This applies to most episodes of Tales From the SMP, where all characters other than Karl are portrayed by content creators with character counterparts on the SMP, be they active members of the server or guests.
On the SMP itself, several content creators play more than one character. Other than their respective character counterparts:
Jack Manifold doubly plays the Overseers of the Inbetween and the Other Side.
Actor-Inspired Element: Oliver from "The Masquerade" episode of Tale From the SMP has bits of white hair, just like Fundy, who plays him. He also wears a fox mask, which looks extremely similar to Fundy's skin.
Approval of God: People on the SMP often look for things like fanart, fan songs and fan animations, and will like them on their social media accounts or leave comments on the things they really enjoy, respectively. Sometimes they would even put it on the SMP with the help of a plug-in.
The three-life system was taken from a Reddit post by u/usedforwholesomeness, and has come to define much of the roleplay's storyline from Season 2 and onward.
Technoblade compares Tommy to Theseus and mentions how the Greek hero was exiled. Once Dream began demanding Tommy be exiled, a common line said in fanworks by Technoblade upon reuniting with Tommy was "Welcome home, Theseus", which Technoblade actually ends up saying to Tommy upon showing him his mountainside secret bunker.
After the first proper Tales From the SMP stream, the theory of Karl being a time traveler became popular due to his role as an Interactive Narrator in a story set hundreds of years before the current canon. Karl himself took a liking to this theory and showed a lot of love to fan works using this concept. Then, during the "Lost City of Mizu" stream, he made it canon, incorporating it into his character's lore.
Philza is often drawn with wings in fan works, due to the fact that he's almost always wearing an elytra in his own Hardcore worlds. Since Philza doesn't have an elytra in the Dream SMP, people have come up with the idea that his wings were damaged trying to protect Wilbur from the explosion from Wilbur blowing up L'Manburg. Phil later confirmed this to be canon, specifically acknowledging SAD-ist's portrayal of the event.
After his duel with Technoblade, it has been widely theorized that Quackity gained a scar on his face from losing his canon life. Quackity has since canonized this, mentioning that his character is partially blind in one eye, and since the Disc Confrontation, his skin has had a scar over his left eye, as a reference to the duel. He also notes that the addition of the scar in canon stems from fanart portrayals of him.
After Tommy's resurrection, many depictions of him usually involves him gaining a white streak in his hair, with the same applying to Wilbur in fanworks involving his revival. While nothing has been confirmed on Tommy's end, Wilbur is shown to have a white streak in his hair after Tommy's April 29th stream. However, it is later clarified that Wilbur's skunk stripe was due to the stress he had experienced, rather than the resurrection.
Wilbur's afterlife being a train station was likely taken from this animatic by cosmicguts, which is in and of itself a reference to one of Wilbur's songs, "Jubilee Line".
Blooper: Due to the fact that the SMP's storyline is largely improvised and acted out live, these moments show up quite often.
After Tommy's trial, he, Tubbo, Fundy and Quackity have a tense discussion about how to move forward from here... which is interrupted by Tommy's mother yelling at him to come empty the dishwasher.
Tommy: I WILL, BUT I'M- MUM, I'M IN A S- I'M IN THE MIDDLE OF A WAR, MUM! (Beat) MUM, I'M LIVE!(turns back) As I was saying, this nation- (corpses)
At the end of the Exile arc, during the intense scene where Dream blows up all of Tommy's stuff while Tommy begs him not to, Dream accidentally gets a bit too close to the TNT and blows himself up as well. He quickly teleports back, yelling that that wasn't in the script, while Tommy nearly chokes from laughing too hard.
Right after the above example, Tommy declares he doesn't need Dream anymore and that he's done being manipulated, then accidentally gets killed by a zombie. But because Dream blew up his bed as well, he respawns back in the Dream SMP, leading to him awkwardly calling Dream and asking to be teleported back to Logstedshire.
After the Doomsday War, as Ghostbur is telling Tommy that he wants to be brought back to life, Tommy suddenly gets struck by lightning, resulting in nearly everyone in the server collapsing into complete hysterics for a good few minutes. This later happens again, this time to Ghostbur and Quackity. It was later revealed that the first lightning strike occurred because cc!Dream was watching Tommy's livestream at the time and decided to summon lightning due to Rule of Funny. He claims to have no influence over the second time, though.
During Ranboo's first panic room sequence, Dream's voice appears in Ranboo's head for a shocking and dramatic scene. However, Dream's Discord bugs out and the first few seconds are spent with Dream trying to fix his mic and Ranboo laughing, remarking on how well the stream is going.
During one of Ranboo's long, panicked monologues in his panic room, a dolphin winds up swimming in and gets stuck. Ranboo tries to ignore it at first, but eventually caves and begrudgingly pushes it back out before continuing.
Subverted during Tommy's March 1st stream. Many viewers thought that his death at Dream's hand was a blooper, but considering that Tommy ended the stream soon after, it definitely wasn't one, and it turned out that the death was canon and he had been Killed Off for Real.
Quackity's April 12th lore stream features him encountering Bad and Punz while the latter two were under the influence of The Egg, while he was attempting to destroy it. Their confrontation is very emotional... which is slightly mitigated by the fact that Bad's dog Lucy (aka Rat) was barking in the background for a chunk of the conversation.
Throughout the livestream where Technoblade escapes from Pandora's Vault, Dream is seen to be using his MCC16 cancer awareness Minecraft skin (the one with the lavender ribbon) instead of his normal/default skin. This led to some jokes in the fandom that Dream might be a sadistic child-abusing tyrant in the DSMP roleplay, but he sure as hell is gonna support cancer patients.
After Dream and Tommy's confrontation in Logstedshire, there was a tense chase scene, with Tommy running away and Dream chasing him down, trying to kill him. He was supposed to run until he got to Phil's house... But on the way out of Logstedshire, Tommy threw an enderpearl too many and actually died. Cue an awkward teleport back. Dream tries to get back into it by screaming and hitting Tommy with his axe as soon as Tommy is geared up again, but Tommy is so caught off guard by this that he immediately starts corpsing, forcing them to put the scene on hold again.
While Dream was testing out the Warden's key-cards to the prison in Sam's 4 February 2022 lore stream, there was a massive lag spike from the redstone in the Vault, causing a huge delay in the return of the key-card from a door-closing mechanism. Both Dream and Sam had a quick laugh about this during the lag spike before continuing the scene.
In Tales of the SMP, during Karl's first trip into the Inbetween, he stands in the grand entrance hall, walks forward, and picks up a book from an item frame... forgetting he's in Creative mode, which means items from item frames don't pop out when you punch them, they get deleted. Cue a frantic scramble to fix it, all while the chat is complaining about the mood being ruined.
Wilbur's favourite, as revealed on his Wine Stream with Quackity in mid-December 2021, is c!Tommy for having "the most believable arc".
Quackity's favourite is c!Slime/Charlie (for how cc!Charlie plays his character and does improv), while his second favourite is tied between c!Dream (for the content creator's acting and development of the character) and c!Schlatt (for being "an S-tier villain").
For the most part, every major perspective character shares a name with the content creator that portrays them. This caused the rise of the "c![X]" (character) and "cc![X]" (content creator) tags during the Exile Arc, to prevent people outside the fandom from assuming cc!Dream is abusive (his main roleplay character is, but he isn't in real life). However, the full names of the characters are usually distinct from those of the content creators, as the characters' full names are typically based on their screen names and/or any nicknames they accumulated, e.g. Philza Minecraft being portrayed by Phil Watson.
In the episode "The Pit" from Tales From the SMP, there is a character named Watson, i.e. the real life surname of Philza, who played him.
Development Hell: Seasons 3-4 really suffer from this. Due to many content creators having real-life obligations, other projects to work on, or serious health concerns, most plotlines created in the third and fourth seasons have either been completely scrapped, temporarily shelved, or left hanging with no news on whether or not they're gonna be developed in any way. Even when the plot gets moving, it's at a snail's pace, with lore streams often being weeks apart.
Died During Production: Before his passing, Technoblade had finished a build and laid out a rough outline for a story where his character would leave the SMP, returning as a separate character named Cyberknife who was Technoblade's antithesis — a man who loved and valued all forms of government.
Disabled Character, Disabled Actor: Several of the content creators are neurodivergent and/or have disabilities, which often reflects on how their characters are portrayed, two examples of this include George being colour-blind and Tubbo being dyslexic.
It has been revealed that Tommy's reaction to Schlatt winning the L'Manburg Presidential Election was genuine, as Wilbur and Tubbo the content creators had kept the results secret from him until it was revealed on stream to the audience as well. This is how we got a couple of gems on Tommy's stream, when he first ran out of his room upon the initial announcement of the results to tell his mother about the POG2020 electoral victory, then later did so again to tell his mother they lost.
According to Phil, Jack Manifold was drunk in real life while playing Bartholomew, the drunk gladiator from the Tales from the SMP episode "The Pit".
Executive Veto: For the Tales From the SMP episode "The Pit", Philza originally wanted to play his character from the main series, but Karl wouldn't let him.
Fan Community Nicknames: The community is often divided by the content creator(s) one might prefer to watch, so there isn't exactly a consistent nickname for the collective of Dream SMP fans as a whole. However, fans who are there for the plotline/lore instead of the content creators tend to be called "loreheads".
Fundy and Dream's relationship arc, the first part of which takes place on the Dream SMP, but the second part of which (i.e. the wedding) doesn't. Dream doesn't consider it canonical to the plotline, but Fundy possibly does, and has incorporated part of his character's lore into the storyline, including part of the Dreamon Hunter side-story.ContextFundy uses the memory of his date with Dream during Dream's exorcism as a trigger to end the Demonic Possession. At the same time, Dream being kissed by George at the altar and leaving in panic during the wedding is cited to have contributed to Fundy's trust issues in canon, and before that, Fundy's initial entry for Dream in the official Butcher Army Hit List (before Tommy got Exiled) was very literally him simping for Dream. The fandom has a couple of conflicting theories on whichever is the case.
How time works in the series in relation to real-world time flow tends to fluctuate as the plot demands. Eret once claimed that a month equaled a year on the server, but this has been proven to be inaccurate. Wilbur has also claimed in the "Decree of Independance" signed after the L'Manburg War for Independence that the walls had protected the country "for years", but it could just as easily be Wilbur being a "showman" (in his own words), aka a 'dramatic bitch' (in our words). So far, however, the time frames of certain events have been canonized in lore streams (counting from Season 2 and beyond, when the SMP becomes much more roleplay-heavy and a firmer line between canon and non-canon is drawn):
Though it took place in 12 days in real-world time, Tommy's daily Exile streams went from taking place days apart to weeks apart, even claiming that he had been in Exile for months altogether. Therefore, it can be presumed that the Exile arc and all events during it took place within the time span of several months in-universe. Eret later confirms it in his 6 February 2022 casual lore stream that Tommy was Exiled for several months.
Tubbo and Philza have confirmed that the Doomsday War took place over the course of several days, with the TNT rain alone lasting for days.
The Prison Lockdown has been presumed to take place as per real-world time. However, Dream claimed that he brought Tommy back two days after killing him, though it's 3 days in the real world, and Dream no longer has a clock or anything to help him keep track of time in prison.
Similar to the above, as of the time Techno was lured and trapped in the prison with Dream, Dream claimed he had been in prison for six months, despite having no time-keeping devices for most of his time there. In real-life time, however, it hadn't even been five months by then.
According to Wilbur, the time frame upon the afterlife runs is approximate to real-life time, with an hour in the real world corresponding to about a day in the Afterlife.
Even whether or not Friend the sheep has infinite canon lives has been up for debate. Initially, Philza told Ghostbur that friend had infinite canon lives, then later claimed that it was a lie and that the new incarnations of friend were just Replacement Goldfish. However, cc!Wilbur confirms that Friend does have infinite canon lives while out-of-character, citing Philza's initial statement as evidence.
The End is off-limits for game balance purposes, which means nobody on the server is allowed to use an Elytra. This is incorporated into Philza's lore — while he canonically has wings, they're too badly damaged for him to fly. This is eventually subverted by Quackity using a pair of Elytra wings for spying purposes during his May 22nd lore stream, which there is no canonical explanation for yet; and is then further subverted by Hannah winning a pair of Elytra wings through the Team Seas charity event, though she has given a in-universe justification for having them... but not whether she used to have them before the event took place.
The 'canon lives' system allows for the possibility of perma-death in the story, while not punishing players for random, unscripted deaths.
Due to the limitations of Minecraft, characters with canon heights are portrayed to be the same standard player height of 1.8 blocks (1.8 metres, or roughly 5'11"). This is especially egregious when it comes to non-human characters who are much taller than the standard height, e.g. Ranboo (8'5", or 256.54cm), Bad (9'6", or 289.56cm), and Foolish (23'3", or 708.66cm).
Also due to Minecraft limitations, most of the physical incarnations of several players' stream chats, e.g. Philza's crows, cannot be portrayed in the game proper.
Regardless of her in-game appearance, it is stated by Niki that her character wears Wilbur's Badass Longcoat after his passing.
There are plenty of animals, foods, drinks, and items that are mentioned throughout the series that don't exist in Minecraft proper, most notably alcohol. The Wilbur Van supports this heavily, with its inclusion of king cobras, scorpions, tomatoes, glasses of water, welding masks for using redstone, a mention to filing cabinets, documents with distinctive handwriting rather than typed text in the default Minecraft font, etc.
God Never Said That: Some fans often claim that cc!Wilbur said that all of the characters were morally grey. However, this is a misquote — Wilbur said that he wanted all the characters to be morally grey back around Season 1, but after he stepped down as head writer following the season, it's clear that the content creators decided not to comply with the request anymore, as seen with Dream having his character blatantly speedrun past the Moral Event Horizon during the Exile Arc.
Harpo Does Something Funny: Schlatt's November 16th script, as shown by Wilbur, is simply "Schlatt has a heart attack and fucking dies".
Keep Circulating the Tapes: Nearly all of the creators who play on the server stream on Twitch, however, Twitch streams are only archived for about two months before getting deleted. Although some creators have accounts to archive their VODs, most do not; it's mainly up to fans to officially archive and pass around VODs on sites like YouTube and Archive.org, while sometimes having to dodge copyright claims from content creators.
Ranboo has stated that he often watched videos of the Dream SMP prior to being invited to the actual server.
Prior to joining the SMP, Foolish frequently made reaction videos of Dream SMP animatics as well as Dream's Minecraft Manhunt series. There was no indication that he was being considered to join the server until Dream himself sent an invitation.
Queer Character, Queer Actor: If a content creator involved in the SMP is LGBTQ-adjacent (which would be about 30% of the cast), it is often assumed that their character counterpart is also LGBTQ+. However, there are also many instances of LGBTQ+ characters being played by content creators who aren't (as far as we know of, at least).
Recycled Set: The seed for the SMP was previously used in one of Dream's Minecraft Manhunt videos (specifically the "2 Hunters" video).
Role-Ending Misdemeanor: Around the end of October of 2021, Dream added multiple new people to the SMP, including a streamer named Jikishi or Demetrius. Days after he was added, dozens of people came forward accusing Jikishi of sexual misconduct towards his fans, with most of his victims being very young teenagers. After Jikishi confirmed in private that the accusations were true, he was immediately removed from the SMP and received a permanent ban.
Schedule Slip: The biggest issue fans have with Season 3-4 is that the pacing has slowed to an absolute crawl, to the point where it can sometimes take weeks for certain plot points to get any kind of development. This is, however, a major case of Real Life Writes the Plot; Seasons 1 and 2 took place during the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic, when most countries had major lockdowns and travel restrictions. However, Season 3 started at the beginning of 2021, when most countries were starting to loosen their restrictions, and thus many of the SMP's members simply got too busy with other projects to get together and do major lore streams, with those projects including meet-ups, merchandise arrangements, music videos, and in Techno's case, (presumably) chemotherapy. Season 4 goes similarly, with the exception that Techno's roles throughout the season overlap heavily with Swan Song in retrospect and Died During Production.
Serendipity Writes the Plot: Phil was supposed to join the server right after making himself known in the voice chat, but he got an error while joining that required him to completely restart his game. This led to a few uncomfortable moments where Phil jokes about hacking into the server and Wilbur tries to lie and say he's still in L'Manburg.
When asked if Tommy was really Philza's son in canon, Phil responded that it wasn't really up for him to confirm — as far as he's aware, he's canonically only a father to Wilbur, and just acts as a father figure for everyone else on the server.
Due to Adaptation Dye-Job in the SMP's fanon, some viewers are confused about Tubbo's canonical hair colour. When asked about it in a fan Q&A, however, cc!Tubbo's response ends up being "hell if I know".
blackb...: Does c! Tubbo have brown hair or blonde hair???? TubboTWO: Pffffft hell if I know freeking pink for all I know
While it was a popular headcanon that Purpled (the character) is an extraterrestrial, with his iconic UFO build being his mode of transportation before settling on the server, this becomes ambiguously canon when he later reveals the UFO in question to be part of his "heritage" and considers its destruction unforgivable, without giving any further context. When asked about this in a Q&A livestream, cc!Purpled stated that the question was "best left unanswered", thus leaving his character Ambiguously Human and the situation up to audience interpretation.
Swan Song: Technoblade's final lore appearances in the "Avenging Ranboo/Saving Michael" and "Bust" livestreams generally wrap up his character arc; his content creator counterpart passed away from cancer about three months after the latter stream.
In a series where most of the major events are loosely scripted, Eret's betrayal in the L'Manburg War of Independence was completely improvised and a genuine shock to L'Manburg's members. Said betrayal has come to define Eret's character arc, and much of his importance to the plot later on (such as his status as The Atoner) is a result of that one moment.
It has also been revealed that Tommy's third canon death was planned out the day before it was filmed/livestreamed.
In the episode "The Masquerade" from Tales From the SMP, the Butler was supposed to be allowed to speak and have more lines, but since his actor, Ranboo's microphone was accidentally muted at the beginning they continued the bit of his character not being allowed to speak and scrapped their original plans.
Trolling Creator: Wilbur is almost certainly one, as seen by him making some highly unorthodox things canonical, including and not limited to him jossing Sally being a shapeshifter (meaning his character somehow had sex with an actual fish), canonizing his character's biological mother being a Samsung Smart Fridge (though Phil later retcons this), and posting updates on how Ghostbur was doing in the Afterlife, seemingly just to watch the fandom weep and question "what the fuck was wrong with [him]".
What Could Have Been: Due to a multitude of reasons, events on the SMP often do not go as planned, or would have been entirely different. See examples of this here.
Word of God: Many content creators have elaborated on their characters and the What Could Have Beens in the roleplay through social media. More on that here.
While Karl is usually in charge of writing the storylines of Tales From the SMP (sometimes with input from other content creators), Ranboo created a backstory for Sir Billiam and his butler (the latter being the character he played) from the episode "The Masquerade"; saying that Sir Billiam had previously stolen money from the bank of the town in the episode "The Wild West" (which is the reason he appears on a "Wanted!" Poster in the town), as well as kidnapping a child and forcing him to be his butler.
Outside of the SMP proper, Kristin has embraced the popular fanon that her incarnation in the Dream SMP universe was the Goddess of Death, and has even cosplayed as said character incarnation based on popular fanon designs. Phil has added to this and canonized this as well, though that particular subplot is still played out very slowly. As of the Syndicate finale, this has finally been shown in canon.
Also outside of the SMP proper, in response to a piece of fanart on Twitter, Mrs. Sarah "MotherInnit" Simons has declared her in-universe incarnation to be the Goddess of Life.
Working Title: The tie-in story The Wilbur Van was initially titled Hitting on 16 in production, only for the title to be changed soon after its publication for unknown reasons.
Written by Cast Member: All of the plotlines and character arcs are created by the content creators who play the characters, since most of the events on the server are extensive roleplay. And since there are over three dozen members of the server, each with their own individual lore, which may or may not cross over with others' to create storylines...
Wilbur wrote most of Season 1, from the L'Manburg War for Independence to the end of the Manburg-Pogtopia War, though it is also known that Eret improvised their betrayal and the L'Manburgians' reaction to it was genuine.
Due to Wilbur stepping down as the head writer after Season 1, Season 2 was primarily written by Dream, Tommy, Quackity, and Techno (the latter for his character, specifically), with input from Wilbur, Tubbo, Fundy, and others.
The Disc War Finale and related revive book plot was written by Tommy, according to the "Dream SMP Reunion" panel at TwitchCon Amsterdam 2022.
Various content creators wrote their own arcs throughout Season 3, with Bad handling a lot of Eggpire lore, and Dream and Tommy collaborating on the Prison Lockdown arc. Wilbur's return to the server is combined with his return as one of the leading writers for the roleplay.
Karl wrote most Tales From the SMP episodes with input from other content creators, though the unreleased episode "Space Race" is revealed to be a joint effort between him and Ranboo.
You Might Remember Me from...: Multiple members of the server could previously be seen on other popular SMPs, such as SMPLivenote Schlatt, Connor, Slimecicle, Wilbur, Techno, Philza, and Michael and SMPEarthnote Wilbur, Techno, Tommy, Philza, Tubbo, Connor, Jack Manifold, Quackity, Purpled, Eret, and Slimecicle.
, and has come to define much of the roleplay's storyline from Season 2 and onward.
