Archives in Podcasts: Worlds Beyond Number: The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One, Chapter 3

Ahoo-hoo! Crackle, crackle, my fellow listeners to one of the most delightfully devastating Actual Play podcasts! That's right, I'm talking about NaddPod. No, it's Worlds Beyond Number's flagship campaign, The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One where two thirds of the party are in the middle of a Studio Ghibli movie and the other third is setting her watch to the amount of trauma a person can experience in a given day.

In the previous article about the podcast, I mainly focused on the archival themes and instances of archives in the second chapter/arc because that's when they truly started to appear. However, now that the first book for WWW has concluded and a new world on the horizon, I think it's a good time to look at the archives that followed in Chapters 3 and 4. In this article, I'll be focusing on the Library of Stars and in the next article, I'll wrap it up with a look at the actual Citadel archives in the Court of Revery as well as the log book created about the Grenaux children.

And if none of those words made sense to you, then I encourage you to go listen to the 54 episodes of The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One because there's only so much explaining I can do.

Also, strap in because this one has a lot of transcript excerpts provided by Worlds Beyond Number Patreon!

As a refresher, The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One follows the adventures of Suvi/Sky (Aabria Iyengar), a wizard of the Citadel and arch-mage in-training, Ame (Erika Ishii), the apprentice turned inheritor of the position of Witch of the World's Heart, and Eursulon (Lou Wilson), a way-shadowed Spirit on a quest to gain knightly honor. The players are, of course, guided and goaded by Brennan Lee Mulligan as the GM, and all the other characters, with Taylor Moore providing the brilliant score and Jared Olson on sound design.

Chapter 3 of WWW consists of eleven episodes, 24-34, and two Interludes, The Clearing and Matsuri. The arc itself is our introduction to the cavalcade of witches and the expanse of witchcraft in Umora as Ame, Eursolon, and Suvi attend the Conclave of the Witches of the Coven of Elders upon invitation from Indri, the Witch of the Wind and Stars, in her palace at the North Pole. What's at stake? Potentially the fate of the Citadel, but the matter of most importance to the trio is preventing Ame's demise as it becomes quickly apparent that the Conclave means to have her station, the Witch of the World's Heart, removed from their coven.

At the heart, so to speak, of the multitude of conflicts the trio face during the Conclave arc, however, is the strained relationship between Ame and Suvi following the former's destructive exit from the Citadel, with Eursolon in tow, in episode 23. Afraid for her life and distrustful of the delays insisted upon by Suvi's adopted mother, Steel, Sword of the Citadel, Ame panicked and left Suvi behind. Understandably, Suvi was upset, believing her supposed "true friends" didn't trust her or love her enough to stay when she asked. When Suvi embarks on her journey to the North Pole, she's resolved to cloak herself in anger and resentment. She's there to help Ame because she ultimately cares about her being alive, but she's still dealing with those unresolved issues and takes multiple opportunities to snipe and snark at the young witch.

Suvi Chapter 3 Art by Lorena Lammer

(Personally, I think Suvi forgives Eursolon far too easily when he arrives at the North Pole. She's upset, yes, but she's not nearly as harsh with him as she is with Ame even though he participated in the less than ideal exit from the Citadel.)

But Suvi isn't just at the Conclave to keep Ame alive. With the first opportunity in forever to see the inner workings of Coven of Elders, Steel tasks Suvi with a Manchurian Candidate mission to gather intel on the witches. In D&D terms, the spell Geas is cast upon Suvi, compelling her to place a Citadel-crafted music box within the palace followed by getting anyone not affiliated with the Citadel to sing as the trigger. Suvi is then instructed to drink a potion to modify her memory to ensure she doesn't remember the Geas and to prevent the witches from discovering the truth should they try to ready her mind.

It's in episode 26, "The Conclave of the Witches of the Coven of Elders," that we get our first description of the Library of Stars as Suvi seeks it out while returning to her chambers in the palace.

...you see a pair of doors, adorned with beautiful eight and sixteen pointed stars adorned in light, and the door’s open just a crack—and these doors are actually made of beautifully stained but still rough-hewn wood, with metal hinges atop them, and looking through the crack and open, you see one of the most beautiful chambers you have ever seen. It is built with sweeping and curving staircases, through multiple levels with great wells and pools, in the dome of an observatory. An enormous silver telescope, that breaches through the heights.

You see the glass at the top of the dome revealing all of the majesty of the stars overhead, that now glitter in companionship to that true-fixed Northern Star. You see the layout of the stairs and wells and landings, almost like a gallery or a grotto more than a library. It is like looking at the many concentric and overlapping gears of a watch, in terms of the size of wells and the spiraling staircases that approach them, in a strange and beautiful asymmetry that nevertheless has some pleasing geometry to it. And from each of the openings of the wells does shimmering flickering light emerge.

When Suvi enters the room, Brennan goes on to describe some of the shelving:

The shelves of ice at the corner of the icy wall do not simply go sideways, but they actually slant up and away, almost like you would store something kept in vast quantity, like the treats of a candy store, or coins in a vast arcadium, something miraculous and wondrous.

A few minutes later, Brennan describes the wells of light that contain the stars observed by the Witch of the Wind and Stars:

As you look into the wells and the light coming from them, you see that—you see that each well goes a hundred feet into the earth, and is lined with red velvet lined icy cupboards, that contain some—that the vast majority of the stars kept in this place are actually in these wells that fall deep into the earth, that apparently the shelves on the wall here, this is the workbench of the Witch of the Wind and Stars and the deep archives are within this two dozen some odd wells that populate this vast observatory dome, with its massive silvery telescope in the center, that is itself the size of a small tower, and as you go, moving from the stairs, there are a million little cupboards and crannies. There are places where a staircase moves narrowly between two wells that abut each other.

So, as far as descriptions go, this is one of the most beautifully realized archives I've been able to imagine. And it is an archives, just to be clear. While the room is referred to as the Library of Stars, the mechanics of the room and the uniqueness of its holdings screams archives. If you really want to get pedantic about it, the room is more Observatory than it is Library or Archives, but my guess is the name was chosen because it invites the kind of whimsy that would be most appealing to a wizard - specifically a wizard like Suvi. How else would you get a book nerd to go anywhere unless you made them think there were books present?

Ame and the Fox Chapter 3 Art by Lorena Lammer

Episode 28, "The Staff," gives us a look at how the Witch of the Wind and Stars gathers information from her charges. Ame sends her familiar, the Fox, to spy on Indri and the Fox being the Fox, manages to hide himself amongst the shelves, giving Ame the ability to see through his eyes as the witch works:

She stands above a central well and raises her hand. Telescope moves, the dome opens, and starlight pools into the room. You see a number of new stars are pulled from the sky, and when she pulls them you see the star they are pulled from remains, and the light moves and rejoins some of the stars on the ground, as though she is drawing water from a well, or pulling silk from a cocoon. More light continues to come down into this place, and as the ceiling shifts, the telescope moves, and the glass is resealed, such that the snow stops falling into the library. She raises a hand, and says...

Brennan (as Indri): Morning Wrensong

And stars begin to float up from the wells. A huge assortment of stars surrounds her, as she moves them in space. Moving over to a central well filled with stars, she begins to pluck them from the air, and suspend them perfectly in the center of the well, and look down as snow covers it, and you see a beautiful young woman, with a patched blue corduroy witches hat...The vantage point of this interaction is from on high, looking down.

Brennan then refers to the conversation observed as the memory of starlight where Ame sees Indri and a young Grandmother Wren talking. When Erika probes for more information, Brennan says:

Yes, this is a recording of the memory of the stars, and the power of that is so vast, and yet must have its limitations. You wonder if there are, indeed, any memories in this place of what occurs in times of day, or deep in dungeons, or underground, or in places like that, and yet, herein this library is recorded everything the stars have viewed in the long history of Umora. The wells themselves seem integral to it, but it seemed quite simple, and it seemed like there were two unrelated things that happened.

It seemed like Indri, in some way, called upon new starlight into this place—that without her act of intervention, these memories could not be improved upon, that she called new light into the room of what the stars had seen since the last time she had been in the library was. And she said a name in full, a full name, to call a certain group of memories to her. And the vast amount of stars that were there, you wonder if that is due to the long and prodigious life, and the fact that Grandmother Wren was in many places of the globe, and many different stars under many strange skies could have been known to see her at one time in her life or another.

So, what we have here is a grand database of starlight that can be acquired and stored within the library. To recall information from the memories of starlight, one must have search parameters, primarily a name, from which the stars can return memories, though the sorting of them seems to fall on the researcher. It's a fantasy computer in a repository that serves one person.

It is interesting to me that the information gathered in the Library of Stars is referred to as memories. Memory work is part of the archival profession, whether through oral histories or community archives, but memories are generally viewed as fallible. One can't recall everything that's ever happened to them nor can they get every detail correct. Memories can be skewed and shaped by the people around us but they're also building blocks to the people we eventually become. Collective memory is necessary to keep communities alive and thriving or, at the very least, show proof of their existence. But the contents of the Library of Stars aren't vague recollections pieced together to form a narrative, they're fixed points of events that happened purely because the stars were out to see them occur.

Eursolon and Family Chapter 3 Art by Lorena Lammer

I'm curious as to the intention behind acquiring memories of starlight. Indri is a witch who wants nothing more than to be alone in her palace at the top of the world. Does she observe the memories for a specific purpose? Does she record anything about them or do anything with the information obtained? Does she see herself as the library's caretaker? Is she tasked with protecting the library as part of her station within the coven? Or, does she just like having access to something no one else does? Wouldn't be the first time an archives was maintained in isolation.

When Suvi accesses the library again in episode 29, "The Spy," we get another angle of examination as she tries to understand the why of Indri's organization:

...you can tell that this Witchcraft is very potent, and you can tell that the organization of the stars that are on the shelves is personal and not systemic.

There is a limitation of the magic, this is what the stars can see, which means they cannot see during the day, and they cannot see inside or through buildings. So every scene you see is some externality, something happening at night, something around, and even like—it seems like the weather can also block some of the sight. That being said, each of these is concerned with Witchcraft but also Citadel, there’s a lot of Citadel here. I think you actually literally go and see one on the nearest shelf to the central well, where the wall kind of juts out a little bit, you see you, drunk as hell in a bathroom in Gavrille!

So what you think is, this system is actually quite practical. These are the nearest memories most relevant—it’s like a workbench, this is what the Witch of Wind and Stars has at her fingertips.

Everything in the wells—and as you look down in the well, it is bottomless...This goes deep, deep deep deep deep. So whatever this archival system is, anything in here has to be called up by name.

Suvi is then able to suss out that there can be a level of specificity to the searches, which Aabria says, playfully:

Okay, Boolean modifier, for the sky.

I love you, Aabria, never change.

I want to note, again, that Brennan uses the term archives to describe the contents of the room despite it being contained within a library. The interchangeability of terms is at play, but whenever Brennan is referring to the information Indri recalls or Suvi searches for, it's always an archives. On a personal level, I like that Brennan gave the archive limitations on what could be acquired and accessed. A lot of archives in media, specifically in fantasy and sci-fi, turn them into infinite holdings of knowledge with unfettered access. While the Library of Stars holds a vast amount of knowledge accumulated over time, it's still has restrictions on what information can be obtained, which is more in line with how archives work. I can absolutely see Brennan doing that in terms of practicality, but there's still a part of my archival soul that enjoys a fictional archives being just a bit more reflective of its real world counterpart.

Would it have been nice if Brennan called it the Archives of Stars or Archive of the Stars? Maybe, but I can also see how that doesn't sound pleasant. Too many Rs means you're getting into pirate territory. The name of the library feels intentional not just because it sounds better to say but it's more evocative. People know, to some degree, what a library looks like, but archives are difficult to describe in a way that would make sense to people who don't work in them professionally. Even with all of the additional descriptions provided to fill out the space, when Brennan calls it the Library of the Stars, he's doing so to help the audience and the players see what he's saying.

I have no idea if we'll ever get another look at the Library of Stars when WWW returns for Book 2 in the future. There have certainly been repercussions to the information Suvi gathered for the Citadel, so maybe it'll be more about the intel rather than the facility but I'd love to know more about it. I'd settle for what even is Indri's deal, but we'll see what happens.

For now, on to Chapter 4!