Trivia / Dimension 20

• Approval of God:
  • The cast has been very vocal about their joy over all of the fan content made for their show, and even though they are sometimes amused and surprised by the differences in their visions of the show, they support the fans' right to interpret the show however they want.
  • Season 17, Dungeons and Drag Queens, shares the name with an ongoing live show in Seattle; per their FAQ, the Dimension 20 crew made sure to get the blessing of that show before titling their season as such.
• The Cast Show Off: The singing bards of Dimension 20 really like to demonstrate their voices.
  • Oddly enough, averted with Fig Faeth. Despite Emily being a talented musician and singer, she doesn't sing during Fantasy High and Dimension 20 Live, opting instead to have Fig use her bass guitar for her spells.
  • At the end of The Unsleeping City, Rowan Berry joins along with the New Year's Eve crowd during "Auld Lang Syne", allowing Siobhan to make a nice rendition of the song.
    • An earlier episode of The Unsleeping City actually had Brennan find an excuse to show off his singing voice as part of a gag where unimpressive NPC Wally, whose speaking voice is reedy and goofy, joins in with the singing in a Broadway show and reveals his singing voice to be remarkably impressive. The same episode also sees Brennan include Stephen Sondheim as an NPC, allowing him to show off a pretty good Sondheim impression.
  • Barbarella "Bob" Sasparilla Gainglynn makes an incredible entrance into the show during one of her performances at the Gold Gardens, which in reality is Krystina singing an improvised song in its entirety.
  • Persephone Valentine gives us an amazing performance in "Belles of the Baronies" as Sam Nightingale charms the folks around the fountain she's standing on with a beautiful siren song.
• Creator's Favorite: Gilear Faeth, Cosmic Plaything extraordinaire, has won over the hearts of all the cast (and the fans) of Fantasy High, due to being an incredible source of Black Comedy with a surprising potential for heartwarming scenes with Fig.
• Enforced Method Acting:  During A Crown of Candy, a fire inspection found the dome set unsafe, so production was moved to a warehouse. The loss of time from moving and rebuilding the set made the crew have to film in large chunks late into the night, which clearly made the stress from an already intense season much harder to handle. The real-world stress made it seem like Calorum would never be revisited, although it eventually got a prequel series in Ravening War.
  • Very deliberately averted in later seasons. Players in The Seven and A Starstruck Odyssey occasionally break character to confirm that they're all okay, and Shriek Week specifically hired a coordinator to advise the cast and ensure they were all comfortable with the increased sexual content of the season.
• Meme Acknowledgement: The cast does this a lot, especially considering that most of them start because they have made the meme for themselves first. This is usually done in Adventuring Parties, as all the seasons are pre-recorded, but Dimension 20 Live allowed the cast to react to the online jokes and events in real time, with Lou even defying the idea of "hot Gilear" being possible, and Brennan challenging the fans to make a Gilear so hot that Lou has to accept it can happen.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content: The two-parter finale of Dimension 20 Live started with songs from the Sig Figs Collective, a fan group for Dimension 20.
• Playing Against Type: As there’s a returning main group of players, this happens a few times
  • In A Crown of Candy, Zac Oyama went from playing Gorgug Thistlespring and Ricky Matsui, characters that, for lack of better terms, were nice but dim warrior-type characters with simple backstories compared to some of the other players, to Lapin Cadbury, who is a morally ambiguous squishy warlock whose complexity and depth of character has only been hinted at thus far.
  • Brian Murphy tends to play intelligent, strategically-minded, and generally friendly characters (Riz, Kugrash, Theobold). In Unsleeping City: Part 2, he opts to play as Cody "Night Angel" Walsh, an immature, idiotic misanthrope who prefers to impulsively charge into battle with his collection of absurd anime swords.
  • Lou Wilson admitted in an episode of Adventuring Academy that he tends to play brash and rough fighters that are very concerned with their appearance and image, as seen with Fabian. In The Unsleeping City, he plays Kingston Brown, a friendly, down-to-earth cleric who's very content with his humble life.
  • Sam Reich is known to usually have fairly anti-capitalist themes in his work. In Mice and Murder, he plays an oil baron (though Buckster has some pretty blatant flaws tied to his wealth and practices).
• Queer Character, Queer Actor: Sort of inverted, because the cast create their own characters rather than being cast as them.
  • Non-binary lesbian Ally Beardsley plays the lesbian Kristen Applebees, the transgender Pete the Plug and Margaret Encino, the asexual Liam Wilhelmina, the non-binary Lars Vandenchomp, and the gay (and potentially trans) Timothy Goose.
  • Non-binary and pansexual Erika Ishii plays Dream in Misfits and Magic, who uses both she/her and they/them pronouns.
  • Trans woman Persephone Valentine plays trans woman Sam Nightingale in The Seven.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Part of the reason that Fig and Riz are absent in the second episode of Fantasy High: Sophomore Year was that Emily and Murph were doing live shows for Not Another DND Podcast.
• What Could Have Been: Naturally, as an actual-play show, there is plenty of room for speculations about alternate timelines where something did or didn't happen, especially when it comes to dice rolls:
  • Fantasy High:
    • Originally, Rekha Shankar, another long-time College Humor/Dropout cast member, was meant to be in the party; however, for currently unspecified reasons, it didn't work out. As a result, Ally Beardsley would become a member of the Intrepid Heroes cast, while Rekha would feature in several sidequests.
    • When asked what roll they would have wanted to fail or succeed, Siobhan said she would have loved the idea of Adaine becoming a werewolf after Jawbone bit her, significantly changing her character arc and her relationship with Jawbone.
  • Crown of Candy:
    • In the Adventuring Party for the finale, Brennan reveals that had Saccharina and Ruby attacked each other, he would have offered Amethar to sacrifice himself to stop the bloodshed from happening, to which Lou would have whole-heartedly agreed to do.
    • Answering to the same question as Siobhan, Zac would have wanted a Nat 20 when Lapin was rolling death saving throws, as he had a Thunder Step spell prepared, which would have significantly altered the course of the season, as he would have not only saved himself, but also Peppermint Preston. Brennan has also said he'd really want to see this alternate reality.
    • The season was supposed to be around 25 episodes long, but lost time due to shooting complications, cutting out several events that already had sets and minis being made. Among them were an arena fight in Carn, the capitol of the Meatlands, and a fight in a pleasure grotto in Uvano against the Sanctus Putris, a rot cult B-list group of antagonists (which would eventually make a comeback as a major plot element in The Ravening War spinoff series a few years later).
    • Saccharina was originally introduced at the very end of episode 10 and even had it filmed, but ultimately had it cut for narrative purposes after Brennan realized he pushed for it early to get Emily back sooner.
    • There were several backup characters that went unused because the starter characters didn't die: Bitternight Darknibs the sugarless warlock (Siobhan), Murdo Briar the molasses necromancer (Lou), the Bubblegum Abomination created by Lazuli (Murph), and Sir Amanda Maillard the s'mores knight (Ally).
  • Ify actually wanted to focus on the possible romance between Markus St. Vincent and Leiland, which Matt would have been open to, but due to the high-paced nature of Escape From The Bloodkeep, he decided against it. However both players have confirmed that the two got together after the campaign.
  • Brennan said in a talkback show that he's considered Mice and Murder being played with Call of Cthulhu instead of DnD 5e, but ultimately went for the latter.
  • Like A Crown of Candy before it, each player in The Ravening War had a backup character in case their character died: Kahfeer Activan-Balfour, a fanatical yogurt follower of a giant SCOBY referred to as "The Mother" (Lou); Zhyr Kaban, a bacon meatlander diplomat (Brennan); Lady Melys of House Manuka, a honey woman who was obsessed with becoming a queen (Aabria); Flakey Smuthers, a megachurch pastor-esque biscuits and gravy cleric of the Bulb (Zac); and Old Granny Pom, an old blackberry woman whose goal in life was messing with people (Anjali). Since no one died before the last episode, none of the players got to play their background characters, although Flakey Smuthers appeared as a minor antagonist in episode 5.
  • A comment from Brennan implies that, during Season 2 of The Unsleeping City, Pete was meant to be sucked into the deep dreaming by the Big Bad of the season and essentially die but because Ally rolled a Nat 20 and successfully cast banishment on it, that didn't happen. Specifically, Brennan said that the only reason he allowed that to happen on a Nat 20 was because there was a break in shooting where he could try to re-rail his campaign.
  • Emily has mentioned that she was intially planning to retire Fig for Fantasy High: Junior Year in favor of a new character, but changed her mind when Brennan suggested a genuinely interesting arc for Fig that season.
• Word of God: Brennan has claimed that, in the world of Spyre (where "Fantasy High", "The Seven" and "Pirates of Leviathan" all take place), other schools teach adventurers with different RPG systems; he specifically said that the school which uses Table Top Game/Pathfinder caters to solo adventurers, as the gulf in power between a Pathfinder character and a 5e character is so vast that one adventurer in the former system can do the work of a whole party in the latter.
• Word of Saint Paul: In an Adventuring Party episode, Ally heavily implied Timothy Goose gave birth to his son Jack, therefore meaning Timothy is trans.

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