As a longtime tabletop role-player, watching Dimension 20’s Dungeons and Drag Queens is the same experience as introducing a friend to a favorite television show you know they’ll dig. All the joy of watching your beloved show, and the joy of watching someone else learn to love it as well.
The actual play setting, helmed by game master Brennan Lee Mulligan with players and RuPaul’s Drag Race stars Alaska Thunderfuck, Bob the Drag Queen, Jujubee, and Monét X Change, returned for a second season this week. Hot off the success of their season 1 adventure, the Questing Queens found out what comes after you become famous heroes.
You’re called to more adventure, is the answer, but Dungeons and Drag Queens season 2 is deepening and broadening its mandate, and in doing so adding yet another great facet of sharing your favorite with your friend: You can see the twist coming and they 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.]
From the beginning, Dungeons and Drag Queens has straddled the audience of experienced and knowing TTRPG players/actual play watchers and the audience of folks who’ve never engaged with the hobby or the medium at all. You only have to look at the comments on any Dungeons and Drag Queens YouTube clip to see it. They’re full of Drag Race fans who started watching to get more of their faves, and stayed subscribed because of how effectively the first season presented the appeal of TTRPGs and the actual play medium (and, it should be said, vice versa).
The brilliance of DaDQ’s first season — what makes it more than just the thrill of “two things that don’t usually go together” — were the subtle ways Dimension 20 adjusted itself on the expectation of an audience new to the actual play medium and even the TTRPG hobby itself. The season featured a more straightforward (but still twisty) story than other seasons, bringing enough rule-explaining back into the edit so that non-TTRPG players could get a sense of the stakes. And Mulligan’s own improvisational chops got a real workout from a set of players in the process of discovering in what ways they liked to engage with a TTRPG world, hatching capers like deciding on a whim to, for example, steal from a high-level shopkeeper and unsuccessfully trying to run.
It was delightful to watch the queens challenge Mulligan in ways that his usual casts don’t, and season 2 is already continuing that theme. Instead of long-form improv comedians drilled in “yes, and” and playing in the space, Alaska et al. are improvisational performers from a more adversarial, let’s say… tit for tat tradition, and it gives the seasons some of their best metatextual moments. As in this week’s episode, where Jujubee described her character Twyla pulling a length of “fae-twine” from around a package, saying, “And I keep the twine because I think it’s going to come in handy later.” Then she locked eyes with Mulligan and snapped, “Right?!”
It’s not the classic moment when a player focuses too hard on an immaterial detail, but a player inventing the importance of a detail whole cloth, pointing right at their DM, and declaring that they better make it important later if they know what’s good for them. A gauntlet clearly thrown.
And to a seasoned fan of Dimension 20 — and a seasoned TTRPG player — it’s clear what Mulligan is doing in this first season 2 episode. Now that the characters and their players have the basics down, he takes them right to a masquerade ball (every TTRPG player should know the pleasure of taking your character to a fancy party instead of a forbidden dungeon) and introduces a smorgasbord of plot threads. Suitors, shifty returning NPCs, secret messages you might not be able to trust, new revelations about the drawbacks of your sudden fame.
Dungeons and Drag Queens season 1 was about establishing the appeal of TTRPG gameplay, and season 2 is showcasing exactly how that gameplay can deepen and broaden once there is a foundation of characters, world-building, and plot elements to call back to.
And that’s where the dramatic irony comes in.
Like any creative, Mulligan has themes to which he is consistently drawn, and longtime viewers will be hip to them. An NPC who’s building beachfront-ready property on the top of a mountain range while letting coastal mansions go for a song? Mulligan’s gotta wake up real early in the morning to get that foreshadowing past me. But have the Questing Queens noticed? Will they notice? When will they notice?
There’s still plenty for them to discover, and for me to enjoy watching them discover, as they’re introduced to one of my favorite hobbies.
