Siobhan Thompson is a British-American comedian and script-writer with credits such as Rick and Morty and Adam Ruins Everything. She is also one of the intrepid heroes on Dropout.TV’s actual play D&D show, Dimension 20. We caught up with her to talk about the Dimension 20 campaign, Fantasy High Junior Year.
How would you pitch Fantasy High Junior Year to an elderly relative who loves Dungeons and Dragons?
First of all, very silly. But I think that a lot of it is about like, the consequences of your actions sort of catching up with you. And also, that moment in school, where you suddenly realise, oh no, I can’t coast anymore, I have to study and do my work. And for each character, that means sort of a different thing. And everybody has a different accent. At the end of the day, it’s full of fun, it’s a show about friends in high school. And that happened to be magical.
This is Season three of Fantasy High? How different is that from the first two?
The first one, we really didn’t know what we were doing, in a good way I think. It’s always fun to go in not knowing anything, and so you can break rules that you don’t know exist. And then second season, because it was all live and we were shooting it week to week, it felt like we could tell a story in a way that is little different. Because we could get some kind of audience interaction. We didn’t have any of the minis. The structure of it was very different.
And then going into this third one, we’ve now been doing this show for five years. We’ve shot a lot of episodes of it. I couldn’t tell you how many, I mean, I shot thirty-six Dimension20’s last year. So we’re much more, I think comfortable playing the game, everybody knows the rules of the game, which we certainly didn’t going into freshman year.
We’re in a whole new, big, fancy studio that the air conditioning works properly, and we have crazy monitors and projections and exciting. All of the minis have LEDs in them now, and they’re so beautiful. I mean, they’ve always been beautiful, but they’ve leveled up so much this season. It’s so impressive.
Has the success changed the vibe. Because there was a 3am in the morning, you were in a warehouse in the middle of nowhere, vibe to the earlier shows has, has that success changed it in what way?
I think somehow it has. I think the nice thing about us shooting all of the seasons outside of the public eye is really nice in that we get to present a finished product where we’re not thinking week to week about what the response is going to be, because we’ve already done it. The whole cast work really hard. We’re also all great friends, even if the show has sort of changed our lives a little bit, and it’s a much bigger operation now. We still have that friendship, and that friendship is maintained and deepened over the years, and I think that that’s sort of the core of it, but we also work very hard at making it feel as small as possible when we’re in the dome.
You’re the only British person amongst the Intrepid Heroes, and British geek culture is very different. How often does that come out in the show?
Certainly you’ve been influenced by a lot of that stuff Pratchett especially. Pratchett is so huge all over the UK. He is probably my favorite writer, and I’ve drawn so much from him, especially like his ability to justify the stupidest thing on the planet. It is so delightful to me, like all of the Pratchett footnotes, that energy is something that I always try to bring into my writing. Like what’s the silliest idea? And then how can I justify that, so that it seems like it’s the only idea, or the best idea, or the actually the most sensible idea. And then there’s Lord of the Rings.
Over Christmas I often I re-listen to the BBC dramatization of Lord of the Rings with Ian Holm and Bill Nye, which is so wonderful. I grew up with Radio Four, so when Radio Four archives started coming out, that was also very huge for me. Especially because of The HitchHikers Guide To The Galaxy which is wonderful. But suddenly, in the early 2000s, you got access to all of this old comedy, as well as the Radiophonic Workshop. Science Fiction that was made for Radio Four and then never rebroadcast or made easily available. Like John Wyndham dramatisations or, you know, Return to Mars. They were just wonderful.
Doctor Who or Doctor No?
Doctor Who!
Rick or Morty?
Oh, Morty. Rick’s a nightmare.
Truth or Beauty?
At this point in my life, beauty, truth is transient. Beauty is forever.
You can find out more about DIMENSION 20 – Fantasy High Junior Year via Dropout.TV. (We’ve updated this article to let you know that you can also join Dropout as Superfan, details are here.)
Editorial note: This is a previous interview that has had it’s links updated.
