Continuing their momentum from their Factory 93 single “Instinct,” techno duo Dunes of Dawn ended 2023 on a high note, gracing the stage at Chicago’s esteemed ‘Day One’ event alongside industry heavyweights like Skream and Hot Since 82. These accomplishments caught the attention of influential labels, setting the stage for what promises to be their most impactful year yet.
Comprised of lifelong friends Tanner and Yianni, Dunes of Dawn have dedicated themselves to their craft, with a deep-seated passion for electronic music driving their journey. Navigating the realms of house and techno, their dedication has led to significant milestones, including sharing stages with the likes of Agents of Time, andhim, and Andrew Bayer. Now, their ascent continues with a signing to one of electronic music’s most revered labels: Insomniac Records.
Their latest release, “Dimension,” under the In Rotation/Insomniac Records imprint, marks the beginning of a new chapter for Dunes of Dawn. This track serves as the inaugural step in a series of label partnerships, each representing a milestone in their burgeoning career. From the first pulsating beat, “Dimension” transports listeners to a futuristic dystopia, characterized by its dark melody and powerful percussion. Tanner’s haunting vocal sample seamlessly weaves into the fabric of the track, enveloping the listener and solidifying the thematic architecture.
Back when I was running the game for my local Dungeons & Dragons group, I would always pride myself on bringing something handmade each time we got together around the table. Maybe it was a leather-bound book filled with vintage David Sutherland illustrations of the Tomb of Horrors, or a 3D map of a few rooms from Castle Ravenloft with just the right assortment of miniatures from my collection. As a lifelong fan of D&D, Rick Perry knows that impulse well. But as production designer and creative producer on Dropout’s Dimension 20, he’s operating at a scale that’s on another level entirely.
Season 21 of Dimension 20, an actual play program on the streaming television service Dropout, will premiere on Jan. 10, 2024. It’s an incredible run that shows no sign of slowing down, and Perry’s work has been integral in its popularity. To celebrate his impact, Dropout has released a feature documentary titled The Legendary Rick Perry and the Art of Dimension 20. In advance of its release, Polygon sat down with the lifelong Texan, now a resident of Washington state, to discuss his work.
A miniature high school dance inside the gymnasium at Fantasy High.Image: Dropout
While world class Dungeon Masters like Brennan Lee Mulligan, Aabria Iyengar, Gabe Hicks, and Matthew Mercer lead each game at the start of each Dimension 20 season with a high-level creative direction, it’s up to Perry and his team of skilled artists to bring that vision to life in miniature on the table. That means creating hundreds of inch-tall figures from scratch using clay and sculpting tools; kitbashing dozens of scale models into fantastical landscapes to anchor the viewer in the world; and crafting dynamic, multi-tiered battle maps where skilled improv actors can chew up the set.
Just like the props you bring to your home games, it’s bait, really, that he willfully uses to draw players — and viewers — closer to the center of whatever complex story he’s trying to tell.
“Dimension 20 [requires] a massive amount of creative genesis to create a 20-episode series,” Perry said, “[one that] that takes place in a completely new world where we don’t know what color the sky is, or what food the people are eating. So there’s this massive amount of creative activity that has to start at the beginning of it, and that takes a big chunk of time.”
The documentary details how that creative work begins at his homestead on Lopez Island in San Juan County, Washington at an outdoor sink first cobbled together by his father-in-law in the 1970s. It then moves into a converted three-car garage that once held farming equipment, but is now filled with bins labeled for the miniatures they contain — a box of trolls here, bugbears in the corner. Only after weeks, sometimes months of effort on the farm with a whole team of designers do the larger pieces get crated up and shipped to Los Angeles. Often, Perry said, that’s where the real work begins.
Rick Perry (right) with his team on Lopez Island taking the original Fantasy High Dungeon Master’s screen from storage for the first time in four years.Image: Dropout
The trick, he went on, is to stay nimble — even when you’re building maps for tabletop encounters that won’t happen for weeks.
“It’s part of the DNA of Dimension 20,” Perry said, “because at the very beginning when we decided we wanted these eight battle maps that are custom, that have this mix of say high school and fantasy, it’s not like something we can just crank out really fast. We need to know ahead of time in order to make skater dwarves, and all this sort of stuff.
“That means that we have to map all that out down to every detail — as much as we can,” Perry continued. That sort of on-rails gameplay is, unfortunately, anathema to modern role-play, which emphasizes creative freedom for the Dungeon Master as well as the players at the table. It’s always a challenge, Perry said, to keep things on track. But with a miniature set that, often times, costs just as much as a full-scale one, it’s up to everyone involved to keep the trains running on time.
“That tells the Dungeon Master that these are landmarks,” Perry said. “These [scenes that we are building] are places that you have to pilot the ship through these little hoops. We try to build in as much flexibility, as much opportunity for improvisation as possible, meaning that sometimes where a battle map falls, they could switch places or we could cut one. We try not to cut one because they cost money to make. And it’s a business venture, the show, and we want all that production value to appear on screen.”
The nearly 45-minute film goes even further in its exploration of Perry and his work, delving deep into his childhood and his time spent in college as a member of a troupe of performance artists. For fans of Dimension 20, it’s a rare behind-the-scenes look at how its particular brand of storytelling comes to life. But for artists, craftspeople, or even just casual hobbyists who paint miniatures on the weekend for fun, it’s the story of a kindred spirit who has found a vital, transformative role in the creative industry.
The Legendary Rick Perry and the Art of Dimension 20 is now streaming on Dropout.
Stories, especially beloved stories, have a tendency to bleed past their borders and escape their original bodies. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is among many well-loved works that have long since taken on new shapes, shifting forms constantly. The epistolary tale of vampires has hundreds upon hundreds of adaptations, with one domineering throughline: Stoker’s lasting characterization of the elegant, verbose, vampiric count himself.
Given the breadth and variety of the landscape, it can be difficult, at this point, to iterate on Dracula in a way that feels fresh — which is why Dimension 20’s Coffin Run was, and continues to be, such a delight.
Coffin Run, a Dungeons & Dragons actual-play series, premiered in the summer of 2022. The six-episode run, described on Dropout’s website as “a tale as old as many lifetimes,” was helmed by storyteller and game master Jasmine Bhullar and starred Zac Oyama, Erika Ishii, Isabella Roland, and Carlos Luna. Coffin Run emerged from Bhullar’s love of Stoker’s novel, she told CBR in 2022, as well as comedic source material like Young Frankenstein and What We Do in the Shadows.
The cast of the series shines as archetypical members of Dracula’s retinue, brought together to ferry the Count (who sustains undeath-threatening injuries at the top of the series) home to Castle Dracula in his coffin. Oyama plays Squing, a Nosferatu-like vampire who is Dracula’s “firstborn,” turned as a child and preserved forever. Roland plays Dr. Aleksandr Astrovsky, a brash, invigorated mad scientist figure. Luna plays Wetzel, a young human who lives as Dracula’s plaything in hope of becoming a vampire himself. And Ishii plays May Wong, one of Dracula’s vampire brides, who used to be an actress in New York.
Image: Dropout
Coffin Run unfolds as a love letter to Dracula, both the form of the novel and the vampire himself. The story roots itself in Stoker’s work from the start, anchoring the narrative in the epistolary form. It’s letters all the way down, really (and not just inside Squing, who has a tendency to eat them). The series opens on Dracula himself standing over a writing desk, penning a letter to Squing. The letter takes a journey across the sea before it arrives at the Gold Crona Inn — much like Jonathan Harker at the outset of Dracula. From there, letters guide the narrative, arriving for the players at key moments.
Letters, as a kind of delivery system for the story, are adeptly wielded by Bhullar — because of the fickle nature of their author, Dracula, when heartfelt sentiments are poured out in the letters there’s a lingering sense of unease, perpetuated by the arrival of letters that reveal that the Count’s feelings for his coffin-bearing friends and family might not be what they seem. Wetzel, for example, becomes disillusioned with the Count as the series goes on, slowly beginning to distrust him, while May realizes that her own adoration for Dracula may be more one-sided.
Materially, Coffin Run pays beautiful homage to the Gothic lushness of Dracula. When players are handed letters, they receive actual letters at the table, passed along with a glowing candlestick. In the final fight, Dracula’s vitality is measured by vials of “blood” poured into a crystal goblet by Bhullar and then consumed as the vampire comes back to himself. Black-and-white film adaptations get a nod in the grayscale miniatures and the monochromatic set. The special effects all come together to create a world that feels incredibly familiar to horror fans as well as uniquely new — Rick Perry, production designer and creative producer for Dropout, gets heaps of nods throughout the series for his work on the sets and miniatures, as do the crew in a talkback episode post-series.
Image: Dropout
From the Scooby-Doo-like title sequence to the performances, the crew and cast of Coffin Run perfectly hone in on the comedic influences Bhullar cited for the series, as well as the inherent ironies of the source material. May, the classically gorgeous vampire bride, is played by Ishii with a gleeful, over-the-top accent, as is Roland’s Dr. Astrovsky. Squing, as Dracula’s firstborn, is constantly baffled by modern technology, referring to the train that delivers Dracula’s coffin as a “metal tube.” Seemingly, his lack of understanding stems from apathy, rather than access. Castle Dracula, when the story eventually arrives there, is similarly frozen in time, preserved by caretakers who eventually end up ceding the castle to antiquers and “Lairbnb” opportunists.
So much of vampiric representation in pop culture is rooted in Dracula’s particular brand of allure. Even Dungeons & Dragons has its own storied distillation of Stoker’s Transylvania and the titular count in the enigmatic Strahd von Zarovich and the land of Ravenloft. The cast and crew of Coffin Run do a fantastic job of preserving the larger-than-life presence of Dracula in the story, from adding a silhouetted batwing shadow over Bhullar when she speaks to characters as Dracula to character arcs that nod at the ubiquity of the Count and his story. In discussing his place with Dracula at the end of the tale, Wetzel says, “It’s like everyone in [Castle Dracula], they’re just gonna be in there for a while, you know? It’s like the same thing over and over again. Same stuff.”
No adaptation is perfect — with Dracula in the public domain and vampires back in the zeitgeist (hello, Interview with the Vampire, and the resurgence of Twilight, and a million other fanged options), there will likely be hundreds more distillations in the future. Coffin Run takes a pile of well-known, over-offered ingredients — Dracula, the undying bogs of Transylvania, letters, a carriage ride through wolf-stalked trees — and makes something wonderfully new from them.
At the very least, it’s worth sinking your teeth into.
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