Ally Beardsley and Siobhan Thompson talk life on an airship in Dimension 20’s Cloudward, Ho!

After years of watching Dropout’s comedy shows, I was drawn into the world of Dimension 20 with their action-movie focused campaign Never Stop Blowing Up. In that season, a group of video store employees find themselves magically pulled into the over-the-top world of a 1980s action movie, a premise that turned out to be an excellent match for the players’ penchant for outrageous hijinks.

After a couple of sequel campaigns to previous adventures and a wrestling-focused one that looks neat but is not my bag, Dimension 20 has my interest back with the pulpy, adventure and steampunk-inspired Cloudward, Ho!

The premise for the campaign has some of my favorite tropes – an old crew getting back together for one last job, a young adventurer meeting her heroes, failchildren of a familial dynasty, a giant vehicle/home for everyone to hang out on (in this case, an airship), and mechs.

It’s also a new setting for the Intrepid Heroes, the main Dimension 20 cast of Ally Beardsley, Brian Murphy, Emily Axford, Lou Wilson, Siobhan Thompson, Zac Oyama, and DM Brennan Lee Mulligan. Cloudward, Ho! will be their ninth D20 campaign together, but the first I’ve watched – while I’ve seen plenty of Fantasy High and A Crown of Candy out of the corner of my eye while my partner watched, I’m excited for my first full experience with the gang D20 is best known for.

I talked to two of the Intrepid Heroes – Siobhan Thompson and Ally Beardsley – about the season and their experience in the world of Cloudward, Ho! In the campaign, Siobhan plays hulking ship boatswain Vanellope “Van” Chapman, while Ally plays Olethra Macleod, the eager scion of the famed Macleod adventuring family. The first episode premiered Wednesday night on Dropout, with new episodes arriving each Wednesday until the finale.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with the setting. What was your experience with steampunk coming in?

Siobhan Thompson: So much of steampunk is an aesthetic. [Cloudward Ho] is aesthetically steampunk, and we’re calling it steampunk, but what it really is in terms of storytelling is like old pulp penny novels, schlocky Indiana Jones punching Nazis, treasure hunts, that kind of vibe, and that is great. Any day of the week I will run around, swing from a rope, hit somebody with a sword. That’s a-okay with me, baby.

Ally Beardsley: We blended a lot of fun influences. I think steampunk honestly was kind of a joke with us, because it’s literally a steam-powered ship. There’s a lot of Miyazaki in this, and a lot of young adventuring for my character specifically, because she is [a part of] the next generation of adventurers who is somehow being allowed to meet all of her heroes and go on an adventure with them. I think this was a really fun style of storytelling that we haven’t done yet, even though it feels a bit similar spiritually to Starstruck because it’s a ship adventure. Like Siobhan was saying, it’s very penny novel, it’s very old creaky wooden ship, hand-to-hand combat, and copper robots.

What were some of your favorite parts of the setting and world?

Ally: Brennan does a really good job of finding news senses to play off of. So it’s a little bit less that we see something scary, and it’s more be careful of what you breathe. There was a lot with vapors and chemical intoxication and chemical dependency in this series that I think was very poetic, and a new way to tell a fun story about mass manipulation and government oversight. They’re very Brennan style stories, we’re still telling very intricate stories about government and power, but with this kind of sepia overlay.

Siobhan: Yeah, I agree. I always love getting to be on a ship, that’s always so fun to me.

Ally: A lot of battle stations and stuff like that, it was really fun during combat.

Siobhan: I think it’s also a very English thing, but literally, because I’m playing the boatswain, I did a full drawing of the ship, with names for everything based on all the nautical names for things in old English tool ships. The boatswain is such a fun character because it’s sort of the assistant director on the ship. The captain mild-manneredly tells somebody to do something, and then the boatswain goes and yells at everybody. That’s very fun.

Ally: You’re like the first AD.

Siobhan: Exactly.

I’d love to hear about inspirations for character creation.

Siobhan: First of all, I wanted to play somebody beefy. I just wanted to play a large woman. Also, I think the Olympics had been happening, and Ilona Maher had blown up on TikTok. And I was like That’s awesome. That was a huge part of it, and my love of ships comes from my dad, he’s a big ship guy. My dad will drive 100 miles out of his way and then go Oh look, there’s a maritime museum, how did we get here? … Dad, you were driving. That was the sort of core of it, and also just a woman who’s very secure in her relationship with her tiny, little husband.

Ally: Olethra is a young trans woman, and Brennan and I were both laughing a lot about this idea of parents who are so libertarian that they loop back around to being big trans allies. Like Don’t tread on me, keep your government hands off my daughter’s hormones. So that was really fun. Then I was really influenced by the video game Heaven Will be Mine. I knew that we were gonna do some stuff with mechs, and a Miyazaki-like coming-of-age adventure story. I was the only one doing that, everybody else had their own really fun experiences with jadedness and what happens when you do make it and group dynamics with a big successful adventuring party. So it was really fun to play out what happens when you meet your heroes. What happens when you actually meet that rock star and they’re like Touring sucks. I hate playing the same song over and over again, and you’re like Whoa, this is brutal info to get. How do you keep the spark alive?

Murph and I were the two youngsters [in the crew], and Murph had such a measured … [Maxwell Gotch] is just one of my favorite Murph characters. I say that for a lot of Murph characters, but this one was …

Siobhan: It’s so much fun when Murph is playing a little stinker. He’s so good at it.

Ally: Yeah. And kind of an insert character, just a beefy athlete and he’s so into hockey right now…

Siobhan: It’s Murph, if Murph was genuinely a heel instead of just pretending to be a heel.

Ally: Totally, yeah. So that just felt really fun. I think I was also coming off of Junior Year and the Blimey of it all, which I had a lot of fun doing. But I also was like can I play a young femme character that isn’t like ‘Blurg, I’m so chaotic and a lesbian!’ Let’s find a new route for this. So I was trying to impress everybody else at the table, and trying to be precocious, which is so opposite from the last character that I played. That felt really good for a balanced player standpoint.

Siobhan: It was fun, sort of for the same reasons, to play somebody who was strong and also just blazingly competent in a way that’s not even showy competence. It’s just effortless. I’ve already done their job before you even notice that the job needed doing.

If you had to give senior superlatives to your character, what would they be?

Siobhan: Most Likely To Throw A Man Overboard.

Ally: This is so boring, but maybe Most Likely To Succeed, because she just was really concerned with doing well and showing up. So hopefully that, for her.

Ally Beardsley and Siobhan Thompson recommend

Heaven Will Be Mine (Ally): It’s this very lesbian mech suit drama that I thought was incredible. It’s a really fun game. It’s a chat box format, it came out in 2018. It’s been a while, but if you haven’t checked it out, it’s a fun weekend.

Voices by Ursula K. Leguin (Siobhan): This is one that I somehow had missed. (Ally: Of course you finished it. I think yesterday you posted that you just picked it up). I don’t even read that much anymore. I listen to a lot of books, but actually sitting down to read I don’t do much anymore. I just whipped through Voices, and I thought it was incredible, and feels very of the moment. It’s about a teenage girl who’s essentially living under a fascist regime where they’ve banned books, her once-rich city has been invaded and all of the books were destroyed, and building a resistance against that. It’s incredible.