Worlds Beyond Number Interview With Brennan Lee Mulligan

I interviewed Brennan Lee Mulligan about his podcast with Aabria Iyengar, Lou Wilson, and Erika Ishii. The interview was first published on YouTube, but we're working on making all the interviews into blog posts, so we decided to start with this one!

You can watch the video here. Past that video, you will find the transcription of the interview.

Enjoy!

Oren Cohen

Okay, so we are here to talk about Worlds Beyond Number, and we are here to talk about the first campaign as well. But I have so many questions about the actual podcast itself, the entire thing. So as always, Brennan, we are going to start with our question, what's the inspiration behind Worlds Beyond Number?

Brennan Lee Mulligan

What a great question. Worlds Beyond Number has been an idea floating around for a long, long time. And obviously, it was very organic. So the motivations for all, so the four cast partners, myself, Lou Wilson, Erika Ishii, Aabria Iyengar, came together... And also, our relationship with our producer, Taylor Moore. So the growth from the roots that you can track as many years ago when I was a improviser living in New York City, I ran a game of D&D for Taylor Moore who was working at Kickstarter, a place that he actually unionized. Go Taylor. A very cool, awesome thing. Taylor's one of the first people in my life that was sort of like, "Have you listened to The Adventure Zone? Have you seen this other stuff? You should be doing this." And I was like, "Oh, ain't nobody going to want to... Hush up, you. You're being too kind." And he was like, "I'm not being kind, I'm being serious."

And then I got the job at CollegeHumor, and Dimension 20 started, and this idea of a podcast was always kind of percolating. Early conversations with Lou, who we're on a two-prov team together and we're workout buddies. Lou's one of my closest and dearest friends in the entire world, and as is Erika and Aabria. And we slowly but surely gathered there was this idea, which had different appealing factors for all of us. For me, the thing that was the most appealing about Worlds Beyond Number was to flex a creative muscle, because in a weird way, this is a funny thing to say, I kind of ended up in comedy. I don't want to say accidentally, but it was certainly... When I was a student going to college, there was nothing in my... I was very much straight-up fantasy, science fiction. I was the head writer for a LARP camp. And I wasn't writing comedy games there.

It was only in adulthood when I kind of graduated as a broke person from screenwriting school and was like, "I don't know anybody." And I ended up at UCB because that was a place for me to meet other creative people. So comedy became this venue for me to meet other professionals and I, of course, identify as a comedian, but that was sort of a layer, in some ways, that got added on a little bit later. So when I got to CollegeHumor and was doing the CEO sketches, and was in the writer's room, and did Troopers, and I was writing questions for Um, Actually, and then Dimension 20 started. It was this unbelievable burst of freedom and it was absolutely incredible.

And now that Dimension 20 is going so well, and we have our whole 2023 slate lined up, and we have all these great people working on the show, there's an ability for me to flex this earlier creative muscle from my childhood of doing very traditional fantasy, the stories that I used to read behind a tree on the playground. So it's really fun to do this high octane, goofs and bits, Dimension 20 seasons come in and do this really... And also, it's anthology, so they're short, and it's Rick Perry making these battle sets, and it's like pow. And then Worlds Beyond Number was a chance to play with a smaller group of people and do really long form epic campaigns that stretch this different creative muscle. I'm sure Aabria, and Erika, and Lou, and Taylor would all tell you different reasons that they were excited about it, but for me it was getting great pals and having a game that we could really sink into and get that familiar narrative structure of the long multi-year campaigns that I grew up playing.

Oren Cohen

Okay, so there are a few things that I want to dive into.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Yes.

Oren Cohen

First of all, I love the idea. I'm so excited. You made my dream come true when you said in the Patreon, you said in the live stream before the launch, you said that this is going to be a multi-year thing. This has been such a joy because you know that I watch every season of Dimension 20 and this has been such a affirming thing for me to know this is going to walk with me in many stops in my life.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Yes.

Oren Cohen

And I want to ask you, what drove you into you and the group? What was the decision behind setting the tone as, this is going to be a multi-year podcast, this is going to be our thing that is going to be going with us into the future?

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Well, one, that's what I grew up doing. I'm in the process of concluding a 14-year home game. I've been playing that for 14 years. In college I played a six-year campaign called Storm City that had over 40 PCs, it was West Marches style. One of my very first games was called Horizon, and it was this long... And it was from when I was 11 to when I was 17, and we played every week. Yeah, it was wild. It was truly wild. So that's what I grew up doing. I cut my teeth doing multi-year epic fantasy campaigns. And there's a lot of influences in this that it's a story that you can already see from the previews, there's magic, and secrets, and mystery, and the world of spirits, and empire, and war. It's big stuff going on. But fundamentally, there's also a lot of childhood nostalgia in this in terms of the Celtic fairy tales my mom read me as a kid, like Miyazaki movies that I would watch over and over and over again.

And just like Miyazaki has, there's My Neighbor Totoro and then there's Princess Mononoke. So there's, even within that, there's a big tonal shift between his body of work. There's a lot of the old fantasy games I used to run, and there's a desire too to have this ongoing years-long thing. And also, by the way, looking at the games my friends run, looking at TAZ with The McElroy's, or NaddPod with Murph, and Emily, and Jake, and Caldwell, Critical Role like Matt and all the amazing players at Critical Role. And looking at, there's a certain type of story that I just had a different itch. There's a certain thing that must seem bananas to people at home that are like... I will be continuing to run Dimension 20 seasons, Aabria will continue to run Dimension 20 seasons, and we will both also be doing...

Lou and Erika will continue to play in Dimension 20 seasons, and if I can ever wrangle them into GMing a side quest, I'll make that happen as well. And then we're all going to be doing the podcast and running stuff there. So I'm sure people will be like, "Are you guys getting sleep? Are you okay?" But the only thing I would say to that is that yes, we are all getting sleep, everyone's taking care of themselves. And for me, I think if you look at other artists and other mediums, they're doing lots of projects. And so for me, there's an element that this is the best of both worlds because there's a certain itch that only Dimension 20 can scratch. Getting to play with the cameras rolling, and Schaubach behind the monitor, and Ebony behind the monitor, and Rick Perry miniatures. That is a high that is totally unique in the world. And there's another itch that I'm really excited for Worlds Beyond Number to scratch, which is this older childhood desire for the kind of epic fantasy and world building that I grew up with.

Oren Cohen

Okay. It's so good. I do want to shout out your mom for a second. You mentioned the fairy tales that she had read to you as a child and I do want to shout out Elaine Lee for the tweet with the video.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

I'm not on Twitter. My mom FaceTimed me and was like, "Sweetie, I need to let you know something. I've shared a video online." And I was like, "Oh, it's so cute." Izzy showed it to me, so I was like, "Oh, that's so sweet." Very, very cute. Mom is the OG. If you think I did not consult noted scholar Elaine Lee when I was doing the early world building for Umora, you better guess again, because yeah, it was absolutely... My mom gave me a whole reading list and a bunch of PDFs and stuff because I was getting into older, going into that kind of lore to help inspire and build out Umora, so it's really exciting. It's fun.

Oren Cohen

Yeah. I want to talk about the world building too, but before we talk about the actual world building and if you want or can to share details about Umora. Umora? Umora?

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Umora. Yeah.

Oren Cohen

Umora? Okay.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Yes.

Oren Cohen

Before we talk about Umora itself, I do want to ask you, what came first, the idea for the podcast or the idea for Umora as a world?

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Podcast. So literally the first thing that happened was just early ideas of like, "Ooh, it'd be fun..." It was like, "It would be fun to do a long form..." And the podcast thing was coming from Taylor. Taylor was a person of like, "This medium is really great." Dimension 20, and even going out and doing other stuff, like doing Calamity over at Critical Role, video production, you have a fleet of people. The storage space, the editing, all the departments that come together. The crew behind Dimension 20 is so many brilliant artists, and producers, and creators, and editors.

Anytime I start being grateful for people I always am like, "Oh, you can't possibly get everyone." Because you've got, our editors right now are Jared and Tyler, and you've got all the staff at Dropout like Matt LaForest keeping the lights on, and Lauren Stone, our post-coordinator. And then you got the producers coming in like Ebony, and Hallie, and Brittany, and all these amazing people, and Schaubach, and just this huge... We're an army. It's an army. And there's definitely multiple people, we have Katrina on socials for Worlds Beyond, and Taylor, of course, producing the show, and Taylor's got a bunch of great people at Fortunate Horse.

But production-wise, the ship runs with a smaller crew. And Aabria's joked about it a lot before, but you can roll up to the podcast studio in your sweatpants and you just... So the idea of a podcast really started first. I can tell you for sure, for people that are worried about the, "Are they getting sleep?" That crowd. If this was a video show, I would turn into dust. I would truly. The lift, I would go... So podcasting does enable a certain degree of flexibility. It's still a tremendous amount of work. Taylor, if you've heard the sound design of Worlds Beyond Number, Taylor is busting his ass. It sounds incredible. It's a lot of work going on. But a smaller crew of people can get a lot done in a podcast. So it started as podcast first and then as we were going along, once me, Erika, Aabria, and Lou had all gotten together and were like, "Okay, this feels right, I think we should kick it off." That's when conversations about The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One started.

Oren Cohen

Okay. First of all, reacting to the sound design, this has been mind-blowing. Like I was in it. I was inside the audio. It's so, so cool. And talking about the actual launch of the podcast, I do want to ask you, I checked before we started recording how many patrons you have right now, and you are really, really close to 20,000. How does that feel?

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Nuts. Yeah, it feels nuts. We had did a little thing before launch where we wrote down how many patrons we thought we were going to get at a certain point in time. And we blew past my projection for the first month, I think in the first couple minutes, which is, I think a testament to me being a dummy more than our amazing patrons and listeners. But it's, just for folks that are listening to this interview, it's astonishing. And I'll never be able to do a good enough job of expressing my gratitude that people support the work. I'll never be able to express the gratitude fully. It's staggering, it's very humbling. It'll get you emotional if you think about it because it so didn't have to be this way. In terms of my personal beliefs in cosmology, I believe in nothing more than I do in luck.

Yeah, you can work really hard, and you can set up the odds to be beneficial for yourself, and you can... But fundamentally, the fact that people have connected, and signed up, and said, "Yeah, I want to support this." Is such a huge generosity on their part, and I can only just stumble through the world in kind of a bewildered state of gratitude that people have chosen, of all of the things to support, to support this. And I just hope folks know that that bewildered gratitude is like a fuel in the furnace of making sure you do not regret your decision. I will work so hard. I will work so hard to make sure that you feel like...

And obviously, with something like Patreon, I've been very fortunate in terms of being a creature of the internet in which people, when they spend money on your services, it's not just that they're buying the service, it's also that there is a part of it that they're supporting your work, they're supporting you, and your collaborators, and the institution that you're creating to make that art. So that support is almost too kind for me to think about, but also, to the degree that there is something of value we are providing in exchange, I want to make that the best fucking thing it can be, and I hope you know that I don't ever take it for granted for even a single second. It is a wild experience for sure.

Oren Cohen

I think in terms of taking it for granted, I don't think there's even one person familiar with your work and your personality that thinks you, for one second, take it for granted. It's such an amazing project. I think in terms of thinking about the entire process of making something for patrons as opposed to a season of Dimension 20, is there something that you do in your creative process differently when you are preparing something for this podcast as opposed to a season of Dimension 20?

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Process could not be more different. When we start a Dimension 20 season, I have to already be thinking about the end. Do you know what I'm saying? Our longest seasons are 20 episodes, so the idea of... And Rick Perry needs to build the battle sets ahead of time, we do the character creation. And from the player's side, the best players when they're working in short form content, even if they're being totally limber, and totally reactive, and staying very traditional to the character, even they are aware of the clock. They're going, "Okay, if there's something I want to do with the character, if I want something to resolve in the last three episodes, I need to set it up in the first three episodes."

So everyone's aware of the clock. And we're all still playing, we're all still discovering, it's still improvisation, but just like improvising on a stage, there's a montage where you're just going and its free form, and then there's a herald where it's literally, yeah, we're making it up as we go, but it's three first beats, one group game, three second beats, one group game, and third beats with connections, plus an opening at the top. So improvisation can have really intense structures to it. And I think Dimension 20's strength has always been the incredible artistry of the minis, the incredible artistry of the editing, the incredible artistry of the cameras, and the mini shots.

And of players and GMs that look in and know, we're going to take off from this airport at this time, we're going to take some route that is improvised and we don't know, but baby, we're landing at 4:30. I don't know what airport we're landing at, but that's how much gas is in the plane, so that's when it's happening. And that's really intoxicating, and I think makes Dimension 20 very thrilling and amazing. And Worlds Beyond Number's doing a totally different thing, which is we are really... I don't know what's going to happen in five episodes, in 10 episodes, let alone that these campaigns sometimes go for 150 episodes, you know what I mean? They're huge, huge, long campaigns, so it's really gratifying and really exciting. Yeah, I just couldn't be more amped, man. I'm really, really into it.

Oren Cohen

Okay. You raise an interesting point here. You say that you don't know what's going to happen in five episodes. I'm pretty sure that for now at least, while the previews are going out, you probably have recorded some episodes, but is this going to be, once you reach your recording, are you going to publish this, I think it was biweekly?

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Biweekly. Yeah, every other week. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oren Cohen

Yeah, so are you going to record the episode between those two weeks or are you publishing it after it was already recorded?

Brennan Lee Mulligan

No, no. We have a huge buffer. We have a huge buffer of recorded episodes, which I think is smart for a lot of reasons. Number one, when I was doing live-streaming, there was an element of almost like you have a thing where you go online, you see people reacting to the episode, and it can't help but somewhat impact your storytelling a little bit, I think. So I think having a nice buffer of episodes, which is not to say that... I remember when Mice & Murder was coming out and people were guessing stuff, and I went, "It's so nice that this is pre-recorded."

Because if I read it and saw all the people getting stuff right and guessing correctly, there's always that thing where you're like, "Ooh, how do I feel about that? Do I want to alter the..." Like the writers of Lost, there's a rumor that they changed the mystery when people guessed it. I don't know if that's true or not. If you guess it, if a fan guesses it, great, they should win. The fans should win. And having a nice big buffer of episodes allows, I think, people to engage with the show knowing that they can talk freely about it online because there's a little bit of a... Our storytelling gets to stay at the table, if that makes sense. Especially for mystery stuff. There becomes a temptation to change your stuff and it's nice to not be able to change it.

Oren Cohen

Okay, that's so cool. Also, knowing that you have a buffer is so nice. I think you already have the children's campaign, which is going to be exclusive for patrons.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Patreon, yeah.

Oren Cohen

Yeah. So how many, I don't know if to call it seasons, how many have you already engaged in production of in the future?

Brennan Lee Mulligan

We're gearing up to do our first... We have plans on the near horizon for some other stuff, but we have a ton, I think we have something like the first... We have many episodes recorded of the main campaign of The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One, so that one we've got a nice catalog of. And I think sailing around the corner are some cool one-shots and other stuff that other folks are going to... Other stuff like that is very much on the horizon.

Oren Cohen

Okay. That's so cool. I do want to talk about Umora now, so tell me a bit about Umora as a world. We've seen some in The Wizard, we've seen a bit of the world with, spoilers, the war and all of that. But what can you tell me about the world of Umora and maybe even recent history or something like that?

Brennan Lee Mulligan

So that's a great question. I'll try to keep it a little bit bird's eye because there's stuff like world map we've not shared yet, there's other stuff we haven't shared yet that we're going to share on the Patreon as things go along. But essentially, I think the best way to understand Umora is as, so it's not really medieval, it's a little bit later than that time-wise. The wizards that we've seen in the Citadel are able to reproduce magic in a way that has really transformed their society. So the society of the Imperium of the wizards of the Citadel, it's kind of a thing where their magic is reproducible and scalable in a way that really has transformed their society. And one of the things that you can kind of hear almost implicitly in the wizards talking is that wizardry, as opposed to some other forms of magic, is a little bit new.

Not five years ago new, but new enough that it's been around for some amount of generations or a handful of centuries, and as it's picked up, there's almost like a revolutionary aspect to it. It's changing the world. And you can see that in the Citadel, you can see that in the war that's going on. And there are other older forms of magic. And I think that as you go, by the time this interview is out, The Witch: Then & Now will have previewed. And there's kind of an element there of... Also, in terms of our inspirations, you can see that there's an element of societal change throughout history where this world has tall ships with sails, it has magical technologies, it has a lot of... The influences that I would point to in a lot of places are probably a lot of Miyazaki's films, sort of like Nausicaä, or Howl's Moving Castle, or even I would say...

Porco Rosso might be a little too advanced, but there's definitely some Porco Rosso stuff thrown in there inspirationally. And I think that there are also, unlike some other high fantasy worlds, there are some references, and I don't want to spoil, but there are some references to past ages of the world, where even things like swords or armor are, at this point, anachronistic. It's almost a thing of like, oh, think about this as a little bit, definitely not high medieval, and maybe even past renaissance into some more like, oh, this is like age of mercantilism, age of empire, but with a big magical kind of overlay on top of that, I would say.

Oren Cohen

Okay. That's really, really cool. Is there anything that you can tell us about the nature of magic in this world? I am a huge fan of Brandon Sanderson, and a lot of his books have systems of magic, like there are rules to use magic. And I think for all the love I have for D&D, there's something about D&D magic that is so unstoppable at some points.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Yes.

Oren Cohen

So is this going to be like D&D magic or is this going to be a little different in some ways?

Brennan Lee Mulligan

It's going to be D&D plus. So there's going to be a lot of home-brewed mechanics that influence magic, make magic a little bit stranger, or work in a different way. So the ideal for this setting is to, especially, I think, as magic gets more powerful, it gets more rules. Like little cantrips, and orisons, and stuff like that tend to just be like, "Oh, well, that's very simple magic." But I think the powerful stuff, as the campaign goes along, you'll see has a lot of other rules on top of it, which I think will be added in as we go along. But yes, so magic systems, I think you can expect as we go.

Oren Cohen

Okay. That's so cool. I do want to go to fan questions. Before we go to fan questions though, I do want to ask you two questions. First, do you have any plans to have guests on the main campaign? For example, you were a guest player on NaddPod. Do you see this main campaign doing the same thing, where you would have maybe guest players that come in for a few episodes and then move on their merry way?

Brennan Lee Mulligan

I think for right now, I think that we are so open to that, and especially, not only in the main campaign, but also in side stuff, other stuff we want to do. For right now, I think that we're still feeling very early days and wanting to get the main trio of PCs up on their feet and establish their story. I think that it'll be interesting to find the structure for this. I've never run a campaign for just three people before. I'd be interested to see, not only do we have lots of friends we want to play with, but I think we also have...

There's a certain balance element of like, "Ooh, what's combat like for only three PCs?" So it'd be very funny to start bringing people in and be like, "Yeah, we want to play with you, but mainly this dungeon's really hard." We'll see how that goes. So I would say that there's no... Look, where we're at in recording right now, we haven't had someone yet because it's still very early days. So I think we want to get up on our feet. But yes, obviously, there's a million zillion people we want to play with, and I think we're very open to that idea, even though we don't have a firm plan of where that would happen right now.

Oren Cohen

Okay. Awesome. One final question before we move to fan questions. The world of Umora, is it going to be this platform for all of the stories of this podcast, or are you going to have other world buildings for different seasons?

Brennan Lee Mulligan

I cannot wait to get the other worlds. Yeah, Umora is very much the world for this campaign. The name of the podcast is Worlds Beyond Number, we can't keep coming back to the same world. We got to go. We got to go. And specifically, there is, I think... I've already talked with Aabria about, in the misty future, ideas for worlds from her, ideas for worlds from Lou and Erika. And I think specifically too for us, we're not opposed to the idea of potentially doing a side quest, or a one shot, or whatever in another one of these universes run by another one of our cast members, and then going, "Can we come back here?" It's very possible that we might stumble into a next multi-year campaign setting as well. So yeah, there's lots of worlds to come, for sure.

Oren Cohen

This feels like Sliders, do you know that show?

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I love it. I love it so much. Hell yeah.

Oren Cohen

Awesome. Okay. So we are going to move to fan questions. I have a sheet of questions here. And before I read the first question, I have a special request from a lot of people to bring back a nice, I don't know if I can call it a segment, maybe I can call it a segment. But people have been asking me to return the role for spoilers thing.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Incredible.

Oren Cohen

So I do want to ask you if you will share some juicy details about anything on a roll of the D20?

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Let's see what you roll and we'll see what gets shared.

Oren Cohen

Okay. Let's do it. Ooh, that is a 19, Brennan.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Wow, that's a very high roll. That's a very, very high roll. There's only one roll higher than that.

Oren Cohen

Yes.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Okay. On a 19. Let me think of something good to... Okay, here is a... I'll give a spoiler-

Oren Cohen

Also, while you think I will just give a little shout-out to this dice. This is the dice actually from the Dropout store that arrived yesterday. This is the, I think Unsleeping City dice.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Incredible. Okay, I will give a spoiler. Let me see. What's a good spoiler to give? I'll do one for episode... Okay, here's a spoiler for episode one. When we meet Lou's character in episode one, when we very first meet him in episode one, he will not look like the character art we've released on social media.

Oren Cohen

Okay.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

That's my spoiler. There you go.

Oren Cohen

This is huge.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Huge. We're breaking it here folks. We're breaking it right here.

Oren Cohen

Love it. Okay, so I'm going to start reading some fan questions. Some of them are so, so cool. A lot of people have the same questions in some way, but let's see what we have here. We have a lot of questions. So first question is from Cecilia and says, "Hey, Brennan, big fan here. Thanks for teaching me how to DM. Question, what oriented your choice of the podcast format? Can you share some thoughts about how to exploit it? Thank you for your wonderful work. Lots of love for the four of you."

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Thank you so much, Cecilia. That is very, very kind. The podcast format's incredible. Honestly, I'll just give you one of my favorite answers, which is a reshoot for a video production requires rebuilding sets, rehiring camera crew, getting your hair and clothing to match. It is a huge, huge lift. Rerecording something for a podcast can be done in minutes and it's just enormous. And especially if you listen to an episode and go, "Oh, I forgot to describe something." Or, "Oh, there's something that needs to kind of be changed there." So my favorite thing about podcasting as a medium and going into this new world is the ability to provide edits, should they be needed, and that is not a heavy lift.

Oren Cohen

Okay. Another question that is a little bit more of what we discussed earlier, but is an opportunity to expand on that a little bit. This is a question from Dorothy, "Hey, Brennan, I'm a huge Dimension 20 fan. While I love the show, I know some aspects can be limiting, for example, the runtime, and needing to make it, to pre-made battle sets. What aspects of Worlds Beyond Number are you most excited about? What opportunities did it afford you that you might not have been able to do on D20?"

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Dorothy, thank you very much for the question. Also, Dorothy, my mom's first name, so there you go. D. Elaine Lee. Also, my grandmother's name. The limitations are the best thing in the world. The limitations for Dimension 20 make it the show that it is. And the reason I'm so proud of Dimension 20 is because of the gauntlet that is thrown by... And limitations are the mother of creativity. What your medium is inspires you to rise to that challenge. And the structure provided by it gives you choices. There's nothing more terrifying than a blank page, right?

Structure makes some choices for you, which kickstarts the creative process. So I will always love, and there are very real limitations within podcasting as well. You can't see stuff, it's just sound. So like Taylor's music, and things like the breath, and having to emote purely vocally. So let's be very clear, Worlds Beyond Number is full of challenges as well. A bunch of us very expressive, hand-talking people on the cast have to learn to focus that performance, try to make it purely vocal. So there's a tremendous amount of challenges in Worlds Beyond Number. And I would say that those challenges are what I'm most excited for. It's a new medium, and there are new limitations, and new forms to learn, and that's deeply, deeply exciting.

Oren Cohen

That's so good. I love this so much. I'm so excited for the main campaign already.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Let's go, let's go.

Oren Cohen

Okay, the next question here is from yourself, or your clone. The question is from Mulligan Lee Brennan.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Oh, no. Doppelganger.

Oren Cohen

"How many worlds are there? Will we see you as a player soon, as well as you DMing the epic campaign?"

Brennan Lee Mulligan

So the technical amount of worlds is beyond number, so I can't tell you. It's in the title.

Oren Cohen

Infinity.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Hey, Mulligan, it's in the title. It's beyond number, okay? So you don't ask for a number, it's beyond that. So aggressive, I'm so sorry Mulligan Lee Brennan. And I would say on top of that, yes, you're going to see me as a player pretty soon. For us, pretty soon, because again, the biweekly release schedule means we've recorded a nice little batch of episodes, but it's releasing biweekly, so that'll get us a couple months in. But we have plans already set up for the first other world that we're going to go to, so I think you'll be seeing me as a player pretty soon.

Oren Cohen

Okay. That's amazing. The next question here is a little deep, so get ready for it. The question is from Emma Rose Miller, "Your genius brain has obviously absorbed a huge amount of myth, story, theory, philosophy, theater, media, etc. In Adventuring Party and Adventuring Academy, you've talked about using those sources for inspiration and as source material. But Worlds Beyond Number is a multiverse, are you worried you will run out of unique material? What do you do when you have hit every genre already? How do you make something new again?"

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Emma Rose Miller, thank you so much for this question. This is a really cool question. I never grow tired of a genre. Does that make sense? I've never been like, "I can't see another X kind of movie." It's a sort of interesting thing. I think that there's a lot of focus amongst creators on novelty and originality. Novelty and originality. How do I reinvent the form? How do I reinvent the form? How do I reinvent the form? And to use a weird food analogy, because I'm always quite hungry, there's a little bit of a thing where people are like, "Okay, we have pancakes, we have French toast, we have waffles, but you can't just keep making those. How do I make a fourth fluffy kind of breakfast food item and show something that's never been done before?" One of the things I used to always advise as an improv teacher is that that type of form breaking, that type of ejecting from genre, that type of novelty is always front and center for creators.

And in my experience, audiences aren't really looking for a fourth type of breakfast fluffy thing. What they're looking for most often is a really amazing pancake because you need to eat breakfast every day. You need breakfast every day. And we need new stories all the time. And artists are really concerned with form. And as an audience, and think about, because every creator's also an audience member, you also consume media. And it's really funny because I'll be sitting there being like, "Novelty, originality, how do we do something new?" And then when I go to the sofa at the end of the day with my fiance, Izzy, I sit down and go like, "A new fantasy show, let's see if it's... Amazing. Yes, a new pancake. Oh, I love a new pancake."

And I do think that artists get really obsessed with form, sometimes to the expense of content. And I don't mean content in the internet parlance, I mean literally, what are you saying? If you go do a story in a magic forest with some swords and you say something deep from your heart, even if you are expressing a sentiment that has been expressed a thousand times before, you're saying it for the first time, and you will add a level of experience because you are unique. No one like you has ever existed before. And I don't know, this is a weird thing to say also, but as someone who spent a lot of time as a teacher, audiences, students, human beings don't mind repetition. There's an element of, think about how many stories there have been that say something like, "You must stand up against the forces of evil and you must cherish your friends." Think about how many stories hit that message. A billion of them.

How many of them do I love? 100% of them. How many new ones of them will I watch and go, "That's the best thing I've ever seen." Countless, countless, countless. So yes, novelty, and originality, and expanding, but the fear hits artists and creators especially hard of like, "Is this new? Is this original enough that it's even worth sharing?" And you want to make sure that you have, hopefully, an interesting take. You want to hope. But again, if you're being authentic to yourself, that's the originality. You're already unique. Your collaborators are already unique. That's the originality. Make a good pancake. Make a good pancake because people want the pancake. They really want it. And they need new pancakes all the time.

Oren Cohen

Yes, we do love pancakes.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

We love pancakes. You're sitting there like, "Could it be a cube? A cube of dough?" And people are just like, "Man, I really wanted a pancake." You know what I mean? I think a little humility. I think a little humility that you don't have to reinvent the form every time, as long as you're doing something from the heart, it will carry the originality of the earnest sentiment of you being a unique human being on the planet, I feel like.

Oren Cohen

This is a good question to finish this on. Brennan?

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Yes.

Oren Cohen

This is from Iron Ninja, and the question is, "From the Instagram live to now, how has Cram Daniels affected your life?"

Brennan Lee Mulligan

I'm on that court every day, I'm practicing free throws, I'm shooting threes, all right? I'm working on posting up and I'm working on going hard in the paint, okay? And people go, "Hey, you're a weird homeschool kid that became an internet dungeon master." And I go, "That's because nobody believed in my reasonable hoop dreams TM." Okay? And Cram's coming. Cram Daniel and Slam Jamuels are coming your way. And if you think for one second that I'm not going to win the Space Jam, the non-trademarked Space Jam, you got another thing coming, all right? Cram Daniels is the way, the truth, and the light. Go Cram.

Oren Cohen

Okay. Brennan, these are all the fan questions that we have time for. Before I let you go, I do want you to tell people where they can find the podcast, and also share with us the one thing that you are most excited for them to see.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Okay. The podcast is wherever fine podcasts are casted. There's a million different apps that you can listen to podcasts on. You can also just go right to the raw source feed and listen there if you want. But different podcatchers are sort of all over, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, it's in all those places. And we're releasing the main campaign, and that is just going out to the world wherever fine pods are casted. We also have a Patreon if you want to come and join us over by the fireside, and that'll have the...

Oren Cohen

I'm there too.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Yeah, Oren's there as well. Come kick it with us over there. And that's where we'll have our fireside chats, which is where we talk about the week's preceding episodes, so that's Patreon exclusive. We'll have the Children's Adventure, which is our big character creation narrative prologue, which is like 16 hours of adventure content about the little characters when they all first met when they were kids, so that's Patreon exclusive. And we'll be dropping other cool odds and ends, and cool bits and bobs over there to thank everybody for supporting the show.

The thing I'm most excited about? I'm really excited because I feel like Erika, Aabria, and Lou, their characters are so phenomenal. There's so much incredible heart to them. And I just really think people are going to fall in love with Ame, and Suvi, and Eursulon, and I can't wait for them because it feels... Every time I've sat down with them it's like I am nine years old with a fantasy book under a tree out in the summer reading it again and getting whisked away to a world of magic and fantasy. And it just feels really great to be able to create that with people that I truly love.