‘Dungeons and Drag Queens’ Is a Sensation
Image; Dropout.tv
Recently, I had my friends over for a TV watch party. We were not watching House of the Dragon (2022-present), Severance (2022-present), or some other media darling, but the season two premiere of Dungeons and Drag Queens (DDQ) on a little-known streaming service called Dropout.tv. It is a show where drag queens meet around a table to roleplay fabulous characters in the fantasy world of Kelvorda, and as I watched my friends seated around me, I couldn’t help but feel the excitement in the air.
This watch party is an informal indicator — I know — but by no means the only one. The series has received coverage in Forbes, Gizmodo, and more. Rolling Stone called the season “an increasingly popular sub-series…where a bedazzled Mulligan holds court over RuPaul’s Drag Race alumni.”
In short, it is a sensation, and that is due not only to the talent of all those involved but also to its approachable nature. The show makes the ordinarily intimating tabletop world seem like a breeze, and because of it, I am hooked on DDQ.
A breakdown of the success
To say that Dungeons & Dragons is in the middle of a renaissance is an understatement. Cool people are playing this game, and more to the point, people are now considered cool for playing it.
An entire cottage industry has arisen to capture people’s love for D&D, with people making whole careers playing it. They have for a while, actually. Our modern D&D renaissance was arguably first popularized by the podcasts Critical Role (2015-present) and The Adventure Zone (2014-present) in the mid-2010s. Dimension 20 would not start until several years later, in 2018, arguably inserting itself at the tail end of this initial resurgence.
Dimension 20 was also not a first when it came to queer representation in the tabletop space. Queer people were making podcasts well before DDQ hit the scenes, such as Join The Party (2017-present), Godsfall (2015–2022), and more. Nor was it the first Drag Queen-focused D&D podcast. Queens of Adventure (2018–2020) with drag queens Arson Nicki, Butylene O’Kipple, Fraya Love, Irene Dubois, and Londyn Bradshaw, taking that glory years beforehand.
So, no, it didn’t have early adopters’ success, but it did have several key ingredients that made it such a sensation.
For one, DDQ aired on the longstanding Dropout show Dimension 20 — an anthology tabletop play series whose characters can range from fairytale characters to anthropomorphic food. Dimension 20 already had a solid following behind it, in no small part due to the brilliance of Brennan Lee Mulligan, who has to be one of the best Game Masters in the world right now. The show also has an impressive prop department that makes its fantasy worlds come alive on the screen.
When the first season of DDQ aired, there were already seventeen seasons under Dimension 20’s belt, meaning the show had quite the following. Dimension 20 has only gained momentum since then, selling out Madison Square Garden earlier this year.
Another reason for the explosion of DDQ is that the drag queens signed on for this series — Alaska Thunderfuck, Bob the Drag Queen, Jujubee, and Monét X Change — are arguably some of the best drag queens in the world, or at the very least the most popular. For example, when you look at records of Alaska Thunderfuck’s Instagram page years before the first season aired, she already had over a million followers.
However, the most successful ingredient has to be the authenticity (a very fraught word) of seeing our ‘Questing Queens’ learn the mechanics of D&D before our very eyes. As Susana Polo writes in Polygon:
“The brilliance of DaDQ’s first season — what makes it more than just the thrill of ‘two things that don’t usually go together’ — were the subtle ways Dimension 20 adjusted itself on the expectation of an audience new to the actual play medium and even the TTRPG hobby itself. The season featured a more straightforward (but still twisty) story than other seasons, bringing enough rule-explaining back into the edit so that non-TTRPG players could get a sense of the stakes.”
This separates it from most D&D campaign podcasts and video series, which usually consist of veteran nerds who know precisely what they are doing. The queens don’t know the rules, let alone how to minmax their characters, but because of Dimension 20’s high production quality, this greenness never causes the viewer to suffer. Brennan Lee Mulligan has enough skills as a voice actor to carry the queens when they don’t know how to proceed. The queens themselves are professional entertainers who can make even a serious gaff funny, and the set design is pretty to look at even when you don’t know what’s going on.
And so you get a show that is both raw and polished.
As viewers, we experience the queens learning how to play D&D for the first time. Because everyone involved is a professional entertainer, this experience is rarely awkward or cringe-worthy but rather fun.
A conclusion that’s a drag
When season 2 ended, the first thing one of my friends asked for (as I hosted a watch party for the show every week) was a season 3. As of writing this, that has not yet been confirmed, but I will not be surprised when it does. Season 2, as I already mentioned, garnered a lot of success. The queens received glowing writeups about their acting on the show, and I very much expect that to continue.
Dimension 20, and the Dungeon and Drag Queen seasons in particular, are not only high-quality D&D but also make someone’s introduction to tabletop warm and exciting. And so, if you have wanted an entry point into roleplaying but have been too intimated to start, there are no better guides than our questing queens from Kelvorda.