Burrow’s End is my favorite season ofDimension 20.
So yeah, spoilers to follow.
You’ve been warned.
GameSpot: I gotta know: Thematically and gameplay-wise, does Phoebe have lich energy?
Aabria Iyengar: Oh yeah.
Some of that is just magic.
But yes, very lich-like, very parasitic.
This is awesome!"
But I’ve watched you for a long time and you so rarely break out the battle maps.
What’s the purpose of this?
Aabria would not break out a map just for the hell of creeping me out."
The hope was that intimacy of the battle map would carry over.
And that’s my favorite thing about the [post-show] Adventuring Party.
Other than having a space for my weird desire to defend the First Stoats' philosophy.
That was funny to watch.
Hey, I’m a DM, too.
as a game master, you’re like, “Great, it landed.”
So it did feel like a really fun and cool way to say, “Let’s get gross.
Let’s get messy in the space.
So it felt like the culmination of a lot of things I wanted to do.
It was so good.
Building off that, why undeath?
There are so many ways for bad people to control others in D&D.
You got Charm Person.
And yet you chose chipmunks piloting bears and a nasty stoat human puppeting AK-47-wielding zombie guys.
I wanted to deal with several kinds of compulsion.
So we have Phoebe, and Phoebe raises [the humans], makes them undead.
I know that in a lot of horror, death is the worst thing that can happen.
It tends to be love or revenge.
But let’s also talk about revenge.
And to me, that’s one of those things that absolutely terrifies me.
I don’t mind coming back as a zombie if I’m in control of my body.
But being brought back and puppeted by some crazy necromancer?
I hate that, and now we’re going to play with that feeling, immediately.
Why did you tempt Brennen with the option?
That man might have done it!
The DM is going to clean us all up and we can get to our epilogue.”
And the bigger theme of the season, this idea of the ever-continuing circle of us-versus-them.
“Us” for this family when they come out of the Red Warren is just this family unit.
But before it was the Red Warren and the “them” was the Lakura.
And then their circle gets a little bigger as they find Last Bast.
And of course, the initial instinct is like, “Great, get him back up.
We have the tools.”
I power leveled them from [level] 4 to 10.
They are all powerful enough to handle this relatively simple task.
And that feels beautiful and powerful.
And we had one more chance to land it.
So I was very grateful that my best little boy [Lukas] went down away from everyone.
There was no Lukas initially but they asked, “Who is in this room in daycare?”
And I was like, “Lukas.”
And he was just sitting behind the screen and a really nice reminder after filming.
I was like, “Let’s just use him.”
So it was very cute.
I’m like, “Save my cupcake.”
Crazy how life comes at you.
Any chance for a Season 2?
There’s a lot still there.
I think there is something, but this is a very genre-bendy story.
So when we ask, “Is there room in the world for Season 2?”
“Is it going to feel like Burrow’s End?”
No, because everything keeps getting bigger and bigger.
It would just feel so different.
Not in a bad way.
So what do you do as you start to figure that out and deal with the stoats?
Magic now exists in the world, but only these long little squirrels in Eastern Europe can do it.
How do you re-understand our world?
I want Season 2 to be Rise of the Planet of the Apes style.
At its core, D&D is a very might-makes-right system.
It definitely began with the story and the theme first.
I don’t think it’s cyberpunk anymore.
I don’t think that that fear associated with that setting makes the same sense now."
Will I know it when I see it?"
The definition is really hard to find.
D&D is great when you know exactly what the bad guy is.
Here’s my beautiful toolkit: always destroy it, one spell or one weapon hit at a time.
So part of the fun of that was, again, power leveling.
I just kept giving them bigger weapons, more magic.
Starting off, their only class options were half-casters.
These are enemies, but they’re also technically terrain.
It’s a little unclear about what you need do.
That’s the thing I wanted to play with within D&D.
And I think we said some fun and interesting things about it.
Picking [D&D 5e] was definitely intentional.
It was a chance to talk about what this system does, frankly, too well.
D&D handles power really well, but it also teaches you to treat problems as fight triggers.
There were always alternate goals and other ways to go about solving these problems.
You are exploiters as a part of your nature.
Will you do that again here?"
It became a fun arc across the season.
I did suspect this would be the “I’ve chosen violence” Dimension 20 season for you.
And before that, you used the Kids on Brooms system for Misfits & Magic.
Both systems lean much harder into roleplay, not combat.
Which is why we had BINX as a warlock patron.
They all exist in the D&D world, just in the Feywild side of it.
They’re all powerful.
They can kick the teeth out of each other.
But the thing that they actually care about is their relative standing in regards to one another.
So D&D was just there, but was not the priority.
So let’s tell a story where you are playing with the edges of D&D.
I love the phrase “fantasy of purpose.”
I think there is always a drive to find meaning in things.
Those reactions to the unknown: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn.
But I do think that good DMs are also riding along.
So yes, absolutely.
This interview was edited for both brevity and readability.
Got a news tip or want to contact us directly?
