“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.”
Back to basics
This didn’t reduce the stakes either. As Mulligan explains, stakes are about what the characters are feeling – struggling to find water in a blasted hellscape is just as difficult as facing off against powerful wizards in the heart of the Factorum Malleus.
In much the same way, Divergence was no less dangerous than previous Exandria Unlimited campaigns. Actually, it was arguably more harrowing because the party couldn’t always fight their way out of their problems. It’s difficult to keep starvation at bay with a +1 longsword, for instance.
“I wanted to get one,” Mulligan says with a grin. “I thought I had [Jasmine Don’s character] Fiedra dead to rights. I thought that it’d be the first on-stream character death from pneumonia. Let’s go. Let’s go, dude.”
A damn good yarn
Impossible odds aren’t new for the show. Critical Role recently wrapped up its third campaign, and the cast talked to us about how they were breaking their world for art. “I was like, ‘Oh, now we’re gonna get real weird.'”
“It was real close,” Mercer agrees. “We were all clenched tightly at our player side table. It was real tense.”
There’s only so far you can go in dialling up the grim, though. As he mentions during our talk, tabletop games inherently have a “baseline percentage of slapdickery.” Regardless of how dark you try to make things, there’s a limit when you have “a Sam Riegel or Laura Bailey at the table.” But that’s what makes it fun; being able to let your hair down makes the darkness feel deeper. As Mercer puts it, moments only feel so dark when there’s levity you can compare it to.
Collaborative creation
I imagine all this has to be an odd feeling for Mercer. Although the world of Exandria as it exists now is a group effort, he’s the one in the driver’s seat. What was it like to hand his creation to someone else?
“I say this without any shred of construct – it is the greatest experience,” Mercer explains. “To create something is one thing, to create something and then watch others make it far more meaningful through collaboration than you could have ever done yourself is, in my opinion, the most pure act of creation. It’s a communal act of creation. You know, Exandria… evolved out of love and collaboration at the beginning of all of this. People have watched, now over 10 years, something evolve that was not intentional. As that intent became necessity, out of the nature of just this growing brand and business and media opportunities to see the world live and breathe in many unique ways, it also became not just necessity to share in its ever expanding existence, but the greatest joy that I have probably ever experienced in anything creative in my time. I love to live the antithesis of the auteur theory. I want to forever wave the banner of many minds make the best art.”
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“I’m going to leap into this question that was for Matt,” Brennan says, “I do need to absolutely jump in and say Matt, in his beautiful, collaborative spirit… Matt’s characterization of that collaboration from a guy who walked into it is like walking into the Sistine Chapel and someone being like, do you want to do an improv show here? I don’t know that I would call this a straight up equal collaboration. It was beautiful when I got here, so I have to give the man his flowers, because he’s perhaps the most generous creator I have ever worked with. Exandria is so stunning, and we owe it all to Matt, and it’s very beautiful to be able to tell a story in a world that has this much love and care put into it.”
So, where next? Brennan feels like his time in Exandria’s past is done, but its future may be beckoning.
“If I were fortunate enough to go back into Exandria, we would go to the far-flung future Exandria, 3044, cyberpunk Exandria,” he jokes.
“The voice of the Tempest is the head of some sort of corporate conglomerate trying to secretly fund eco-terrorists against, like, a major corporation,” Mercer adds.
“Precisely, 1,000,000%,” Mulligan agrees. “You go to Craghammer, and it’s just a giant fleet of dwarven server banks, like Mines of Moria style. I love it.”
Honestly? I’d be down for that. Maybe next time.
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