I imagine plenty of us would agree that they play D&D for escapism, but not Brennan Lee Mulligan. The legendary Dimension 20 Dungeon Master would like to stare into the void, and he's OK if the void stares back.
"I'm not trying to escape shit," Mulligan says when we talk about Exandria Unlimited: Divergence and D&D. "I keep hearing about escapism. I'm not plunging into the heart of Fantasia to the seat of the throne of the Childlike Empress to do anything other than find the secret wisdom I can take back from realms supernal to tell a story about a better world that we imagined together. So for my money, stories of myth and legend and fantasy are where I go to find joy and play and meaning… I remember being a kid and playing house with my younger sister, and she would be like, we're getting blueberries for the pancakes. And I was like, what's that outside? Something rumbling in the woods? And she'd be, 'NO IT'S NOT!' So I've always had this issue. I need there to be something rumbling in the woods."
Mulligan isn't criticising anyone who plays D&D or the best tabletop RPGs to get away from a messed-up world, of course; rather, tackling heavy issues during play helps him work through dark times in real life.
"I like stories where we can talk about how we're feeling, and I don't find any relief or reprieve by hiding my face from the darkness I perceive in the real world," he says. "Turning my face from that doesn't give me peace. It doesn't give me anything to look away from that. So it's not to say that I'm in the business of just doing pure allegory, but it is to say that I think the great fantasy stories are about things that give you something that matters back in life as well. So when I say that I'm not trying to escape shit, I mean that telling a dark story during a dark time is what you do when you use stories to make your way through the time you're in."
Fellow D&D legend and Critical Role DM Matt Mercer agrees. "Yeah, I'll say off that, there's a difference between power fantasy and empowerment fantasy. The ability to create a world to play in that has terrifying conflict to surmount and… people who you would not consider capable of doing so, but in spite of that knowledge, still manage to fight for that victory, to make the world a better place, is exactly the crucible that lets us learn how we as people can be better at changing the dark parts of our world around us for the better. In small ways, it may be. But that's the empowerment fantasy that I strive for."
Amen to that.
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