#but austin (the gm) and the rest of the friends at the table say you could start with partizan if you aren't determined to listen

[telomirage]

What is palisade? :)

oh hello! palisade is the eighth full season of an actual play podcast called friends at the table. it's a group of friends playing some tabletop roleplaying games together to "play to find out what happens." it's also the fourth full season of the sci-fi series they have named the divine cycle, which includes counter/weight, twilight mirage, and partizan. the divines are powerful robotic machine gods in many shapes and forms, and which have titles and attributes like rigour, loyalty, integrity, gumption, arbit, empyrean/imperium, perennial, motion, etc. palisade opens five years after the end of partizan and is mostly focused on the planet palisade, an ongoing war, and resistance efforts. it's wildly funny at times and intensely serious, deeply distressing, tense, and dangerous at others.

I hope this helped! I'm currently 24 episodes into palisade and boy howdy is a lot happening all of the time 😂

(also, here's an intro episode, which you could listen to or read the description for to get an idea of what the previous seasons are about! I personally think friends at the table in general is great, but I know it can look daunting with so many episodes that are sometimes so, so very long lol)

[transfemmbeatrice]

Where should I start listening to Friends at the Table?

A short novella by me

Friends at the Table is one of the best actual play podcasts out there and you should listen to it because they tell amazing stories with both diverse characters and a diverse cast (the GM is a queer black man and almost everyone at the table is some flavor of queer). They put character development and good storytelling at the forefront while creating incredible and complex worlds to play in. They make you laugh, cry, and laugh so hard you cry (and also give you chills on occasion) and I genuinely cannot recommend them highly enough. Whether you like a good story, characters to fall in love with, learning new ttrpg mechanics, or listening to friends have a good time together, FatT is for you.

FatT also has an enormous backlog that can make it hard to dive in so here is a handy guide for when you want to listen don’t know where tf to begin.

The Friends have provided some resources for this: there is a flowchart that gives you the quick and dirty deets (though it hasn’t been updated to reflect their current season) and also Austin made a 20 minute ep of him explaining the show and stuff and put it at the beginning of the podcast feed which could also be helpful (which I haven’t actually listened to bc they put it out after I was already deep into the show)...but this is my over detailed take.

There are currently 4 seasons of FatT. In order: Autumn in Hieron, Counter/Weight, Marielda/Winter in Hieron, and Twilight Mirage. Marielda is a mini season that takes place in the Hieron universe but before the Hieron seasons; Counterweight and Twilight Mirage are both standalone but do take place in the same universe, tens or hundreds of thousands of years apart. 

Twilight Mirage is approaching its endpoint and will be followed by Spring in Hieron which should be the last Hieron season. There are pros and cons for starting with any of these seasons so depending on your taste and preferences you can take your pick!

(Also, each new season begins with an Episode 00 which is just the friends discussing the setting and pitching characters. It’s not required listening and they’re pretty long so you can skip them if you want but for people like me who live for worldbuilding and behind the scenes, they’re great prefaces to each season!)

Autumn in Hieron: The very beginning! This is where I started because I’m a hardcore chronological completionist. There is definitely something very fun and satisfying about watching them develop over the past 4 years, in confidence and skill and in production quality! They’ve been amazing since the beginning but it only gets better. 

However, because it’s early, the audio quality is not great, so if that’s an issue for you, this probably isn’t your best starting point. Some extremely good shit goes down in this game and I highly recommend listening to it if you can parse the bad audio. Also, starting at episode 5, they split into two smaller groups and the audio improves, so if you want to start here but find the sound unbearable at the start, you can try skipping to here to see if it works better for you! The first few episodes are just a mini quest and it’s definitely fun but not deeply plot relevant so you’ll be fine to skip it. This is also a season potentially worth returning to even if you don’t start here because as I said, it’s good, and the bad audio might be more listenable once you know the players’ voices better. But if you absolutely can’t, no worries! They recap this season at the beginning of Winter in Hieron so if you don’t listen to it you won’t be lost as the story continues!

Hieron is a high fantasy setting in what Austin describes as the post-post-apocalypse. It’s been long enough that they’re past just surviving and have rebuilt tons but it’s still a wild world out there, and no one alive really remembers what apocalyptic event happened, but they all know something bad went down. Over the two (and a half, counting Marielda) seasons they’ve done they have really built out the world. It explores a lot about the concepts of divinity and entropy and so much more. I think Hieron is a great place to start because fantasy is the usual setting for actual play podcasts so it’s a familiar touchstone. And also just, really fucking good.

Counter/Weight: Welcome to SPACE. The second season of FatT is a good starting point because it’s self contained--it’s longer than the Hieron seasons but when you reach the finale, you’ve gotten the whole story. It starts off a little slow as they adjust to a new system and new characters for the first time...but there are some hilarious bits in those first couple of missions that I love. Then they switch systems again to something that fits more what they are doing and things pick up from there. 

The “ground” game (the majority of the episodes with characters going on adventures as usual) is interspersed with the “faction” game--Austin and two other players not in the other half of the game zoom out and use mechanics and roleplaying to decide what the big factions/corporations/etc are doing around the sector, and eventually we see these events trickle down to effect the player characters in the other half of the game. These are a bit slow, especially when they first start, but I recommend listening to them because it’s cool to see how things are moving around on a more macro scale than one little crew of fixers, and it really informs the world they’re operating in. It’s not strictly necessary if you really find these episodes untenable, but you’ll definitely be able to follow along better if you’ve heard them. Also, around the 3rd or so faction game session, they cut down the number of factions significantly so it goes a lot smoother. I’ll also put in here that Counterweight is probably my favorite season of the show at least thus far even though I wasn’t sure I would like it at all when I first started it, for what that’s worth.

Counter/Weight is a cyberpunk/scifi setting somewhere in the Milky Way. It is set less than a decade after a war in which two rival powers united in an uneasy alliance to drive back an Empire. They succeeded, but now things have settled into a good old fashioned cold war. There are lots of robots and mechs and they use the cyberpunk genre to explore labor and capitalism and feeling small and helpless in the face of such massive, powerful corruption. Or, sadness and robots in space. (Also, literally none of the PCs ended up being cishet.)

Marielda: Marielda is a mini season they did right before Winter in Hieron. Set in Hieron before the events of the other seasons, it provides some context to the world. It’s also fucking delightful. This is probably the most recommended starting point for FatT because it’s short, has high production quality, and some of their best work. It really encapsulates what this show is so if you’re unsure if this is the podcast for you, this is a great starting point. 

Since it takes place long before Autumn in Hieron, you don’t need to have listened to it to follow along; but I do find it somewhat helpful because there are callbacks to the events of that season as they show how some of the things they encountered then came to be in the first place. Marielda (and Winter in Hieron) were made with new listeners in mind, so Autumn definitely isn’t required.

Marielda is of course also high fantasy, but it has a tinge of steampunk too because this island has more technology for....reasons that will be revealed as you listen. The only train in Hieron is there, and the crew stages a heist on it, and it’s amazing. Marielda has two parts--the first couple episodes are some of the players playing The Quiet Year, a collaborative mapdrawing game, to build this city. Then the other players played a few missions in Blades in the Dark as scoundrels who steal information to sell to the highest bidder. Their shenanigans are hilarious and occasionally heartbreaking and I’ve relistened to it so many times.

Winter in Hieron: Hieron season two of three! Winter begins with two episodes recapping the events of Autumn in Hieron, so if you skipped Autumn you can listen to them and be good to go, and if you didn’t...you can skip the recaps! (Unless maybe you listened to Counterweight in between and you need a refresher). There are two new PCs in Winter because Andi and Janine joined between Autumn and this season, and they only make Hieron better.

This season is a little heavier than Autumn because it’s Winter and...Winter is usually darker than Autumn. I’m in the middle of relistening to it now, though, and it’s still incredible the second time through and a great starting point. I would not recommend starting with Winter without listening to Marielda first, partly because Marielda is so good, but also because Marielda informs so much of what happens in Winter. 

Since Twilight Mirage is getting close to finishing up (as of writing this, anyway) if being Current In The Fandom is something that’s important to you, I’d start with Hieron (whether that be Autumn or Marielda/Winter). After Twilight Mirage wraps up, they are reportedly planning to return to Hieron for its final season--Spring, so if you start catching up now you can be ready! I don’t know for sure yet but so much has happened at this point that I find it hard to imagine that they’ll do a recap before Spring that lets you jump in there very easily. I could be proven wrong but even if I am....I don’t recommend it. You’ll miss too much Seasons of Hieron is a joy to listen to.

Twilight Mirage: The current season! Usually I say to start here if you find the backlog intimidating--it’s current and you can jump in to what’s happening now and get to the rest when you feel ready. And that’s still somewhat true, but Twilight Mirage has gotten pretty long so it’s potentially still intimidating? And they have said they’re nearing the endgame, but I have no idea if that means weeks or months. But regardless, it’s still less to get through than starting further back, and it is a standalone season so it’s a great starting place!

Twilight Mirage is another game in space. It is set in the same universe as Counterweight, and there are some callbacks to it, but it’s set far in the future from the events of that season and was intentionally made so that people who hadn’t heard Counterweight could listen fine. It’s more like easter eggs than important backstory.

The premise is a dying utopia: a massive fleet that has slowly been whittled down, still home to millions of people, but they’re starting to look for somewhere to hopefully colonize. This game does a great job of questioning what a utopia would look like--what does prison look like in a utopia? how do we treat synthetic beings?--and exploring the themes of self/identity and colonization and so much more. It’s the most philosophical FatT season to date but the narrative is also great and stands on its own--you can engage at whatever level you want. (I, for instance, don’t get a lot of the philosophy referenced, but I’m still deeply enjoying it because it’s a great story and I love all the characters!) So much shit happens to alter the original premise and it’s fascinating to see the characters have to adapt to all these evolving circumstances and question their values as they themselves also change. Also, lots of robots and mechs and aliens and shit. One of the PCs is just a cat person. One of the PCs is a downloadable hitman who is losing their memory every time they die and get downloaded into a new body. It’s A Good Season, they friends are extra af (more than usual, even) and it’s a Delight.

And that’s my answer to the age old question, where do I start listening to Friends at the Table?, answered in more detail than anyone ever wanted. If you have any questions or anything feel free to shoot me an ask or a message, I’m literally always here to talk about FatT!

[anonymouscatt]

My traditional New Years Fandom meme! Under the cut, if you’re interested:

1. Your main fandom of the year: Did I… even have one? There was a lot of stuff I liked and followed this year but not one main thing I was into. I watched Doctor Who, and the finale of the Good Place, and got into some new fandoms with Friends at the Table and The Mandalorian, but… no main fandom. Just freaking out with the rest of the internet about the state of the world in general.

2. Your favorite film this year: Does the film release of the musical Hamilton count? LOL the loss of theatres and theatrical releases means I can’t really think of any other movies I saw this year. Soul was okay but not Pixar’s best imo, and I never even watched Mulan because I heard it wasn’t very good at all. The release of the Hamilton recording was a boon this summer, it was something for my family to look forward to and it felt like an Event in a year that had very few of those. And the music and choreography really is excellent; it was awesome to see the original cast perform! I hope it sets a pattern for other Broadway shows.

3. Your favorite book this year: The Illuminae Files Series by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff! I discovered this series in the early months of quarantine, and it was some of the most engaging content I’ve read all year. Relationship drama, fighting big corporations, a deadly virus (-_-) and a murderous AI that is somehow the most compelling character… IN SPACE! I loved it, and the unique format the series was written in was extremely cool. Although I read them all on kindle, so some of the formatting did not translate the way it should… these books were made to be read in physical format, and it shows. It didn’t keep me from really enjoying the story and becoming really attached to the characters though; what a great read. I also read the novel-length Murderbot book Network Effect, and it did not disappoint! It was great to follow Murderbot and friends on a full-length adventure, with hints of more to come.

4. Your favorite album or song this year: Maybe Jodie Whittaker’s cover of Yellow by Coldplay… I don’t have a good reason except I liked it and I didn’t listen to a lot of music this year either. Sad to say I didn’t really “get” Taylor Swift’s Folklore or its sequel, though I think it’s pretty cool to release so much new music in one year. She clearly had a lot of time on her hands, lol.

5. Your favorite TV show this year: The Mandalorian! After the huge disappointment of Disney’s Star Wars sequel trilogy, this show was an unexpectedly welcome return to the galaxy far far away. It’s engaging, it’s fun, it has moments of humor and drama and found family, and I love it. It’s also refreshing to see a Star Wars story that isn’t centered around Skywalker Family Drama, the cameo in the S2 finale notwithstanding. And even that cameo was so fun, a return to form for a beloved character… I’m eager to see where the show goes in the future.

6. Your favorite tumblr moment this year: Listen… nothing is going to top the evening of November 5th, 2020. Nothing. The moment Destiel went ‘canon’ and the internet lost its shit is going to be memorialized in the tumblr hall of fame for all time.

7. Your best new fandom discovery of the year: Friends at the Table! I was thinking about trying another tabletop podcast after listening to The Adventure Zone, and when quarantine hit and I suddenly had tons of free time and the need to go for daily walks, it seemed as good a time as any to start a new one. It was kind of slow-going at first, but I’m glad I started at the very beginning and listened to the team grow and change- you can tell they’ve gotten a lot better at actually role-playing as their characters instead of summarizing what action they take, plus I catch all the little in-jokes from previous seasons. The style and tone is very different from TAZ but I like it a lot and I think Austin Walker is a fantastic GM. Like, the amount of detail and planning that goes into it… mind-boggling. And I love that he comes up with, like, mini-games and writes new game mechanics for them, like when characters are exploring a new place or defending a town… I’m just in awe. FatT has saved my sanity during this hell-year and I am eternally grateful.

8. Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year: Thinking it’s going to be Doctor Who for the Timeless Child plot, or The Outer Worlds for being, not terrible but kind of a mediocre game in a year when I desperately needed a new RPG to get lost in when… wait, what’s this? IT’S SUPERNATURAL WITH A STEEL CHAIR! I haven’t been invested in the show for YEARS and tapped out around season 10 with literally no expectations for this dumpster fire of a narrative, and then 15x18 shows up with a legit LOVE CONFESSION from Castiel that sends him straight to Turbo Hell?!? How are they possibly going to resolve this?! I (and indeed the entire internet) was on the edge of my seat waiting to see what would happen… and the answer was nothing. It didn’t go ANYWHERE. Like, you’re on tumblr, you already know this, and really what else would you expect from Supernatural of all shows… but they still managed to get me to watch the finale LIVE out of curiosity only for it to be senseless death and boring montages and NO SIGN OF CAS.  I was OUT and they baited me back with the promise of resolution for Cas and then they BROKE that promise and I should not be surprised but somehow I am. Wow.

9. Your favorite male nonbinary character of the year: Can’t think of any male characters I was really into this year, so let’s just nominate Murderbot, with a return to form in Network Effect. It’s snarky and relatable and I love it very much, and the new installment included plenty of juicy character moments to sink my teeth into.

10. Your favorite female character of the year: Kady Grant from Illuminae. She’s so determined even up against impossible odds, and the way she learns to trust AIDAN and build that relationship only to be betrayed… heartbreaking. And fascinating.

11. Your biggest squee moment of the year: Possibly when they announced Omniblades in the Dark, the Mass Effect/Friends at the Table Crossover I never expected but enjoyed very much!

12. Your most missed old fandom: Dragon Age? It doesn’t feel old but like. I’m so ready for the next installment. And I know it’s a ways away and I don’t want to rush the devs or drive them to crunch. Crunch is bad! But I’m so ready to play in that universe again and it’s been six years since the last game and I miss it. They released a collection of short stories from Thedas teasing at new developments in the world and those stories were awesome, plus the new trailer… I’m worried the new game will be a disappointment, doubly so if they rush it to release, and yet. I want it. :(

13. Your fandom you haven't tried yet, but want to: I WAS going to play Cyberpunk 2077, but, well. What with the epilepsy controversy, general glitchyness, and just the sense that it’s not my kind of story, I don’t think it’s on the table anymore. Can’t think of anything else… anyone want to rec me something?

14. Your biggest anticipation of the New Year: Literally just. Anything good. Anything better than the year we just had. 2021, the bar is so low. Whatever happens though there is another new Murderbot novella set to be published in spring so that’s something.