Worlds Beyond Number is my favorite thing of the year

I was listening to Worlds Beyond Number on my walk today, when the following exchange blindsided me and made me, quite literally, stop in my tracks.

Fox: "What bothers me?"

Ame: "That...what other people think of you?"

Fox: "Nah. If they can't catch me, they can think whatever they want about me."

Ame: "And if they can catch you?"

Fox: laughs "Oh, I'm in trouble"

Ame: "Yeah...imagine that they can always catch you...and then how would you live your life? Would you always be doing what you wanted to do?"

Fox: "Yeah...because if I stop trying to do what I want to do, then they've already caught me.”

This is just one small example of incredible lines, and nuggets of wisdom, hiding in this actual play podcast - lines that, as the players themselves, reflect on later in this very same episode, will often cause them to break character and admire whatever it is that dungeon master and master storyteller Brennan Lee Mulligan has just said.

But I should take a step back. Who are Ame and Fox? Well, Ame is a witch, and the fox is her familiar.

Hm. I should probably take more of a step back.

What’s Worlds Beyond Number, other than my favorite thing so far this year? Worlds Beyond Number is an Actual Play podcast, created by Brennan Lee Mulligan, Erika Ishii, Aabria Iyengar, and Lou Wilson, alongside their producer, Taylor Moore. When it was first announced, I followed with great interest, just due to the sheer talent of, and my personal affection for, all of the people involved.

If you’ve never heard the term “actual play”, it is, broadly speaking, a genre of podcast where people record themselves playing tabletop games to tell stories. Generally, at least for the more popular shows like Critical Role and Brennan Lee Mulligan’s own highly-acclaimed Dimension 20, this game is usually the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons - as it is for this first campaign of Worlds Beyond Number, titled The Wizard, The Witch, and the Wild One.

So far, when I’ve come to this blog to write, I’ve generally had some sort of overlying point I’m trying to make. Today, I sit at this computer typing simply because my joy for Worlds Beyond Number needs to live somewhere than just my heart and my head. In a year full of amazing things I’ve enjoyed - from things I’ve personally enjoyed, like the delightful early-year surprise that was the video game Hi-Fi Rush and the wildly-entertaining latest season of my other favorite actual play podcast, Friends at the Table, to works of such high quality that they will influence their medium for years to come, like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and the television show Succession - my love for Worlds Beyond Number has consistently kept it at the top.

Part of this is my bias for the medium itself. As much as I love video games, and books, and TV, and movies, and even other forms of podcast, actual play shows stand alone as something truly unique. When you bring together the right group wildly talented people, and ask them to collaboratively tell a story, using a tabletop game to ensure some degree of both order and chaos, well, there’s really nothing else like it.

But clearly, there’s something about this group of people, telling this story, that’s resonating with me on a whole different level. It’s hard to look at a piece of magic and try to break down the individual components of the spell, but if I had to try - it’s not just the act that everyone involved is unbelievably talented, but that they deeply love each other, and most importantly, deeply love telling stories together. It’s not just the drama or the in-world comedy, the immediately-compelling player characters, and the fascinating world they’re building together, but it’s also the moments that can’t help but bring everything to a halt, where everyone steps out of the moment to reflect on whatever wild thing was said or done.

This isn’t unique to Worlds Beyond Number, either. My other favorite shows - the aforementioned Critical Role and Friends at the Table - have this same dynamic, and it often works for me in similar ways. My favorite moments of Critical Role are being able to see the players physically respond to some new twist or revelation.

Yet, despite not being able to see the players, similar moments in Worlds Beyond Number somehow land even harder for me. When I interrogate why that is, I come to the conclusion that it’s the intimacy of the group. One dungeon master and three players isn’t a large group - Critical Role has one dungeon master and eight players, with an occasional guest - which is its own fantastic dynamic, but can also result in some of those characters, and some of those players, sometimes getting lost in the shuffle. Every episode of Worlds Beyond Number gives every character, and every player, a chance to shine.

Likewise, many words have been written comparing Brennan Lee Mulligan to other DMs, something I have no interest in doing myself, other than to say, his style is unique, and incredible, and that is no small part of why I’m writing about Worlds Beyond Number, and not those others shows.

When I was trying (successfully) to sell a friend on the podcast, I specifically chose one of those moments of high drama where the tension is cut by the players reacting to the scene itself, because if there is a single component of the spell that’s most important to the magic, I believe it’s that.

If you read all that, and are already interested in actual play shows, this is the perfect time to jump on Worlds Beyond Number. A commonly-voiced complaint of actual play shows is that the sheer number of episodes makes them overwhelming. “How can I ever watch 63 three-to-four hour episodes of campaign 3 of Critical Role in order to catch up to where they are now?” is a very relatable question. Likewise, while Friends at the Table’s campaigns are often more standalone, the current campaign, Palisade, is a direct sequel to another one, Partizan, which is set in the same fictional sci-fi universe as two others - Counter/WEIGHT and Twilight Mirage.

Now, do I think all of that is worth watching or listening to? Absolutely. The universe in which Counter/WEIGHT, Twilight Mirage, Partizan, and Palisade is set is in the running for my favorite sci-fi setting in any medium. But, I do also understand the intimidation of a backlog that’s hundreds of hours long.

Which is why, if you’re reading this when it’s posted, it’s the perfect time to start listening to Worlds Beyond Number - they’re only nine episodes in, and new episodes are released every couple of weeks. If you’re reading this years later…well, hi, I hope the world is still here, and also, you should still listen, but I understand if that’s a much more intimidating proposal. Of course, I imagine it’s been quite the wild ride, and worthy of your time.

If you’re here, at the end of the post, and still don’t know if actual play is a genre that interests you, I strongly recommend the four-episode YouTube series Exandria Unlimited: Calamity. It is set in the same fictional world as the main Critical Role campaigns, but far in the past, during a near-apocalypse. It’s guest GM’d by Brennan Lee Mulligan, has two of the three players in Worlds Beyond Number, and it is a simply incredible story, told by incredible people, and the single best introduction to actual play I can think of, with much of the same magic as Worlds Beyond Number.

Once you watch that, if you find yourself thinking “I want to experience more of this, but maybe a bit more lighthearted” - buy, do I have a show to recommend to you.

(It’s Worlds Beyond Number. In case you didn’t get that. You probably did.)

(…I should go)