Matthew Lilliard on Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! and the Future of Dungeons & Dragons Actual Play

Matthew Lillard is back on TV to kill off your favorite Dungeons & Dragons players. This week, Dungeons & Dragons Adventures, the new FAST channel on Amazon Freevee and Plex, launched Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill!, a new hour-long D&D actual play series created by Matthew Lillard and his company Beadle & Grimm's. The new show features four first level characters come face to face with an epic D&D monster, and quickly meet their demise. ComicBook.com had the chance to speak with Lillard about the new show, the challenges of making an hour-long actual play show, and the future of the genre as it ventures into TV.

Comicbook.com: Are you excited that this is finally out and people finally get to watch all the episodes? Because you filmed this a while back, right?

Matthew Lillard: Yeah, back in April. And if you think about pre-production and everything that went into the show, we're about a year into the process now. So yeah, we're thrilled. On Monday night, we had the big premiere. We had big premiere of all three shows for Dungeons & Dragons Adventures – Heroes' Feast, Encounter Party and Faster, Purple Worm, Kill! Kill! To sit there and to see the community come out to see the show, it was really rewarding. My wife had never seen it and even she loved the show. 

You've been a D&D player for a very long time. Did you ever imagine that you would get to see Dungeons & Dragons on TV? Not the franchise, but the game itself?

Lillard: No, definitely not. When I was coming up, you would never be caught dead wearing a D&D shirt. Nobody would make a Dungeons & Dragons shirt. Those things just didn't exist. It's this renaissance for Dungeons & Dragons right now. There's just this huge groundswell of support for the brand, the game, and where Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! is just another piece of that, the tsunami of the game coming in, and it feels like it's everywhere.

What are the challenges of making each episode of Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! as a contained story and what are the challenges of trying to distill that story down into an hour-long episode?

Lillard: So, every episode is four 1st Level characters going off into the world to become the heroes of legend. And in each episode they come face-to face with an epic Dungeon & Dragons monster and get completely obliterated, which is hilarious. Every single show is fun. The challenge of it really is that Dungeons & Dragons plays as a three-hour game or four-hour game. The tempo of a game is very extrapolated. So the challenges is getting people into our mechanic, into the speed in which things have to happen. What's essential to the game is that we take the game deadly serious and allow comedy to be born out of the stakes, to allow comedy to be born out of what's happening to the characters and what the characters do in these incredible circumstances.

Finding people that are good at "yes, and"-ing, that can operate quickly and sort of understand the tempo of the game, is the number one challenge to it. The good news is we have an incredible production crew and the editors for our show are remarkable. I think we had 12 to 13 cameras on set at all times. 

I think the longest game we had was an hour and 20 minutes. I think I was the DM of that game. I was a horrible DM because I knew exactly what it took to produce the show and I played in all the practice tests. But when I DMed, I got lost and we ended up taking an hour and 20 minutes. The good news is that it still cuts down to 48 minutes perfectly. You don't miss a single thing that's taken out. At the end of the day, the shows are each one of them a success. 

Did any cast members pitch characters with massive backstories and you had to explain to them that the character was just going to die?

Lillard: We wanted those backstories! I mean we didn't want 13 pages. We wanted everyone to have a really firm grasp on who they were. Bold, strong choices going into a quick game like this, serve everything. They serve the people around you, they serve the DM, they serve the audience. We want to know exactly who you are, what you're committed to, and what drives that character. Now 13 pages of backstory, we're never getting to that stuff, but you having an idea of who you're playing and why you're playing them and having a strong point of view for Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill!, that's the sweetness. That's sort of the thing that makes this show work.

Was there any particular character that, when you got to watch them go through this process, you were just really pulling for and hoping they would survive? 

Lillard: All of them! The funny thing is that in the show you fall in love with these characters. There's four first level characters and we brought all these incredible players. Everyone's bringing this energy. They're all very charming, they're all very intelligent, and you sort of fall in love with all of them. 

I will say the odd thing is that when the characters are getting obliterated, when they're getting completely destroyed by Tiamat or some other ancient monster, you have this empathy, you have this sadness, and you can see the players. Nobody wants to die. I mean, how often when you're playing Dungeons & Dragons do you have a character that actually gets wiped out? I mean, it rarely happens.So, you would see people get upset. 

One of the things that I think makes the show special, in my opinion, is that we created the end of the game. Our host, Bill Rehor, what he does is at the end of every game, he finds a moment that happens in the story and he weaves in this epitaph. What happens is, each one of these characters, and we talked about this in pre-production, we want you to play righteous. We want you to play a very serious character. Be fun, have these moments of frivolous joy, but at the end in the epitaph, find something that can give somebody closure. They've just found a character, fallen in love with a character, and then lost a character. So can you see closure in a really human way in that last beat. 

The crazy thing is that all of these epitaphs have this weight behind them. That's nothing you've seen before at a D&D game, right? You're funny, you're laughing and then there's these really emotional moments at the end. They're not sappy, they're not dramatic, but they're kind of lovely. It's closure. It's one of the cool aspects, I think.

So who decides what monsters appear on the show? Is that left up to the DMs that you bring in or is that the production team? Who decides which monster gets to kill?

Lillard: We let the DMs decide that. Our goal is to provide framework to these really creative, unbelievably talented DMs, right? And so they came in and said, "Hey, I want a Tiamat. I want a dragon. I want a purple worm." First person gets it, right? And if they were a little off and we had an incredible mini from WizKids. (WizKids was an incredible partner for us, they gave us all kinds of monsters miniatures) And so we would offer like, well, what about this monster? Because having a mini was really good. We'd bring the mini in, slam it down on the table. It was super fun, but we tried to give the DMs as much room to express themselves as we could.

Obviously, there's a rotating cast in the show. Is there any dream guest that you hope to have on in future? 

Lillard: Yeah, a million of them. One of the things we're really proud of is that the table is as diverse as the tapestry of this community. So, we definitely want to keep going. That's important to us. I want to keep pushing those boundaries. I want to bring in players with Down syndrome. Is there a blind group out there that plays? Is there a deaf group out there that plays? Can we sort of illuminate different gameplay than we've seen on traditional TV? I think that's super exciting.

Also, we have celebrities, I would love to keep bringing in different celebrities that are interested in playing that are fun and are funny. Stephen Colbert is obviously a fan of Dungeons & Dragons. We'd love Stephen Colbert to come in and play the show. That'd be incredible. And for us, we would love Matt Mercer. We love the whole Critical Role team to come in and play a game. They all know each other so well. It was like sitting at their home table and playing in this style. So for us, the idea of inviting Critical Role and the way they play applied to this, I think Mercer would be a blast and the whole crew would be incredible.

Do you think that this more focused format of Actual Play is the future for Actual Play? Because we've seen Critical Role where their episodes go four hours long, but one of the things that both Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! and Encounter Party are doing is they're offering a much more focused type of a D&D experience. Do you think that is going to be one of the secret sauces to making these D&D TV shows and getting even more mainstream exposure?

Lillard: Yeah, I think so. Look, I think that people consume TikTok videos constantly, hours at a time. I think that the way people consume media is changing dramatically. Also, you have to tip your hat to a game like Critical Role. They are maintaining those eyeballs, maintaining that community, and people that love that love that. Not everyone is that group of actors. They're incredible to watch. They're all charming. It's like sitting at their table and to capture that magic is very difficult. So I think that that's the outlier, not the norm.

I think the Faster Purple Worm! is a super fun way to play this game. We have hopes and dreams of doing all kinds of stuff that supports this format going forward, but we'll see how it does on the show. But our hope is that the people will want to go out and hang out and you want to squeeze in a D&D game, then you can play a Faster, Purple Worm! game and have a blast. It is about sitting around the table, hanging out with your friends and playing a game. That's the best way to spread our craft.

Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! airs every Thursdays & Saturdays at 6PM PST and 9PM PST Eastern & Pacific on Dungeons & Dragons Adventures.