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Brennan Lee Mulligan
American writer, actor and gamemaster (born 1988) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Brennan Lee Mulligan (born January 4, 1988) is an American comedian, actor, writer, and gamemaster. He often works with Dropout (formerly CollegeHumor) as a writer, performer, and producer. He is the creator and regular gamemaster for Dropout's actual play series Dimension 20. He also wrote the superhero webcomic Strong Female Protagonist alongside artist Molly Ostertag.
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Early life
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Brennan Lee Mulligan was born on January 4, 1988, in New York[1] to actress and writer Elaine Lee and comedian Joe Mulligan. He is of Irish descent.[1] He was introduced to the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons by his mother at age nine,[2] first gamemastering at age ten.[3]
Mulligan was introduced to theatrical gaming while attending the Hudson Valley Beltane Festival at age eleven.[4] He started attending The Wayfinder Experience, a live-action role-playing summer camp,[5] spending much of his teenage years working as a lead story writer, performer, and camp counselor there.[3][6] At age 15, Mulligan and his brother co-founded Bootleg Adventures, organizing one-day live-action role-playing games to introduce children to theatrical gaming.[4] In an interview with the Times-Herald Record, a 16-year-old Mulligan expressed conviction in theatrical gaming's potential to enable "kids [to] come out healthier beings than when they first arrive".[4]
He dealt with significant bullying in elementary school and struggled with realizing he had become a bully himself.[7][non sequitur] He was also homeschooled as a youth.[8] In 2005, at 17 years old, Mulligan graduated from SUNY Ulster with an associate degree,[1] having majored in philosophy and humanities.[3] In 2009, Mulligan graduated from the School of Visual Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in screenwriting.[9]
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Career
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Writing
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Mulligan and Molly Ostertag co-created the webcomic Strong Female Protagonist, which was named one of io9's Best New and Short Webcomics of 2012.[10] In 2015, Strong Female Protagonist won an Autostraddle Comic and Sequential Art Award.[11]
In 2017, Mulligan joined CollegeHumor as a writer for Um, Actually: The Web Series.[12] In 2018, CollegeHumor's streaming service Dropout launched Um, Actually as a game show, with Mulligan continuing to write for the show until 2020.[13] Mulligan was also a writer for several scripted shows on Dropout, including the Star Wars parody space saga Troopers,[14] and the mockumentary Gods of Food.[15][16] In August 2025, Variety reported that Mulligan had "struck a new three-year development deal" with Dropout.[17]
In 2023, Mulligan was a writer for Foul Play, an interactive murder mystery series created by Andrew Barth Feldman and Alex Boniello.[18][19]
Performing
In his twenties, he performed and taught[3] comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB).[6] It was working at the UCB that led Mulligan to working at CollegeHumor,[3] (premiering on December 14, 2017, with Who's the Real Cop?).[20] He has appeared on, and is the executive producer of, the comedy panel game show Game Changer and the spin-off improv show Make Some Noise on Dropout.[21][22][23] He has also appeared on other Dropout shows such as Very Important People and Gastronauts.[24][25]
Actual play
Since 2018,[26] Mulligan has been an executive producer, writer, and gamemaster for Dimension 20 on Dropout (which also hosts his video podcast, Adventuring Academy).[2] In his capacity as a professional D&D gamemaster, he has been cited by Bleeding Cool,[27] Comic Book Resources,[28] Wired,[29] and Wizards of the Coast's own Dungeons & Dragons podcast—Dragon Talk.[3] Glen Weldon, in a review of Dimension 20 for NPR, commented that "Mulligan is such a good DM and he's got so many improv skills. He's such a close and responsive listener that no matter what the players throw at him, he can always roll with it, without breaking the game. And that is a very rare skill, so it's terrific stuff".[30]
Mulligan was the Dungeon Master for Exandria Unlimited: Calamity, a weekly, four-part actual play web series spin-off of Critical Role that premiered on May 26, 2022.[31][32] He returned to Critical Role in 2024 as the Dungeon Master of the three-part special titled "Downfall" for the show's third campaign.[33][34] Mulligan was then the Dungeon Master for Exandria Unlimited: Divergence which premiered on February 13, 2025.[35][36]
In January 2023, it was announced that Mulligan, along with Erika Ishii, Aabria Iyengar, and Lou Wilson, would star in the creator-owned actual play podcast Worlds Beyond Number.[37][38] The show launched on March 1, 2023, and quickly became one of the top 20 Patreon accounts in the world; Mulligan was the "inaugural game master".[39] The first book of this campaign ran for four seasons with the finale scheduled to air in August 2025. The next campaign is set to premiere in January 2026 with Iyengar as the game master and Mulligan shifting to a player-role.[40][41]
In August 2025, Critical Role announced that Mulligan would take over as Game Master from Matthew Mercer for their fourth campaign. The new campaign is scheduled to premiere on October 2, 2025 and will feature a new world "outside its usual Exandria setting".[17] Rolling Stone stated that "the inclusion of Mulligan is huge, but not entirely surprising" given Mulligan's background as "a well-established Game Master" who created the "titanic success" Dimension 20 along with previous comments made by Mercer on eventually shifting "into a 'Professor X' role as a mentor to the next generation of storytellers rather than remaining the face of the brand in perpetuity".[42]
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Accolades
He has received an "Excellence in Performance Award" from the New York International Fringe Festival,[43] and won a 2019 Webby Award in the "Comedy: Shortform" category for his CollegeHumor skit, Tide CEO: You Gotta Stop Eating Tide Pods.[44] In 2025, his series Dungeons and Drag Queens won "Best Web Series" at the Queerty Awards.[45][46]
Personal life
Mulligan is the godson of comics artist and writer Michael Kaluta.[47] In November 2015, Mulligan was a contestant on the American version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and won $50,000 after incorrectly answering the $100,000-question.[48]
By 2020, he lived in Los Angeles.[28] On January 21, 2021, Mulligan announced his engagement to his fiancée, Izzy Roland, via Instagram.[49] They married on April 1, 2023.[50][51] On January 23, 2024, Brennan announced the birth of his and Roland's first child, a daughter, on the Patreon for the podcast Worlds Beyond Number.[52]
Politically, Mulligan is a socialist.[53] In August 2023, during the 2023 Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes, Mulligan led a Dungeons & Dragons-themed picket day at Universal Studios where the final boss was AMPTiamat.[54][55]
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Filmography
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Television
Web
Video games
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References
External links
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