#I’m sorry I can never be brief about FatT I just love it so much

[transfemmbeatrice]

Hi! I keep seeing your Friends at the Table posts and I really want to get into it, but I tried listening from the beginning and the audio quality isn’t great. Did you start from the beginning or is there another good place to start? Thanks!

Hello friend! I am always here to talk about Friends at the Table.

I’m a hardcore completionist/chronologist so I started from the beginning and went straight through. The beginning is super rough though. I don’t know how far you made it, but if you DO want to try and listen to the first season, I would skip to episode 5. After their first mini-quest, the permanently split the party and go back and forth between the two, starting that episode. The audio quality still isn’t great for a while, but it’s way more listenable with 3 players than 6. There is some really good stuff in s1, but never fear! If you find it unlistenable, they recap the season at the start of the next Hieron season so you’re fine to skip it if you need to.

That leaves Counterweight, Winter in Hieron, and Twilight Mirage. You can really listen to these in any order because they’re all separate, depending what you prefer. Hieron is fantasy so if you want something more specifically taz-like (or if you just love fantasy) start there. Listen to Marielda along with that, it’s like a prequel mini-season before Winter in Hieron that’s AMAZING. You don’t need any prior knowledge to listen to Marielda because it’s set in Hieron but in a different place and time, and then they recap s1 of Hieron before the season proper. (There will be one more season of Hieron to finish that story, presumably after this Twilight Mirage season).

Counterweight is sci-fi/cyberpunk. I wasn’t sure it would be my thing when I first started listening but I ended up absolutely loving it. It’s self-contained—that season is the whole story. It’s also the second season of the show so their recording equipment is way better at this point and the editing really improves (even throughout the season) and they’re more comfortable with what they’re doing, though the beginning is a little slow because they’re learning a new system and world but Drillbot Taylor makes it ALL worth it.

Twilight Mirage is the current season. I pretty much only recommend starting here if you want to skip the backlog, which it doesn’t sound like you do…mostly just because it’s still airing so if you start here and then go to another season you’ll have to break to listen to Twilight Mirage again? But if that doesn’t bother you, by all means… choose your own adventure my dude. It’s sci-fi also, but it’s this super interesting dying utopia setting. It’s set in the same universe as counterweight but thousands (tens of thousands probably) years later and it’s specifically designed for you to not have to had listened to Counterweight to understand it. I recommend listening to Counterweight first anyway because it gives a little more context and there are some references to it but they’re more Easter eggs than anything.

I️ kind of generally advise listening in release order just because they reference past seasons in play, not in any spoilery or important way, but it’s always fun to be in on the joke and I really enjoyed listening to them evolve over time.

And because this post isn’t long or overwhelming enough: they also have a patreon! If you find yourself really liking f@tt and you have the funds, I highly recommend backing them and getting the bonus content. This includes the clapcast (funny behind the scenes stuff), a Tipcast (fan questions about DMing and playing tabletop rpgs), Live one-off games in cool different systems (which are archived), and best of all: Bluff City, a single setting where they play lots of different systems for a couple sessions to tell different stories in this slightly surreal version of Atlantic City. It’s amazing.

Tl;dr skipping s1 is no problem and you can start with whatever season you want but I’m extremely long winded and couldn’t just leave it at that.