Worlds Beyond Number - Blog Posts
YES, it’s like, 7 x 3 = 21 always served cunt and was the color magenta, the number 14 give’s chaotic bisexual and I am here for it.
I love em dashes (—) they’re the most underrated form of punctuation. they have so many uses, and they also feel like thursday
well i didn’t cry this time (e 43) , but i would still categorize this episode as another kind of emotional terrorism.
i can’t wait for the next one!
every time i listen to a new worlds beyond number episode i do this fun challenge:
try not to be emotionally destroyed by the end of the episode!
I lose every time
every time i listen to a new worlds beyond number episode i do this fun challenge:
try not to be emotionally destroyed by the end of the episode!
I lose every time
WBN animatic "The Vote"
More people need to see this
EVERY EQUATION
I C A N S E E E V E R Y
E Q U A T I O N
If we ever get another D&D movie and have some actual play peeps cameo in it, I would want Brennan, Aabria, and Matt cast as “trio/quartet (if we could get Jasmine too) of arguing wizards”, and anyone who’s seen the Game Masters of Exandria Roundtable immediately understands what I mean.
Brennan would probably be interrogating some nonsensical illogic surrounding the behavior of a person and/or organization, which, on a Doylist level would be him examining the worldbuilding.
Aabria would be starting BEEF.
Matt would be exasperatedly trying to mediate and deescalate.
it all hurts so muchhhhhh
i love when things from the very first episode come full circle
I think he also illustrated well how these moments will become stories. opening with the mythos around the epiphany, describing the perspective of the soldiers seeing these fantastical powerful things... their individual deaths may be forgotten but the stories of the "heroes" will live on.
Really really really loved how Brennan showed the two different sides of this "combat"
The insane fantasy moments: the dreadnoughts, Eioghorain, Ame's curse, the chained dragon, everything with that last scene between the sorcerer and Steel. Devastating and scary, but also really cool
Intimately juxtaposed with small moments that brought the true light of horror back: realizing a solider is only 17 in his first battle where he will surely die, the acid damaging the land so it will know no life for generations to come, bodies of those that begged for an academy not to be demolished, Suvi recognizing the wizard she just killed. Just admissions that there are no winners here. Every part of this is a loss.
It makes everything feel so much more real
I was trying do hard to look normal at work while listening. I don't think I succeeded.
1) i didn't know you could have near-constant goosebumps for almost an hour and a half, but i have now experienced that, so that's special
2) WITCH CURSE FOR THE MOTHERFUCKING WIN
3) my mouth was open for the last five minutes and my chest hurt from how little i was breathing. Brennan. You absolute maniac. WHAT WOULD SUVI LIKE TO DO AFTER ALL THAT, HUH?
God i just read it and wow that is just so ludicrous i mean I'm just absolutely flabbergasted and perplexed. how could such exorbitant extravagance can exist in the same world that sells just enough formula to poor mothers to make it so they will no longer have the ability to produce their own breast milk. The amount of tragedy and pain that I have suffered and people i know have suffered so that there can exist people out there like this is just outstanding to me.
Guys I am begging you please read Brennan Lee Mulligan's story about the Insane Christmas Party. He does not even BEGIN to describe it in the Fireside Chat.
Ame is a child when she first wonders through Grandmother Wren’s cottage. She wakes to the stomps of a fierce rooster, the smell of juk, the chorus of small sounds that builds the cottage.
Ame is a child when she falls in love with magic, the scent of it, the purity and the heart that lives at the core of it. Magic, the ability to connect with the earth, to provide for the animals and the trees, for the Spirits and honour their works. To help humans with sickness and mending.
The humanity in magic, the spinning of life to vow service to all that breathes on Umora.
Yet Ame is still a child as other children scowl at her, throw piercing gazes and words, “you’re a witch!” and see nothing but body, a little girl disconnected from the flesh of their own, a witch, nothing but a witch, an orphan, a stranger, a child. All but human.
But Ame had never thought herself anything other than human.
Ame, a child that never was, never could be, and forever will be.
She is a child when she is given to Grandmother Wren. Unwanted, strange child. She is a child when she is othered by the other children. Witch and apprentice, and still a child.
Ame never experiences childhood. She knows the wonders of magic and medicine, of healing and earth. But she never experiences the wonders of friendship, of connections in childhood. Ame never experiences the wonders of playing make belief, the warm hug after a heated argument, the small secrets shared in childhood.
But Ame is a child when finds more to her little family. A wizard, a witch and a wild one. Each child with a deep and profound sadness etched into the core of their beings and yet all too young to form the words to it.
Ame is still a child when she waves goodbye to her best and most True Friend. Tears wet her cheeks and the summer falls to her feet in a sweet breeze and a distant memory unforgotten. Ame is a child when she whispers her final goodnight to her brother, her True Friend, without and fully knowing so. She wakes up to the smell of moss and nothing but moss. She finds the cottage all too quiet.
Ame gains more than childhood during one summer and looses more than it when it is over. She finds fellowship and family in two True Friends. A secret and bond in childhood that cannot be simply broken. A thread that stretches across over water and mountains that no matter how far they are, they know they have a piece of themselves, of a simpler yet complicated summer in childhood somewhere across the lands. A small shard of childhood, of their true humanities stuck in memory of the scent of honey and magic and fur, a time long ago.
I don’t care what story it is, if there’s a small talking fox with infinite wisdom, never ending trust and a love of trickery, I will love them.
The Wizard, The Witch and The Wild One’s Fox
The Little Prince’s Fox
D20 Neverafter’s Fox
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse’s Fox
All very beloved by me and I’m sure I’m missing a few of them
Listening to WWW and every episode is just:
5 minutes in *jaw drop*, 20 minutes later *jaw drop*, 2 seconds later *hands over mouth screaming*, 30 minutes later *jaw drop*, last 5 minutes *sobbing*
Not me absolutely bawling my eyes out at 3am after a very unproductive day listening to the first 10 minutes of Worlds Beyond Number, The Wizard preview
Podcasts are my least favourite form of content cause purely auditory concentration is my weakest but this is so so good for me and my mental health
spoilers for whatever the hell steel did at the end of episode 47
Long moments pass, the western sky is hell itself. You see, glimmering for a moment, a point of green light appear. Concentric circles, lined with runes, stretching some hundred and twenty feet in all directions begin to spin in the manner of a gyroscope of light and figures, arithmetic and language arcane around the figure of the Wizard Slain, who appears in the sky.
Lowering a staff of the leader of the Citadel's war mages, he carves a line into the heart of one of the shahoran, destroying one of the sorcerers below. Raising up his staff, he begins to abjure, protecting the war mages around him as best he can.
And the sun rises in the west. A sorcerer, so radiant as to blind you even some miles away, hangs in the air and extends a finger towards the Wizard Slain, beckoning him towards the light. And the Wizard Slain is unmade.
You look, and see, crowned in light and gold, a robe and cloak some forty feet in length, twisting nobly in the wind behind him - first one set of arms, a second, and a third, as Harmas Raunza, leader of House Raunza, appears, in visage over the battlefield.
As he appears, points of light begin teleporting and some hundred nobles of the House of Raunza appear on the battlefield, from across the wide world of Umora.
He points forward, towards Twelve Brooks. The dreadnoughts converge, and as he raises his hand, he opens a door in space. Hundreds of spirits, bound to the House of Raunza. The Bashaal - the spirits of those of his house that failed the trial of their ordeal to enter into sorcerous covenant with their noble lineage, who now bear the heads and wings of white eagles made of blinding light, wielding broadswords, doublehanded, curved at the end, fly forward, gushing onto the battlefield. A cheer goes up from the forces of Gaothmai. "For the Cauntaranacht! For Raunza!"
As the lord of House Raunza holds his hands wide, "It is here we make an end to their tower!"
A white cape, streaking through the sky from the Epiphany. A flash of steel, a glint of a sword.
A bubble forms around the leader of House Raunza, and a white cloaked woman with auburn hair, who hangs in the air before him.
Time slows. She twists her wrist, turning her sword ninety degrees to the right. All of the world is mapped out, like a map of the stars. Your own body is simply lines, and the names of your joints and blood vessels. She twists to the left, raising the sword up in front of her in guard position, vertical, matching her straight spine. All the world is rendered in black and white, as though drawn in charcoal on fresh paper. She levels it.
Straight out, floating in air, written in the Lingua Arcana, is simply her namecloak - "The Wizard Steel". And before her, the symbol of House Raunza. With her offhand, she touches that symbol, undoing his true name in front of her. She points, draws her sword back. The image fades. It never happened, it was just a dream. How could she have changed the nature of the world itself?
The point of her sword, at his heart. "You shouldn't have brought so many of your grandchildren, old man." Pushes the sword through his heart. Blood bursts like a wave from his back, killing not only him but each and every one of his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren on this battlefield, who fall like rain from the sky, their light extinguished.
The Sword of the Citadel hangs in the air as the leader of a Great House falls before her blade. The cheer from Gaothmai dies, as quickly as it was born.
The Wizard, The Witch and the Wild One, episode 47
(Worlds Beyond Number podcast)
Finally listening to the most recent ep of wbn and I'm realising that this whole time I've been picturing the man in black as Zac Oyama from his 2023 4/20 tweet
Lou works fast. That is impressive.
Mr Police
We gave you all the clues
Join our fireside already
Thinking about Silver's Namecloak
So, inspired by the whole "silvering a mirror" thing, I was thinking more about Silver's namecloak. Specifically, the fact that silver quite famously tarnishes, and the thematic parallel between the loss of shine and the Suvi+Silver breakup. What's more, the process of silver tarnishing has been accelerated by the additional sulfur in the air post-Industrial Revolution, and wizardry/the Citadel seems to be pretty much the magical Industrial Revolution. So, there's this crazy parallel between sulfur pollution tarnishing silver and the Citadel driving a wedge between Suvi and Silver.
IDK it's not totally coherent yet, but it did set off the gears in my brain.
I could write an essay on Ame’s witchiness and gender… the way she was abandoned for causing too much chaos and should “know better” at age five, how her natural self is something she should be afraid of and keep in check, the difference in personality between a seven year old Ame who doesn’t have to perform gender for anyone vs. an adult Ame who is trying to fill a role in the community and as a result is much more subdued and maternal when talking to the people of Toma, making an effort to “be kind” because any expression of rage was seen as dangerous, “she’s not a girl; she’s a witch!”, her knowing that she is different from her maternal mentor and feeling like she is failing at her responsibilities, her instincts and ways of thinking constantly being put into question by those around her, particularly Suvi who had never felt uncomfortable in the role she was born to fill.
(deep breath)
her veiled explanation of the coven of elders to Keen being “a council of women who recently decided whether I should remain a part of it” (even as she’s obfuscating she emphasizes being an outsider in a group of women), her feeling like an outsider in the binary world of humans vs. spirits (which Eioghorain this episode says is not as clear a binary as humans make it out to be), how often she is accused of being too brash, too impulsive, too much, too foolish, and you should not be this way.
anyway. I have a lot of feelings on this aspect of Ame’s character. for reasons.
WWWO Fireside Chat: ep31 "The Souvenir"
Just saying, Brennan's witch aura (prone) could be justified as a compulsion to bow, which is significantly cooler than just slipping out of nowhere, even if it is way less funny.
Some Worlds Beyond Number sketches I wanted to share as this show feeds my imagination quicker than it can digest
It’s been over a year since I posted, but this came out really good and everyone should go watch Worlds Beyond Number!
(Also if you are obsessed with @quiddie like I am she’s on it sooooo)
Hacaea, the Witch of the Woodland Green and Grimore, the Witch of the Wild Hunt
(@worldsbeyondpod has me pacing and fearing for the pcs lives)
Indri, the Witch of Wind and Stars and Mirara, the Witch of the Waning Moon
so ready for @worldsbeyondpod to give me psychic damage next week