of Dracula’s coterie charged with transporting his corpse back to his castle across hostile territory. Along the way they encounter enemy werewolves, vampire hunters, and Dracula’s distant relatives who see reports of his death as an opportunity to seize his assets. Bhullar fills the campaign with immaculate Hammer-horror atmosphere, capturing a variety of B-movie fun that has largely disappeared.
The result is akin to Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, except Abbott and Costello are also monsters. As Dimension 20 campaigns go, Coffin Run is a genuine sleeper hit that anyone with an affection for classic monster movies should give a look.
For Science Fiction Fans: A Starstruck Odyssey
Elaine Lee is a writer, playwright, and actor who created several independent comics during the 1980s and ’90s. She is also Brennan Lee Mulligan’s mother, and her best-known work is almost certainly Starstruck, a sprawling adult space opera based on a stage play Lee wrote and starred in.
In A Starstruck Odyssey, Mulligan adapts his mother’s setting into a tabletop campaign with her cooperation. The closest comparison might be Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels: Starstruck takes place in a distant future where spacefaring humanity has spread across the galaxy and used advanced technology to become deeply and permanently weird.
Both the tabletop campaign and the comics take place during the AnarchEra, a lawless period between the collapse of one government and the establishment of whatever comes next. Mulligan’s version is anchored by a series of enormous choices from its players, with The Intrepid Heroes portraying the crew of the Wurst, a band of mercenaries being crushed by debt and haunted by past mistakes.
Under an unlikely new leader played by Beardsley in one of their strongest D20 performances, the crew slowly begins to reverse its fortunes. The result is a chaotic rags-to-riches story that earns its happy ending, though its satisfying conclusion has not stopped fans from clamoring for another trip into the AnarchEra.
For Harry Potter Fans in Recovery: Misfits & Magic
Played on the Kids on Bikes system, Misfits & Magic is a direct, pointed satire of the Harry Potter universe, made right at the moment when J.K. Rowling was beginning her headlong dive into Twitter infamy. Other seasons of D20 have been made as specific parodies, but where those are loving, this one is sharpened to a fine point.
The campaign is set at a very British magical academy where four American teenagers have been recruited as new students. Almost as soon as they set foot on campus, all four begin to rebel against magical society’s strange rules and customs, sometimes because they seem wrong and sometimes just on general principle. Guided by Aabria Iyengar alongside players Erika Ishii, Brennan Lee Mulligan, Danielle Radford, and Lou Wilson, the season delivers a pointed comedic edge.
The first season is only four episodes long and, like Bloodkeep, is available in its entirety on YouTube. It’s a fast watch with a simple gaming system that rapidly developed some of the most viral moments of any D20 season. If it grabs you, an 11-episode second season ran in 2024, tracking the “Magical Misfits” as they each made their own way into adulthood.
Looking Ahead
Whether viewers choose to dive straight into the sprawling Fantasy High saga or sample one of the show’s shorter, self-contained campaigns, Dimension 20 offers a wealth of entry points suited to every taste. Several of these seasons remain freely available on YouTube, making it easier than ever for new fans to discover why the series has become such a beloved fixture in the actual-play landscape.
As the franchise continues to expand with new campaigns and specials, newcomers have more opportunities than ever to find their footing in D20’s rich world of dice, drama, and comedy. Whatever starting point you choose, one thing is certain: once you begin, you’ll understand exactly why so many players become hooked for good.
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