A prequel to one of Dimension 20’s most popular stories begins airing this week. The Ravening War is a new 6-episode miniseries that reveals the events that led into A Crown of Candy, a series set in a Candy Land-like world, but with Game of Thrones themes. The new series will feature Brennan Lee Mulligan as a player alongside Dimension 20 regulars Zac Oyama and Lou Wilson. Also joining the cast is Critical Role’s Matt Mercer, Aabria Iyengar and Anjali Bhimani. ComicBook.com had the chance to speak with Bhimani about the upcoming series and the unique circumstances that featured her playing with the creator of The Ravening War, but with someone else controlling and telling the story.
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ComicBook.com: How did you become involved with Dimension 20? Most of your RPG experiences have been Critical Role based. So what made you jump over to Dimension 20? How did you become involved with this miniseries?
Anjali Bhimani: It’s a great question. I actually did some stuff with Geek & Sundry as well before I did Critical Role, but that stuff happened because of Matt and Marisha. Marisha had recommended that I go there because I knew them from Overwatch and a bunch of other things. The TTRPG community is obviously very, very tight, and there’s a lot of overlap. I’d been watching Dimension 20 and loving it for a while at that point, so I was hoping that this was true, that it was only a matter of time before we’d be crossing the streams and I would get a chance to work with them. Because I love the stuff that they do, I love both their smaller series, like The Ravening War, and then their main cast are just so extraordinary.
And especially after watching Brennan do Exandria Unlimited: Calamity for Critical Role and watching how epic that was… I was just really excited. And what made me really jump over is Matt texted me, “Hey, I’ve got this thing that I am doing, no pressure, but I need to know by tonight if you can do it.” And I was like, “It’s you. Yes. I’ll say yes before I even know what it is, because it’s you.” Because he’s one of my dear friends and I trust him implicitly and anything that I get to do where I get to hang out with him, I’m in.
When you found out that Matt was going to do a prequel campaign of A Crown of Candy, what were your feelings about that?
Bhimani: Well, like I said, the power of the prequel as an improvised creation is extraordinary especially after watching Exandria Unlimited and seeing the power that can happen, specifically the Calamity. It’s one thing to write a prequel that’s a movie or a book, but to have to create that, the level of virtuosity on the GMs part to be able to create something that will live on improvised, but will live on in the lore of an already existing universe. On a scale of one to 10 of difficulty, that’s like a 17, right?
Obviously Matt is Matt, so I was fully aware that he was capable of it, but I was just so excited that, ooh, to get a chance to do that, to get a chance to be in that world ahead of time, that was very, very exciting. So like the good student I am, I watched all of Crown of Candy and took all my notes and made sure I knew who everyone was. I knew that this was a world that the D20 community had been very, very fond of. And when you are that fond of something, you have a certain ownership of it, and it’s incumbent upon anyone who steps into that world as an artist to treat it with respect and love. That’s me doing my homework as a creator to make sure that the community that I’m creating this for, with these amazing artists who’ve already been a part of it, some of them, that’s my job to make sure that I’m doing right by them.
Can you tell me a little bit about your character that you’ll be playing in The Ravening War?
Bhimani: Lady Amangeaux Epicée du Peche. So Lady Amangeaux, she has been for some time the Queen of Fructera. However, as everything starts during this series, we discover that she is mourning the death of her husband, and as a result, the monarchy is in question. This character for me is very different than any of the characters I’ve played before in any RPGs because I’ve historically made very capable characters. Characters who really knew what they were doing, knew how to navigate socially and physically, and knew how to navigate the waters that they were in. For Lady Amangeaux, she knew how to navigate those waters before he passed away. But she’s about to be taken out of this life that she has lived and put into a completely different set of circumstances she knows nothing about. And that’s one of the reasons I wanted to create a character like her who is very powerful in her own right, but in a very different, uncomfortable new world, trying to navigate a system she knows nothing about.
What is your thought process as your character tries to navigate all of the political intrigue in The Ravening War? In general, navigating through something political like courtly intrigue or negotiations is very improvisational. But in an RPG, everyone is kind on the same side. So how do you improvise with the other players? What’s your main plays? What’s your main cues?
Bhimani: First of all, in TTRPGs, just like in any other medium, the most important thing is story. What is going to tell a good story? It’s way more important that I tell a good story than if I get to use all of my character’s strengths and skills. And the conflict in a circumstance like this doesn’t necessarily have to come from not agreeing with the players across the table. The conflict might come from the very fact that I am in this circumstance that is unexpected and that I don’t know how to navigate.
I remember when I created the character, I was like, “Okay, so she’s in court. A lot of this is going to be in court, and so these are all the skills that I’m going to pick, and these are my proficiencies.” And within the first 10 minutes of filming, I was like, “Oh, I’m not going to get to use any of these because this is a whole different game.” And no pun intended, it’s a whole different game in terms of where Lady Amangeaux is having to live her life. So I think it actually served the story and served the show that just like my character, I was little iffy on her feet trying to maintain this sense of order. So that was really exciting to me because it created a conflict, not just in the story, but within myself. That was really fun to play.
Of the other players, were there any that you were really interested in watching to see how they approached this series and these situations?
Bhimani: Well, every single one of them, because one way or another, every single one of those stories was going to affect me. The players that I hadn’t played with before, I had watched and seen how incredible they are in this storytelling format. Going into it, we knew that Brennan and my character had a relationship, so I was very interdependent with him in terms of how he did things. But at the same time, obviously just like any other TTRPG show, we had things that we had not told each other. So, that discovery happening in the moment was really, really, really special.
I loved having Aabria on this side of the table with me after having played with her behind the screen. It was so much fun. Aabria is just pure joy. I see her, I don’t even have to get near her, but I see her and she fills me with joy. And we have some pretty incredible moments, at least I remember from the inside, and I hope the audience feels the same way.
And I knew from watching Zach and Lou both in the previous Crown of Candy, I knew how Zach, for example, he says the most brilliant, hilarious things in the most understated way, and they’re so perfect for the story, and then he’ll rip your heart out with something else that he says, and it’s just that flip back and forth. I was looking very forward to trying to navigate that with his character. And Lou is just loads of fun. I’ve seen him perform with Brennan on stage. I couldn’t wait to get in there with him.
Was it weird at all to play in a world that Brennan created, but that Brennan was not currently in control of?
Not for several reasons. One is that I did Exandria Unlimited with Aabria behind the GM screen. And Matt was playing with us. And what was so beautiful about that experience and this one as well, is that the person telling the story is whoever was behind the GM screen. And obviously both Matt and Brennan had huge respect for each other in the worlds that they had created. It’s mind-blowing to me, the things that these guys have created in their shows. So I wasn’t so much looking to anyone else for guidance as trusting that together we would all shape the story in a way that would work. I feel like honestly, the hardest part, for obvious reasons is Matt taking on that world because, he has to set the stage in so many different situations for us to create the lore that then goes on to be in A Crown of Candy. I mean I’m already terrified of GMing. I can’t imagine GMing something like that. Can’t imagine.
Watching what Brennan and Matt and Aabria have all done, I’m just blown away consistently.
And it’s also not just them. There are other, there’s so many other GMs, Jasmine Bhullar is out there, and she created this whole new incredible world for us, for DesiQuest that ended.
There are so many other people out there who maybe have seen these folks who are further along, but are coming in with their own unique storytelling flavor and coming in and doing all of these super cool things and being at their table is really exciting too. I’ve been exquisitely spoiled by the people that I’ve gotten to play with because my friends are really dope.
I had one other question. You’re a working actress who has appeared on shows like Ms. Marvel. When you’re on the set, do you probe a little bit to see what cast members could potentially be future tabletop RPG players?
No, I don’t. Maybe I should more, but I kind of am this way. I’m the same way about video games when I’m on set. It’s not that I’m trying to hide that part of my life. I never would hide any of it. I’m proud and love all of the different facets of my career that I’ve been able to tap into. But I tend to just let the conversation organically come to different things when I’m learning about other people. ‘Cause I’m much more interested in asking them about themselves than about me in the first place. And if it seems like something is going in that direction, we can have a moment of connection over TTRPGs or over video games or over any number of things that we connect with. So I don’t specifically probe for that.
So one final question. What are you looking forward to the viewers seeing come out of this campaign?
I just thought about this and I think it’s going to be powerful. A lot of us in our lives, we have every intention of our lives going one way, but for whatever reason, they go another. And many of us think that as a result, we are failures, or as a result, we’ll never attain our dreams. We’ll never have a life that we want. So much of this story is about when life doesn’t go the way you think it’s supposed to go and what do you do with that.
And I would hope, and I’m excited for this to happen because I really hope it does, what I would hope people would see is that there is a future, even when things changed in wild and unexpected ways, and that even through heartbreak, there are ways to live, there are ways to move on. And I hope people get a little bit of solace through that, recognizing that you didn’t do it wrong, you did it your way. You didn’t do it any other way than you yourself had the power to do. I’m really excited and intrigued to see how people react to that, because it’s definitely a theme throughout the show.
The first episode of Dimension 20: The Ravening War debuts May 10th on Dropout.
