If you follow tabletop news, chances are you've spotted teasers for Worlds Beyond Number over the past weeks. The new podcast series was created by and stars TTRPG heavy-hitters Aabria Iyengar, Brennan Lee Mulligan, Erika Ishii, and Lou Wilson, with design by creative director Taylor Moore from Fortunate Horse. It's all about the joy of home campaigns, those stories you tell with friends and that can span across genres and settings.

Worlds Beyond Number is creator-owned and supported by over 20,000 Patreon subscribers, as of February 2023. The inaugural episode for the podcast's first campaign, The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One, releases on March 1 and introduces us to the mirthful world of Umora.

D&D Beyond sat down with Brennan, who serves as Dungeon Master, to talk about Worlds Beyond Number and what listeners could expect from this campaign.

Art by Corey Brickley

Thank you so much for coming on here and talking about Worlds Beyond Number. I'm excited about the podcast. From what I'm listening to, the audio quality is—I don't know a PG way of saying it—but it sounds good in my ears.

Yes, I know what you mean. Taylor Moore, our producer, has pulled out all the stops, man. He's a genius. Just straight up. There's no other way to put it. His sound design is unbelievable.

You've worked with Taylor for some time now, is that right?

I met Taylor originally doing [Upright Citizens Brigade] in New York, and then they were also working at Kickstarter and helped myself and Molly Ostertag kickstart two volumes of our web comic.

I used to run a D&D game for him and a bunch of other UCB friends at the Kickstarter headquarters in New York. You know, go in and get little nice, iced coffees and play in their big, beautiful library there. Back in the day, when I was running games for him, he was like, “Dude, this is what you should do.” And I was like, "Ohh, you're being very nice."

Lo and behold, CollegeHumor and Dimension 20, and then he was always like, "Podcasting is this really incredible medium for sound design and theater of the mind." And it’s been very special with Lou and Aabria and Erika, who I've wanted to do a long-form campaign with for a long, long time.

All the pieces came together to make something really special.

I'm curious what the studio space looks like. Because in my head I was thinking, "Oh, they're telling a beautiful children's story." So, I'm just imagining everyone with parasols in the backyard, twirling around having so much fun.

Michael, let's go with that, that sounds great. Let's go with that.

That's one of the things, if you're not working with video, people could just imagine whatever they want.  

For you, Michael, there were bowties and trellises full of creeping vines and beautiful flowers and definitely not us crammed in a little studio in Atwater. I promise. I promise you.

You and I are wearing three-piece suits right now, too.

Yeah, exactly. Beautiful velvet. Three-piece suits. Yes, exactly. The beauty of theater of the mind. But actually our audience has already heard content recorded in different places. We've recorded in studios in Los Angeles. We've done fun little trips to do batch recording in little shared cabins, which has been really delightful.

Call that like camp. Going away to camp, which is really, really fun. There are a couple of different locations we've recorded in already. But for everyone else, yes, it's in a deep, rich forest filled with camphor trees and, you know, everything else like that.

Were you the one who came to the group and said, "All right, here's the idea. We've wanted to do a home game, but what if we did a podcast?"

It kind of was stars moving in space to orbit each other, right? I had conversations with Taylor where he was like, "It would be great to do a podcast." I had conversations with Lou Wilson, who I met doing comedy in LA prior to working for CollegeHumor, being like, "We should do a podcast."

I met Erika Ishii for the first time in person doing Escape from the Bloodkeep. It immediately was like, oh they are so brilliant. And immediately was like, if you ever had the chance to do like a longer-form thing with me, would you want to? And then same right upon meeting Aabria, I was like this is the person for this. So it was a beautiful kind of—like a shape that kind of organically came more and more into focus as the space for it in all of our lives came to exist.

And it was a real joy. Very organic I would say.

In the first Fireside Chat,* the group talked about the role of a tabletop system in the story. Why did you choose D&D for this first campaign?

In Dimension 20, we play so many [systems] out there—high genre, different settings. For this one, there was sort of, "If this is going to be a multiyear campaign, let's give it the feeling of the games I grew up playing," which were Dungeons & Dragons. Also, the feeling of we wanted to tell an epic fantasy story, right? A wizard, a witch, and a wild one. You know, we homebrewed a witch class for Erika Ishii. Aabria is playing a classic D&D wizard. Lou is playing a paladin. It's like this sort of classic thing that you would want.

I think that the mechanical offerings of Dungeons & Dragons—adventure, high-stakes combat, mystery, intrigue, skill checks, a very well-designed codified magic system—that allows for a certain kind of problem-solving and cleverness. And I think too the idea of leveling, the idea that over time with milestones and experience that we would watch these characters grow from novice adventurers and see where the story takes us. So, D&D was very attractive for those reasons.

* Patreon subscribers get access to the Fireside, which offers bonus content, including Fireside Chats, where the cast gives a behind-the-scenes look at the game.

Art by Carly Monardo

Do you envision this campaign going from levels 1 to 20?

Michael, I'll do you one better. We're going level 0 to 20.

We have an entire prologue called the Children's Adventure. For the podcast episode one, we're going to have a prologue with some material from the Children's Adventure. We'll start episode one as the adult heroes going off starting at level 1, going on their adventure.

But to do character creation, we decided we wanted to do a narrative character creation, which means we ran a "magical little kids in a magic forest during a big summer of their lives," as 0th-level children, no abilities, no feats. They rolled 2d6 for their ability scores. So, their ability scores max out at 12. They're little guys!

Over the course of the Children’s Adventure, they started to accumulate their first magical abilities. It was almost like the journey from 0th level to 1st level.

But the prologue, what was supposed to be like, "Yeah, we'll do character generation narratively!" turned into this 10-plus hour monolithic campaign of the children's magical summer together.

That entire Children's Adventure is going to be available on our Patreon over on the Fireside. So, for folks that want to come check out a little kid's adventure in the magical world of Umora, you can do so.

You mention the world of Umora. What was your inspiration for it? And can you describe it for folks who haven't yet been introduced to it?

The world of Umora, the setting of The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One is a magical world demarcated between the world of mortals and the world of spirits that is coterminous with and lives in and through and beyond and past and between the world of mortals. That is suffused in every possible way with magic.

And the world is at a time of an inflection point between various types of magic. Some of them are ascendant and some of them are diminishing. Some of them are very chaotic, and some of them are very rigid and ordered. And there are conflicts that exist between the realm of mortals and the realm of spirits. But there are conflicts that exist between imperial factions within the world.

The Empire and its Citadel of Wizards is where Suvi is from. Versus the more spiritually-aligned witchcraft of Erika's character. And then you have Lou himself playing a wild one, playing a spirit.

The inspiration for this world comes a lot from Celtic myth and imagery of the fairy tales I grew up with as a kid. It was also heavily inspired by the works of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.

Our children's adventure is big Totoro vibes, and then they kind of age up into something maybe a little bit more Mononoke or Howl's Moving Castle. There's a lot of inspiration there for us. It's a world with wizards and witches and sorcerers and all sorts of things like that, but a world as well that is so rich with magic that it sort of defies taxonomy in some ways.

But there's a lot around the ways in which people relate to spirits in the world of spirits. "Spirits" is sort of this all-encompassing term for fey and celestials and all these things. I think people will recognize a sort of world building that comes from that more Pagan or polytheistic mentality of "the goal is to find a way to live in harmony with the spirit world" rather than divide and taxonomize. 

Spirits are a big part of Umora. Are they viewed differently from monsters in a typical D&D campaign?

This is a very interesting type of world building. I think people will recognize it a lot from Studio Ghibli. I went and read all of my old favorite mythology for this and also got a lot of inspiration from the players who were offering things up. Erika offered up this amazing old kitsune mythology from Japanese folklore. I got a copy of the Kojiki and stories of the idea of spirits and how they interact with the mortal world.

There's a ton of Celtic mythology of "the ones under the hill" like [Lebor Gabála Érenn], The Book of Invasions. Things like, what is the difference between a god and a fairy and a sprite and how you have to ask yourself, "Is there a difference or is that just something that humans put on this world? Do they see a difference between each other?" There's a big suffusing of that.

The world of Umora itself does have a lot of magical creatures within it. But there is sort of this demarcation between humans, which are the main species that populate Umora, and all the different nations of humans and things there. And then anything sort of beyond that tends to be classified as a spirit.

In other words, it's not like high fantasy where you have different species but all of which are just mundane demi-human species. Like, "Hey, you're a gnome and I'm a human but we're both primates moving around in this place."

It's very much a world of the mortal beings that occupy the material world, and then a whole host of different entities from the world of spirits. You can classify them as demons or celestials, you can classify them as fey or undead. But, fundamentally, it's sort of that idea of, you know, it's all from that realm of the spirit.

Did you come up with the name of the campaign first and then decide on the characters or did you decide on the characters and then the campaign?

Characters first. Yes.

Because the name of the campaign is pretty slick.

Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. As soon as we had the characters, that was the vibe we were going for, right? It's like Where the Wild Things Are, great olds like Celtic folklore, Studio Ghibli. There's a lot of this stuff.

We are focused on our heroes here. That is the focus of this story and the world is expansive and big and full of wonders. But I think it's very much the story of Suvi, Ame, and Eursulon. And so, as soon as we had them, it was like, oh, The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One. It felt right and hopefully conveys the whimsy we're going for.

Art by Lorena Lammer

You've gotten to sit with these characters for some time now. What is it about each of them that you're most excited to explore, or that you're just most excited about?

I think that it's the triptych of them. It's what they each represent and how different they are. It's Suvi's brilliant mind and Ame’s expansive heart and Eursulon's unconquerable soul. It's this very beautiful triad.

These characters' strengths are also their struggles in some way, and I think that there's something very classically fantastical about this. But in the classic fantasy of it, it's also them encountering a world with very real consequences and elements wonder to Umora. But, within all that wonder there are no easy answers.

You know, you watch something like Totoro and you're like, "Weeeeeee! We're flying!" and then you go watch some of Miyazaki's other work and you go, "Oh there's a melancholy and a somberness here that also is a meditation on the world in a very real way." And I think that there's a lot of that, too, to get really excited about what these characters grapple with.

But yeah, I think people will fall in love with each of these characters in quick succession.

In listening to the preview episodes on Patreon, I feel they have a focus on the narrative aspect of D&D and not on the mechanics. Is that indicative of the vibe we're going to see moving forward?

The mechanics are part of it. Now we do edit out a lot of the dice rolling and the doing math and me looking up an ability. But people, especially people that are familiar with the game will see the mechanics at work right away.

I think this is a little D&D Beyond exclusive. Eursulon is a reskinned firbolg. So Eursulon is a spirit, he's a wild one, but he has Speech of Beast and Leaf. He has Hidden Step. People can rely on the fact that those are powers that he has access to.

Also, it's all full circle by the way because the name firbolg is directly from Celtic mythology. But there is a degree of visiting those mechanics as we go through.

But what I think you'll correctly notice is we are incredibly story-forward. And also, I think there's a lot of meditations for us on violence in this and on combat or espionage, like what it means to lie to people, what it means to steal. So, violence has a tremendous amount of weight there. Theft, or even things like lying glibly to someone, that can fracture a relationship. I think that you'll find that there's a lot in the campaign as it goes on of the characters making really smart and clever choices.

And if they do get into hot water, it feels like hot water. It feels like, "Oh no, we're in danger." I don't want to lightly be in a place where swords are getting drawn. That's really frightening. And their 1st-level characters, they're incredibly fragile. To the player’s credit, there is no feeling of, "Time for a fight now!" [But] there is combat within the first arc, within "The Wild One," the first chapter break.

Yeah, there's a couple instances of combat in the first one, but every one of them, it feels like, "Oh my god, I wish we had avoided this." And that gives a feeling that will resonate with really classic parts of fantasy storytelling for some people. Obviously not the kind of swashbuckling, constantly beheading goons high fantasy. But something more in the spirit of those other kinds of fantasy tales, for sure.

You previously mentioned homebrewing a witch class for Erika's character. What can you tell us about it?

The witch class is the coolest thing ever. It was designed by M Veselak, who's the designer of Wickedness, an incredible indie TTRPG. There was additional design by the incredible Brandes Stoddard. And the witch class is just a beautiful feat of design work of creating a primary spellcaster class that deemphasizes indiscriminate magic. Meaning, that almost everything about a witch is relational and down to their magic. Their magic gets more powerful if they are helping someone they care about or wreaking vengeance on someone who has wronged them.  

Mechanically, the class is built so that characters in the world of Umora can say, "You do not want to trifle with a witch." And it's mechanically true.

If you mess with a witch, you have put yourself in far more danger. As opposed to a wizard or a sorcerer, where it's like, yeah, they could be dangerous. They don't get more dangerous depending on whether or not you've messed with them.

So, the witch class has incredible abilities concerning familiars, concerning the creation of magical crafts, like literally witchcraft, the idea of magical objects of significance, making spells and charms for other people.  

They have healing, they have certain hexes and curses and cool stuff like that. There's a bunch of new spells that have been designed for the class. But I think the main thing they will see from Ame early on, is stuff concerning some spellcasting which is very very cool. Also, witches have a lot of cool character class design put into their familiars.

Do you plan to release the class on Patreon or are the specifics of the class something you're going to keep secret?

Yes. I think the plan is definitely to release it on Patreon sooner rather than later, but not on a tight timeline. We want to get it all nice and pretty and get art for it and all that good stuff. But yes, the goal is to release it on Patreon sooner rather than later.

People will see it and go, "Oh, this really feels like what I wanted an archetypal witch to feel like, especially as an adventurer." They even have some sanctum features for witches as well that mechanically explain, "Why are witches always in some tall, tall tower by the sea or a little cottage in the woods or something? Why do people go and seek witches out?"

What was it like in that first session when you first started playing?

It was awesome. See, the beginning of our prologue, which is also the beginning of "The Wizard: Then and Now," that's the first scene we recorded. So, that scene with the wizard, and then followed up with Ame’s scene, and then followed up with Eursulon’s. Those were sort of in order, and it was a joy.

The second we started playing, we were like, "There's something about this world and these characters in this setting that is just really bringing a sense of wonder." I keep coming back to the word "wonder." Maybe because it's all "W" words in the title.

Right when we started playing we went, "Oh. This is it. This is our sweet, just the four of us, long, epic game that we get to share and get to take our time with."

How many episodes are you planning for this campaign? Because you mentioned chapters. Are these four-to-five episode arcs per chapter and then you have so many chapters within the campaign? Or was that more of a figure of speech to call it a chapter?

No, I think it is sort of a chapter. And the answer, Michael, is, we are blissfully following the road not knowing where it leads. We've looked at our friends and collaborators in this space, who have taken campaigns to like 150 episodes. That's like 150 four-hour episodes. Not Another D&D Podcast, Critical Role, The Adventure Zone: Balance. I think we're in here for more than 100. We're here for a long, long time.

We're very, very excited. Yeah, man. It's just deeply, it's deeply gratifying. We couldn't be more psyched.

And the cadence of episode releases?

Every other week. We're doing the first on Wednesday, and then after that, it's going to be dropping Fireside Chats on Patreon on Tuesday. And then it's going to be dropping on the public feed every other Tuesday. So there will always be something weekly. It'll go public episode on Tuesday, following Tuesday Patreon Fireside Chat, following Tuesday public episode.

There always will be something new every week. But the public episodes will be biweekly.

Is there anything that you were hoping I would ask you about Worlds Beyond Number?

We're just so, so excited. Me and Aabria and Lou and Erika have been playing this for what feels like so long at this point. And it's finally coming to life. And Taylor has done such an incredible job making this beautiful, magical world come to be real.

If you love the show, please tell your friends. If you want to come see all the cool bonus content and come support us over by the Fireside, you can check out our Patreon and follow us on socials. We're truly bowled over and honored just at the support already, and it's a gift to be able to share it.

Yes, congratulations on the Patreon's successful launch. It’s fantastic.

I super appreciate it, Michael. Thank you so, so much for your time. And I really appreciate it.

Watch: Aabria Iyengar on Suvi

On February 28, Aabria Iyengar joined D&D Beyond on Twitch to talk about Worlds Beyond Number and her character, Suvi the wizard.

About Worlds Beyond Number

The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One is the first campaign in the storytelling podcast Worlds Beyond Number. You can learn about the crew below:

• Brennan Lee Mulligan (he/him) is the creator and DM behind Dimension 20. He formerly was a writer and cast member for CollegeHumor. You may also recognize him as the DM behind Exandria Unlimited: Calamity and as Nikhil from Battle for Beyond.
• Aabria Iyengar (she/her) plays the wizard Suvi in The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One. Aabria is a streamer, voice actor, podcaster, and writer. She was DM for Exandria Unlimited, played Sestia in Battle for Beyond, and has starred on Dimension 20 and The Adventure Zone: Imbalance.
• Erika Ishii (all pronouns) plays Ame the witch. They are a voiceover artist for gaming and animation and have appeared on Critical Role, Dimension 20, CollegeHumor's Dropout, and as Leila in Battle for Beyond.
• Lou Wilson (he/him) is the actor behind Eursulon, the wild one. He is a comedian with roles in The Guest Book and American Vandal. He can also be found on Dimension 20.
• Taylor Moore (he/him) is the founder and creative director of Fortunate Horse. He is the producer, designer, and composer behind Worlds Beyond Number. He formerly worked as head of comedy and podcasts at Kickstarter.

You can enjoy episodes of Worlds Beyond Number anywhere you enjoy podcasts (Apple, Google). To access subscriber-only content, support the Worlds Beyond Number Patreon. For more goodies, follow Worlds Beyond Number on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.

Michael Galvis (@michaelgalvis) is a tabletop content producer for D&D Beyond. He is a longtime Dungeon Master who enjoys horror films and all things fantasy and sci-fi. When he isn’t in the DM’s seat or rolling dice as his anxious halfling sorcerer, he’s playing League of Legends and Magic: The Gathering with his husband. They live together in Los Angeles with their adorable dog, Quentin.