“He’s right to think it’s cool, because it is”: D&D legends Matt Mercer and Brennan Lee Mulligan on Divergence, sharing worlds, and what they want next from Exandria Unlimited

Like all the best Dungeon Masters, Matt Mercer knows when to drop a hint. In fact, that’s how the Exandria Unlimited miniseries came about. During lunch with Dimension 20’s Brennan Lee Mulligan and fellow Critical Role cast-member Travis Willingham, Mercer began talking of his hopes for a limited series.

“Matt talked about, in terms of broadcasting, where different adventures or stories might take place,” Brennan said when we caught up to discuss Critical Role’s latest miniseries, Exandria Unlimited: Divergence. “[He] was talking about the past, and there was this thing he said about, ‘Yeah, we could do stories set here, or exploring this, or even going back to the age of Arcanum.’ And there was something in Matt’s voice that I immediately latched on to as, like, ooh, that is something that Matt thinks is really cool. And he’s right to think it’s cool, because it is very cool.”

Calamity, Mulligan’s first as a Critical Role DM, was born out of this lunchtime conversation. It charted the end of the world, but also the start of an MCU-style universe that led to a mid-campaign spinoff called Downfall. Divergence is the final part of that trilogy, and it differentiates itself by focusing on the average person at the end of this time-period. (You can catch up on the entire show via Critical Role’s YouTube channel, if you missed it.) This led to the cast’s characters starting as level 0 and eventually evolving into the level 1 adventuring classes we know from the best D&D books. But why scale back when so much of the game is about delivering a power fantasy?

“Well, we did high, level 20 mortals at the height of society sparking the Calamity with their hubris and tragedy,” Mercer says, “to Brennan helming the gods themselves in mortal form, kind of re-emergent as their terrifying and awe-striking, powerful selves in the hardest choice they had to make in history. Second hardest choice, technically. Where do you go from there? And you know, Brennan out of the gate was like, ‘well, it can’t be anything but the ground level.’ People who have suffered, survived, and rebuilt in the wake of what’s come before. And once [he] said that, it was like, this is exactly what the tale has to be. It was too perfect.”

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