It’s important right now to be doing things that bring you joy. In between checking in with your loved ones, organizing your workplace, investing in your community, and ranting angrily to your friends for the pure catharsis of it, it’s important to also be focusing on the same things that have already been making you happy and keeping you sane. Try to sleep well. Drink water. Eat a good meal. Pet an animal. And stay engaged with your hobbies, whatever they might be.

For me, one of the main things I do when I relax is listening to TTRPGs (table-top role-playing games), and most recently I’ve been listening to one called Worlds Beyond Number, which I’ve been enjoying specifically for how different it is from other actual-play podcasts. To explain what I love about it, though, I really want have to give some context. A lot of context.

Like many others, I started in high school with The Adventure Zone: Balance (actually, I’m pretty sure my entry point was Temple of the Lava Bears, but I don’t remember too much about it). TAZ is a pretty rules-loose, narrative-first D&D podcast that endlessly charmed and delighted me, in part because of the McElroy boys’ casual attitude. The boys are entertainers first and role-players second, and this is one of the show’s biggest strengths, because it brings you along as the players themselves gradually become more invested in the story of their own characters: a quintessential experience for initially dismissive players. I haven’t kept up with it much since Balance, but it remains a deeply influential piece of media for me.

On the other side of the spectrum is Critical Role, which became my next listening project. And it took some getting used to, at first. While the McElroy brothers sometimes patently refuse to sweat the small stuff, the cast of Critical Role do it like it’s their job. And it is their job. Episodes of Critical Role are unedited, four-hour long behemoths where the players insist on role-playing every inconsequential shopkeeper interaction and deliberate for real-life hours on what to do next. This is not only by design, it is the primary appeal of the show: long-winded, granular D&D played by professional voice actors who are deeply invested in both the narrative and the mechanics of the game they play. And the formula clearly works, because Critical Role has found enormous, eight-figure success since its genesis in 2015.

But in the last few years, I’ve mostly gone back and forth between trying to keep up with Critical Role and making my way through the many seasons of Dimension 20, which are enjoyable for, again, completely different reasons. Unlike Critical Role’s 100+ episode long campaigns, D20 has carefully structured, twenty-ish episode long seasons, which often alternate between story-based episodes and combat-focused ones. Under the banner of the Dropout streaming service, an evolution of the old CollegeHumor brand, D20 consists of a rotating cast of trained improv comedians and comedy writers, including perennial game master Brennan Lee Mulligan, who operates within the somewhat rigid structure of the show to facilitate incredible tabletop storytelling in a variety of genres and styles; something new almost every season.

Nowadays, D&D is more or less mainstream, partly thanks to these three shows, which are now typically considered the titans of the TTRPG actual-play genre, meaning their influence is unmistakable in newer shows and projects. And in many ways, Worlds Beyond Number feels to me like a sort of culmination of them in terms of its approach. It carefully selects important elements from all three shows (and probably many more) and adds its own unique flavor, and the result is a staggeringly compelling story that has had its little hooks in me for a while now, certainly deeper than I expected and perhaps slightly deeper than I knew was possible.

Imagine TAZ, CR, and D20 as three points on a triangle. WBN is a point above and in the center of those, creating a triangular prism and bringing the medium of actual-play podcasts into a proverbially three-dimensional space. Does that make sense? Let me break it down.

First: the table size. Like Adventure Zone, WBN is a small operation: one game master and three players. While the antics of a seven or eight-person table like CR can be uniquely fun, having a small group allows for a careful focus on complex interpersonal dynamics and, in this case, inter-party conflict especially, which the players don’t shy away from. In order to pull this off, the group must implicitly trust each other, in addition to being skilled, confident role-players, and this requirement is met and exceeded by a wide margin. Good friends Erika Ishii, Arabia Iyengar, Lou Wilson, and Brennan Lee Mulligan come together with a combined depth of relevant experience in voice acting, hosting, comedy, improv, and TTRPGs. In fact, all four members of the group are not just seasoned role-players but game masters too, giving the storytelling at the table an especially balanced, egalitarian feel.

Second: the structure. Like Critical Role, WBN has no particular constraints when it comes to episode or season length, which means Brennan has huge freedom in how he chooses to shape the narrative, and how much time to spend on what. So far, though, the group has organically fallen into a rhythm of extremely dense, hour-long episodes that make up broader story arcs. In almost two years and forty-five total episodes, the group has engaged in honest-to-goodness D&D combat a number of times somewhere in the single digits, and by normal accounts this would sound like it makes for a boring podcast. But rest assured, it most certainly does not. The stakes are high, and actual combat means actual danger for the player characters, in a way that sometimes gets lost in traditional D&D shows.

Finally: the production. Like Dimension 20, WBN has a production team, except it consists of a single person: Taylore Moore of Fortunate Horse, who does the cutting, editing, audio design, and even original music composition for the show. But, like Adventure Zone, WBN is an audio-only production, which means any energy that would go into visual elements is instead channeled into music and sound effects, resulting in a remarkably polished piece of audio content for such a small team. The cast records several episodes at a time, and Moore edits it together expertly into the final product.

I have so, so much more I could say about this podcast that has become important to me so quickly in the last few months, but I’ll leave you with this for now: Having long since evolved past my days of wanting a more casual style of D&D, I’m now much more interested in listening to adults who are deadly serious about their storytelling, and WBN delivers on this in spades. If you listen to the post episode talk-backs, you can hear the absolute passion that the group has for this project, and listening to them gush about their own collaborative storytelling can be infectious, if you let it. It’s unmistakable that they believe in what they’re making, and that energy is hard to resist.

If you’re interested in listening to The Wizard, The Witch, and the Wild One, their first and only (so far) campaign, I would recommend starting with the children’s adventure, which gives helpful context for the characters—though you don’t necessarily need it to enjoy the season proper. Either way, I also recommend listening to the talkbacks for each episode, alternating between episode and talkbacks. The episodes get pretty intense, and listening to the cast discuss and joke around helps relieve some of the built-up tension, giving the listening experience a more sustainable cadence.

There are some things I do that feel like deliberate ‘escapism,’ whatever that means. This past Tuesday, I started playing the first three Harry Potter games again, for example; staples of my childhood. But TTRPGs have never felt like that, really. Sure, they’re fun to listen to, but in listening to any of these podcasts—The Adventure Zone, Critical Role, Dimension 20, and Worlds Beyond Number—you’d have to be pretty obtuse to not find any parallels to the real world. These stories are as grounding as they are fantastical, because they reflect more abstract aspects of our actual lives in more concrete ways. To me, that’s kind of what the fantasy genre is supposed to do. In any case, I like to highlight a good story when I see one, and I think Worlds Beyond Number is doing something pretty interesting.

Philip Rienstra

Phil Rienstra (they/he) (‘21) studied writing and music, and since graduating has developed a deep interest in labor rights. They currently work at a unionized Starbucks and volunteer with Starbucks Workers United. They’re an amateur chef, a perennial bandana wearer, and an Enneagram 4. He lives in St. Paul with his spouse, Heidi.