#everyone has done Twilight Mirage dirty it’s a good season too!!!

[cadmium-free]

The thing that is making me become a wild biting animal is how many of you will be like. I started with Twilight Mirage which no one should do or I started with Spring in Heiron which is a terrible place to start and NO!!!!! NO!!!!!!!!!!! YOU ALL GOT HOOKED THAT WAY!!!! YOURE STILL HERE AND IT WAS A GOOD AND FINE PLACE TO START!!!!!! CHRONOLOGY IS NOTHING!!!!!!! TWILIGHT MIRAGE IS A GOOD STARTING POINT TOO I WILL DEVOUR YOU ALL!!!

I love when people reblog the “which season of friends at the table should you listen to” uquiz and assert there is a correct season to start with in the tags and 100% of the time they pick a season I would never pick to tell someone to start with

[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!