Dimension 20 Burrow’s End Interview: Aabria Iyengar On Shocking Finale Influencing Candela Obscura

The twentieth season of Dimension 20, Burrow’s End, has come to a close with epic battles and the family of stoats making choices that determine the fate of the world. The family of stoats has come a long way from fleeing their Warren and racing through the Blue Forrest, but after wiping out the leadership of the Last Bast, dealing with the human threat and protecting 20,000 stoats falls on their shoulders now. As they face the biggest threat to Last Bast in one final showdown, the stoats will need to work together to protect not just themselves but all those who depend on them.

Aabria Iyengar crafted this horror-filled season as the Game Master returns to the dome with a less silly season than her previous ones. The cast includes Dimension 20’s Brennan Lee Mulligan, Siobhan Thompson, Erika Ishii, and Isabella Roland. Joining them in the dome for the first time are Rashawn Nadine Scott and Jasper Cartwright, longtime fans of Dimension 20.

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Screen Rant interviewed Aabria Iyengar about the finale of Dimension 20’s Burrow’s End. She broke down the different themes explored throughout the season, why she wanted to use the 5e system, and why she so vehemently defended the First Stoats during Adventuring Party. Iyengar also explained how exploring horror in Burrow’s End influenced her when creating season 3 of Candela Obscura and how Mulligan’s Devil’s bargain became an important inspiration.

Aabria Iyengar Talks Dimension 20: Burrow’s End Finale

Screen Rant: Aabria Iyengar. Masterpiece.

Aabria Iyengar: Thank you. I’m so excited we can finally talk about it. Gosh. Going back and seeing the early interview where I was like, “Buh, buh, buh.” Oh, buddy. You’ve just got to trust, I think, because how do you explain to someone at the end of this without spoiling stuff, like what it’s going to be?

It was just like, “Yeah, it can’t be. It really can’t be DnD, or it can’t be Bunnies & Burrows or Wanderhome, or these gentler systems,” because it’s going to go so wide, honestly, so quickly, and then just keep turning. Yeah. I’m glad to be at the end of it, because I’m like, “Now I can talk! I can use all of my words about what this story is.”

Well, it’s really interesting you bring up the 5e system, because Erika and I talked about that. That was one that gave me the answer where I gave up halfway through the interview, because I was like, “None of my questions are as good as what you just said.” Can you talk to me about what you’re excited to explore with the 5e system, specifically with the horror element?

Aabria Iyengar: Yeah. For me, the DnD does better than most other systems is that power leveling. It’s that creep of when you gain a level, you are significantly more powerful than you were before, and power in Fifth Edition translates directly to your ability to enforce your will on the environment and other people around you. Usually the tremendous and fantastical acts of violence. So much of this season, especially with the double leveling. Every time they leveled up, they got two levels. It wasn’t just, “I got a little bit better at this.” It’s like, “You got way better at a thing than you did before,” and it always came at the end of some tremendous action, usually violent interacting with the Blue.

You eat the bear’s brain, or you eat some part of the bear, and you get it right away, but fighting something that is also attuned to the Blue makes you even better at fighting. There was also a sort of stealth mechanic that, I think, a couple of people noticed, was everyone’s initial builds. I instilled a maximum. They could only be half casters if they were going to cast at all, so it’s half casters and martial. It wasn’t until post their interaction with the Corium in Phoebe’s heart in Reactor Charlie that they had access to full caster classes. The only one that was off the table the whole time was druid, because introducing the idea of turning into other animals really kind of breaks the world in a way that I was like, “Oh, I don’t want to try to account for that.”

Exploitation of other animals and things around you becomes less important when you can just be those things yourself, so taking druid off the board. Yeah. Every time you gain levels, you become more powerful. That power is always even in the things that are social. There are spells that are charm person. Those enchantment spells instill compulsion like you’re enacting your will on someone else against their better judgment or their priority set. Everything you are made to be better at in DnD is inherently cruel and violent, so if I keep doing that to you and giving you these nebulous situations of, “Who’s really bad here? Is the bear evil? Is it just the chipmunks? Are the First Stoats evil?”

Well, now, if it’s very explicit because they’re threatening Sybil, but also, what’s the state of this world, of last bass? You haven’t experienced a lot of it, but everything I give you is a bigger and bigger hammer. At what point does everything in your way that’s stopping you from what you want to do become a nail? That was a very big theme in the system. It’s a very big theme in the story, and the system was always there to support it and to subtly push them towards it. If you go back and watch, you can catch me sort of trying to put my thumb on the scale a little bit of, like, “Oh, I thought you’d have more people that made it out of the Red Warren with you, so here’s a point where you kind of failed and could’ve done a little bit more.”

If you can do more, if I make you a little bit more desperate to enact more on the world, but the toolkit that you have, that when I give you a question of, “What do you do,” the moment you look down at your character sheet, you see a bunch of ways in which to interact violently within the world. How does that affect your problem solving as you get bigger and more interesting problems? That was a big ole part of it. I think the table handled it beautifully, and I think the story was better for that sort of core tension at the heart of it.

I completely agree. Also, you have been so adamantly defending the First Stoats in all of this.

Aabria Iyengar: Half of that was a joke. Look, the adventuring party episodes are me truly unhinged, because I tend to feel, especially when we’re filming D20. I have a big, “Whew, we made it,” and my brain just absolutely shorts out. The adventuring parties are usually either me being very specifically like, “Let’s talk about the story,” but if you let me get into my wacky bag, I will pick a weird hill and die on it. Brennan truly is like my brother. I’m like, “Okay, I’m an only child,” so I don’t know what it’s like to harass your siblings, so this is what that felt like.

Iwas like, “Yes, I understand how I built the Stoats, and what they look like, and what they did,” but there’s enough of a case that you can make in either direction based on how you want to see the world and how you want to view systems. You can make a pretty strong case in any direction. It’s not about doing the thing that’s exactly right. It’s about making a choice, and standing by your choice. That was just me sort of bugging the table, because we were coming into the finale. I was like, “What if I just say, ‘Yeah.'” Sometimes it’s just a bit, and you find a hill, and you’re like, “I’m going to die on this hill for no good reason.”

I love it. I think what I was most curious about, had the First Stoats survived, would they have worked with Phoebe, or would they have tried to stop her?

Aabria Iyengar: Had the First Stoats survived, they would have been very excited to see and meet Phoebe and figure out what she wanted. The moment they realize Phoebe’s aims were to make the entire plant go nuclear, and, with the fallout, whoever survives, survives. I think they would’ve said that, “That’s beyond the pale, and now we are aligned against Phoebe, because that could kill too many things.” I think there’s that sense of even the First Stoats have their limits, and you didn’t see that before they were killed. Yeah. That idea of the First Stoats went down that easily because they were never the final boss.

They were the people that were left that were trying to figure out what to do in and with this world, and knowing that humans are real and will come back, and not understanding whether or not Phoebe was a friend or a foe. Again, even playing into the theme of every decision you have to make is really gray and not that concrete, even for the NPCs within this world. They’re going through the same thing you’re going through, so having the First Stoats there as people that could’ve fallen on either side based on interactions, and based on new evidence, was a bit of a part of it. I still think everything went the best possible way it could, but yeah. That’s what would’ve happened.

We have to talk about Phoebe and what happened to Dr. Wenabocker. How was that grosser than the bear map?

​​​​​​​Aabria Iyengar: Because it deals with that last horrible problem of the bear map is this sort of infestation, and exploitation, and parasitism, but the bear is still its own thing. It’s a thing that’s infected, like a disease. The horror of Phoebe is that Phoebe fused with Dr. Wenabocker. Dr. Wenabocker isn’t there anymore. That’s Phoebe wearing him like a suit. The final comp, because we’ve made so many jokes about what the comps and the hidden comps for this show and this story are. The final comp was Attack on Titan, and it always started with that the first thing from Attack on Titan is, this is a world where there’s an unknowable, unfightable monster that is knocking at the gates.

They exist, and they will come back, and we don’t really know what to do, but we’re going to try to figure out how to survive in the face of whatever they are. That felt like such a fun early analogy. People called it out really early. They were like, “Oh, this feels like Attack on Titan.” Even down to the scale, and the size, and the shape of the thing. I was like, “Yeah, but lean in even farther,” because, whatever, spoilers for Attack on Titan, the idea that the Titans are piloted by people. It was like, “Oof.” That somehow makes everything so much worse, because there is human intentionality behind this Eldritch monster.

That was a thing I wanted to lean into for Phoebe, which is Phoebe isn’t unknowable in the way that we thought humans were unknowable until we finally met them. We know what Stoats are like, so having a Stoat sort of in control of the Eldritch endgame of this is like, “Oof.” It’s extra yucky. Also, it just looked really gross and bad, so I love that for her.

I love that you’re like, “Matt did Eldritch horror? I will one up that. Thank you very much.”

​​​​​​​Aabria Iyengar: Look, again, that was also the funniest part. All of this was in place, and then we got to Molaesmyr, and I was like, “Oh my gosh. While I’ve got you, let’s talk about this.” Then we play Kingdom Death together, so we are also playing inside this game that has so much Eldritch monstrosity at the core of it. It’s been a thing that I’ve been thinking about for a while, so it was fun to take a little swing at it. I think it went pretty good.

Without a doubt. I think the thing that’s so interesting to me is Phoebe spent essentially 20 years among humans. Why did that experience make her even more anti-human than they already were, because they did lock him in the closet when they first met him, but this was worse.

​​​​​​​Aabria Iyengar: Yeah. I think there’s always that subtle implication that cool. Once you are there, and you’re safe and hidden, it’s the reverse Avatar of it all. Not The Last Airbender, the blue alien thing of, you can drop into an Avatar and see the society as a member of that society and come to your own conclusions. The beauty, and hope, and triumph of Avatar is that you see it, and it becomes something worth staying with and defending and protecting. I think the fun of a horror game is going, “I have seen through the lens of safety pretending to be Dr. Wenabocker what the humans do, and what they are like, and I have find it wanting.

I do not like it. I reject it with my whole heart, and I will come back and still remember my roots and who I am. My goal is to eradicate this menace and clear the field,” for that original priority of making more Stoats that are just like you. Phoebe was so on mission, and I think that sort of clarity and focus of purpose across 20 years is terrifying in its own right when you’re like, “Oh, your mind didn’t get changed at all?” ​​​​​​ Horrifying.

One of the things that was so cool about this season is you not only just had these amazing battle maps, but you had the puppet show. You had the tapes. You had the clipboards. Can you talk about creating an immersive experience in the physical world, as well as through storytelling?

​​​​​​​Aabria Iyengar: I mean, there’s something very cool when you have the crew that Dimension 20 has where you’re like, “Oh, everyone here is an absolute killer. They’re the best in the game at what they do. Do no under utilize the resources available to you. Tell as much story as you can. The walls of the dome are better projectors than they’ve ever been. You can do more with that.” How do you push? What do you do past projection? What if you start telling story on the wall, not just using the dome as immersion, but the dome as storytelling, and voice recording as storytelling.

Carlos is the head of series, but he’s also a phenomenal actor. If he’s got the time, and he’s interested, can you get a little bit of extra juice from him too? It’s all about using everything you have in front of you to try to tell as much story as you can, even down to the little details. Between an episode, we’re going to slap a sticker on the back, and they won’t have noticed it, and all of that. There’s also something. Sort of taking a step back and not answering that question all the way. Caitlin, I’ve never finished a sentence. I won’t start now.

There’s something unique about horror, which is the three levels of horror. How do I scare the characters at the table? How do I scare, safely and kindly, the players that are playing but hitting some of their fears and making them feel that too so they push it more into the characters and their character’s choices. Then the third and biggest layer is, how do you scare the audience there? There’s a lot of stuff that’s done for immersion, because feeling inside it really allows the players to feel the things that they are asking their characters to feel. Then, of course, all the story is there to scare the characters.

Then it’s like the synergy and synthesis of all that to also get the audience. I think that was where the tapes really shone that it was something that bypassed. It was like, “You are hearing this too,” and you are trying to discover and figure out what’s going on. It’s the nebulousness of all of it that really was able to land all three of those axes. Yeah. A difficult effort, but made much easier when you have Rick and his squad, and Carlos, and Chavock, and Kevin. I can’t name everyone. Everyone did such a good job that it made it so much easier for the sort of herculean effort of trying to get as much story into 10 episodes of a game with fear and confusion as its heart as you can.

Speaking of horror, can you talk to me a little bit about what your experience in Burrow’s End you wanted to bring to Candela Obscura?

​​​​​​​Aabria Iyengar: Yeah. I think there was. Oh, gosh. It’s so nice that even though they’re airing with a little bit of overlap, there were months between the two to digest everything that came from Burrow’s End and decide. With the new set of parameters that Candela has, it’s a different ask. It’s three episode that will air a month apart. It’s a different system, and a different world, and a lot of other things that are like, “Hey, this whole system’s out of your hands.” The world, the lore, exists, and this will be the first system, or the first iteration of Candela has the lore book and can follow along with you, so make sure you don’t get the lore wrong, because they’ll know immediately, which is very, very fun and exciting.

It was definitely a lot of lessons about getting to the heart of what a fear is and exploring that in as many ways as possible. Burrow’s End had a lot of layers of fear, and what it means to be human, and violence, and confusion, and this sort of us versus them mentality. Sort of a conversation around regimes, and governments, and responsibility, and trying to be able to see from a vantage point when a government breaks bad, and when you have to do something, and when you interact, and when you fall in line. Burrow’s End tried to cover a lot of things, and I was like, “Cool.”

For Candela, for it to be as clean and easy to pick up episode by episode, assignment by assignment, because they are self-contained in a way that Burrow’s End wasn’t. Really drilled down onto a singular fear. The big one for Candela is that idea of monstrosity of your job is to find and deal with monstrous things, but what if you are the worst thing you ever met? What do you become? What do you do? Yeah. I think there are a lot of really good lessons learned from Burrow’s End, and were able to be taken into Candela and go laser focus. Get this one thing, and if you can nail that, and the audience understands that right away, you will be able to keep them on board from month to month, and from assignment to assignment.

One of the things I’m curious about, because having all of them have this touched by the magik of the Fairelands, it really kind of reminded me of that big reveal with Tula, where she’s been a Revenant. Was that kind of part of the inspiration for offering that to all of them?

​​​​​​​Aabria Iyengar: 100%. Seeing what Brennan was able to do when he took my silly little devil’s bargain in our session zero, or not even our session zero, our character gen. Watching him take that, and take that little bit of, “What if I offer you something a little terrible,” and it becomes your secret to keep. It becomes this little thing that informs so much of your choices that no one will know about until the reveal happens, and how fun it was to play that, and how fun it was to watch it.

It was definitely a thing that was like, “New group. Hey, what if,” and then, yeah, in exchange for a scar they got a little bit more of an ability. Everyone in Candela starts off with one scar, so they’re all that much closer to oblivion across the three arc campaign chapter. Yeah. I think seeing the success of how Tula felt was definitely a big mark in the, like, “I think I can continue to offer this and see what new things I will get back from people from it.” Yeah. Episode one having all those big reveals up top.

There was also a lot of, like, “You can’t hold on to this secret until episode eight.” There’s a thing about secrets, and this was something I talked a little bit in AcoPath too. The point isn’t the secret. The point is who do you become, and how does everyone react once the secret’s known? Having Tula keep that secret for so long was a fun subversion to my normal paradigm of, “Get the secret out early and often,” which we came back to for Candela, where it was like, “Everyone’s got to know what the board state is of this group. Why this group? You’re all a little monstrous, and we should know why.”

Now the subsequent two episodes will be about the, “Oh my God. What are they? What are they capable of? What are they fighting for, and what are they fighting, both within themselves and without, inside the world of the Fairlands?”

I love that. Then you’ve explored, in Dimension 20, a lot of these fantasy subgenres, and I’m loving it. Do you have any others that you really are excited to explore in the future?

​​​​​​​Aabria Iyengar: Okay, this is going to be my one very bad answer for you. Yes, but I’m going to keep it a secret.

That means we’ll see you again, doing it all. I’m good with that.

​​​​​​​Aabria Iyengar: Look, I know the address to Dropout. They can’t. They’re going to have to move if they don’t want to work with me anymore, because I just show up and sit in the dome. They’re like, “Fine. Who do you want?” I’m like, “Call Brennan. Get him in here. I have a half of an idea.”

You just pull the chair to the side of the table. You’re like, “I’m here now.”

​​​​​​​Aabria Iyengar: Duct tape myself to the dome and be like, “I go here. This is great.” Yeah. I think, again, I’ve made a thousand jokes about not watching all of Lord of the Rings, and not being very high fantasy driven as a kid. It feels very fun now, as an adult, to get into that and immediately go to the edges of the genre, because I still think the lion’s share of most fantasy. I’m like, “It’s fine. It’s great.” I don’t think I’m as resistant to it as I was when I was a kid, but I still find the edges where it bleeds into sci-fi, or horror, or these other things a little more interesting.

There are lots of subgenres and parts of fiction that intersect and interact, and are in conversation with fantasy, that I find fascinating, and that I still want to dig into and tell stories within some of them. Burrow’s End was a fun exploration of, like, “what if I do something that is not pastiche or parody, but sort of sincerely inside of a set of ideas that I want to explore?”

But also know that I can come back and have the optionality to do something a little more sincere that will still be funny, because the table is funny, and games are funny. Also getting a little bit back to the bag of having fun with the theme and the genre and playing with, and teasing it, and finding story within the comedy of that is very fun too. I’m excited to get back to.

For as horrifying as this season was to end with Jaysohn becoming the stoat Air Bud.

​​​​​​​Aabria Iyengar: Incredible … The implications of a little Stoat at the Olympics is the funny … I definitely went home that night, and I was like, “What? Of course Lyla’s a scientist, but Olympics? What does that mean? How does that work?” I just love it. It’s just so fun. It’s just so fun. Shavon’s so good at seeing the heart of the things and going, “Here’s the fun corner inside it. Just in case you didn’t see it, I’m going to shovel it and throw it into the air so we all get to play into it too.” It was just so good. What an epilogue.

I love that so much. Then you’ve talked about how Burrow’s End really digs into a lot of different themes. What was maybe your favorite one to explore that you haven’t necessarily had the chance to explore in other D&D games?

​​​​​​​Aabria Iyengar: For me, I think it was definitely playing. Oh, gosh. What a good question. I’m actually going to shut up and think about that for like two seconds … Yeah. I think there is something in the, “What does it mean to be human,” that is so fun, and a little off genre for DnD writ large, because you’re playing an assortment of humanoids, but it all still comes down to that fundamental. Everyone here is people, and we’re exploring how we want to interact with the world, and what we are capable of, both good and bad. We are capable of tremendous heroic highs, and also monstrous sort of colonialist inspired lows, but it’s still about how we want to interact with the world.

I think there’s something that’s a little more like that, but the subset of that, of, “What does it mean to be human,” that was so fun by adding a layer of xenofiction on top of DnD. That you can talk about all of the moral highs of the love of family and coming into one’s own like we have. I’m so grateful that Izzy and Shavon chose to play children, because then you have that coming of age tale that’s also sitting inside of this. What does it mean to become an adult? What does it mean to be human, to understand love and family, and saving people, and reaching out? Gosh.

All of those things on top of the, “But you’re still carnivores, and you still exploit the world. You are capable of lower lows, maybe, than you are your highest highs,” and it’s all about from moment to moment, from encounter to encounter. What are the choices that you make? Every encounter had options. There were alternate win conditions that were inherently non-violent, and it’s not a value judgment to say which ones were taken at any given time. It is just as cool that Tula knew to put the bear to peace with its heart as it is to have Rashawn with the most beautiful nat 20 blow up the last encounter with a perfectly timed shot, and this immediate and violent and monstrous threat. Those are both correct. Yeah. Playing in that.

Humanity, to me, is who you choose to be from moment to moment. The ability to choose to be past the state of nature that says, “Do what you have to do to survive,” but you can make a choice about how you want to be in the world, and what you want to leave as a legacy, and what you want to bring into it, and what you want to remove from it via all your interactions. It’s the coolest thing, and it was so nice to be able to tell a story about that.

Obviously, you had worked out the lore and some of the narrative that you wanted to explore with this. What was something that the table brought to the story that maybe surprised you in the best way possible?

​​​​​​​Aabria Iyengar: Definitely how tight-knit their family was, and how important mothers were to this family. We have a mother of adult children. We have an expectant mother. We have a mother of young children. Erica is so stinking brilliant. Erica as Ava picking an ancestral guardian barb … Even the mothers that are just sort of spirits and ideas now are a part of the cycle of family here. When you call on your ancestral guardians, you’re calling in your mother’s mother’s mothers. It is about protection and what mothers owe their children, and what they owe each other, and what they owe themselves.

All of that came out of that character gen session, which then became me going, “Well, that’s integral to this table’s inner party dynamic, which means it has to be integral to the story of the world.” There’s a lot of things you can see within the story that looked through the lens of motherhood, even down to kind of funky terrifying pregnancy allegories with the bear map of this thing that’s inside you that can only live by feeding off of you.

I know that’s a very dark way to refer to pregnancy, but I do have cousins that, when I was calling and talking to them as I was kind of breaking out the world, they were like, “Oh, I’m going to be really honest. I’m seven months pregnant now. I’m so excited to meet this kid. This child is the love of my life, but it does feel bad, if I’m being honest, that the exchange that’s happening right now, all the choices about what I eat, and what I do, and when I rest, and what I do in the world is around what is best for this baby, and all I am getting back from this child is they’re sitting on my bladder, so I pee every 12 seconds. My hair and my skin are different, and my back hurts all the time. My feet hurt, and I can’t touch my toes, and I have to be on bed rest five hours a day.”

There’s a lot of that trade off that is uncomfortable. You can find a lot of those little things if you rewatch it with a lens of an analysis of motherhood. All of that was very much entrenched in everything that the player has built.

Love that. Then what do you want the audience to take away from this as kind of the core piece that you hope sticks with people?

​​​​​​​Aabria Iyengar: I hope the thing that everyone walks away with is that in that fiction, in that time when we were reading, so much of the brutality of teaching children the highs and lows of what humanity is capable of was obscured through the lens of xenofiction. If you show intergroup violent dynamics, but they’re bunnies, we don’t find that as distasteful to show children as if there were people doing it in a story. We would say that maybe that’s not age appropriate for a kid, but because we made the bunnies do it, we’re able to see all of that. In that transitional time where you go from animal xenofiction to 1984 and Animal Farm, where we’re starting to talk about important books and works and fiction that teaches children how the world works and how to think about it.

I guess if I wanted anyone to take something away from Burrow’s End, I hope they saw it as a meditation on what it means to be human, to decide what you want to be as an individual, as a family, as a society, and to choose. Yeah. I hope it’s a little messy, and I hope that people can debate interactions in the world, and what NPCs were right and wrong, and what player choices could’ve led down different paths. I hope it opens conversation, because that’s my favorite part of good books is the ability to discuss them, and I hope people can do that with this. I will find that so wonderful if they do.

I can tell you right now you succeeded, because the second you said that the choice that Rashawn made of blowing up the big bad in the final moments, I’m like, “Oh, but what if they didn’t?” Was Phoebe someone you could talk off the ledge, because I didn’t think so.

​​​​​​​Aabria Iyengar: I wonder.

Is that a thing? Is that possible?

​​​​​​​Aabria Iyengar: The best part is that I could tell you what I had in my notes as resolution mechanics, but I think there is something more interesting that you’ll never know. You’ll never know what Phoebe was capable of. Maybe if you had stopped and taken your foot off of her throat for one second, she would have taken the advantage, won the fight, and doomed the world. You’ll never know. You’ll just know what has come out of the choice you made. Seeing those epilogues, how can you argue that this isn’t the best of all possible worlds? That’s really fun to me.

About Dimension 20: Burrow’s End

Burrow’s End takes place in the Blue Forest, where a certain family of stoats, comprised of matriarch Ava, adult sisters Tula and Viola, Viola’s husband Thorn Vale, and Tula’s children, Jaysohn and Lila find their once peaceful existence threatened by forces both natural and otherwise.

Check out our other Dimension 20 Burrow’s End interviews:

• Aabria Iyengar on episode 1
• Siobhan Thompson on episode 2
• Brennan Lee Mulligan on episode 3
• Erika Ishii on episode 4
• Jasper Cartwright on episode 5
• Siobhan Thompson on episode 6
• Rashawn Nadine Scott on episode 7
• Erika Ishii on episode 8
• Aarbia Iyengar on episode 9