Spoiler warning: the following article contains light spoilers for the first episode of Cloudward Ho!
The new season of Dimension 20 takes to the skies this week. Cloudward Ho! leans into a steampunk vibe full of steam powered gadgets, airships and tomb raiding. The opening scene shows a cast prepping for a great adventure in a newsreel style segment that introduces the characters.
Then everything changes when the story jumps forward and we find that many of those bright and shining faces are now weathered by time and failure. Will the old heroes heed the call to adventure and bring the new generation of heroes with them? We spoke with Brennan Lee Mulligan, Ally Beardsley and Siobhan Thompson about their latest actual play series.
Capital-A Adventure
The first episode sets up a search for a lost continent as well as a chance to see adventurers who are not all at the start of their adventuring career. It offers a chance to look at the bright side and the darker elements of the steampunk genre. The cast was excited to try something new.
“I always approach the cast,” said Mulligan, “usually with seven to ten ideas that I’m excited about, or genres that we haven’t explored, or things that are interesting to me. Of that list of seven to ten a couple will hang around and morph for the next time we’re planning a season. Some of them will become Side Quests or other projects. The wonderful part of our core seasons is that it’s so clear what the mission brief is. What are my players psyched to do? We’ve just come off of Junior Year and Neverafter. We just did a sequel season. Let’s do something brand new. The last thing we did was horror, darker themed. Let’s do capital-A Adventure. Something pulpy and brightly saturated. We want new locations, thrills and battles. Let’s go on a damn adventure.”
“Brennan sent us a huge lore document that was just about the world,” said Thompson. “It was about the vibes of the different continents, islands, towns and cities. Everyone is going to be connected to the professor. We all came in with a few different ideas. We all sat in Brennan’s office and discussed what the best build of the party is. And then almost all of us went away and came back with ‘actually, I don’t want to do that, I want to do something else.’”
“I like that this felt kind of blank slate,” said Beardsley. “We’re doing steampunk, which is hilarious and there are a million ways we could go. It could be Indiana Jones, it could be Miyazaki. One of my favorite things about this specific group of seven people is where everyone’s brains go. Sure, we’re doing old wooden ships and air travel but then we get Brennan’s brain with different countries that he’s created with their warped corruption that happens at a government level. Everyone’s telling extremely sophisticated stories. I cannot wait to see jadedness come up against up-and-coming adventure hungry people. My character had read all of their books and was ready to meet her heroes. Should you meet your heroes?”
Generation Gap
While the adventure is grand, the drama is personal. Some of the characters are disillusioned with the choices they’ve made in previous expeditions. Others have been raised on the legends spread by everything from their own legacies to the trashy pulp novels that stretched the truth of their experiences.
“It was a conscious choice to be related [to] the next generation,” said Beardsly. “With the way the first episode tees everything up to the rug pull moment where we are young adventurers and are going to meet our heroes. When we do they are all washed up, they are completely disillusioned with adventuring and they don’t like what they do. That was a very fun misdirect that we wanted to set up with these two factions where they meet in the middle with a love of adventure.”
“In the world building,” said Mulligan, “we found this natural shape where the lore touched character creation and people’s character ideas. Our aeronaunts are eccentrics and criminals. The advent of aviation in this world was something for crackpots and dreamers at the edge of society to do. But, we watch as it changes and moves from pure science and experiment to being sucked up by the wheels of industry. That occurs over a period of time that creates this interesting generational gap. Who was doing this when it was an expressive, cutting edge creative science thing? Who’s doing it now? The PCs needed to straddle a divide. The people who began this are now older. Who are the PCs that are one the younger side of that divide?”
“First and foremost,” said Thompson, “it’s just so much fun to go on a rollicking adventure. That is what this season is. Wish fulfillment makes it sound trite but it’s so delightful. Everything that Brennan and the art department has come up with. It has the vibe of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is my favorite Narnia book or The Odyssey. You’re finding a whole new world, a whole new civilization, a whole new way of thinking and feeling things that opens your eyes and opens your heart. That felt delightful, like something we haven’t really done.”
Cloudward Ho! begin on June 4th, 2025 streaming exclusively on Dropout. New Dimension 20 episodes debut every Wednesday throughout the summer.
