![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
friends at the table: a manifesto
archiving from tumblr - original post.
do you like critical world building, smart characterisation and fun interactions between good friends? do you want more quality tabletop rpg podcasts to listen to? do you like any of the following: d&d fantasy tropes turned sideways, character names like Public Person and Grand Magnificent, consistently stunning and gorgeous musical accompaniment, space cyberpunk that fully commits to the anticapitalism and takes it to its most horrifying conclusion, visions of a utopian future with weird space magic and explorations of faith, characters of colour everywhere and never as an afterthought or textual queerness in not just characters and relationships but inherent in the very storytelling itself? my friends, you should listen to friends at the table.
friends at the table is a tabletop RPG actual play podcast with a solid crew of lovely, thoughtful people who I won’t go into here or I’ll get off topic. most important to know are austin, the perennial game master, jack, the music wizard, and ali, who’s produced the show since s2 iirc. they play a variety of cool and interesting and thoughtful games which focus more on character choices and meaningful consequences than like, repetitive fight scenes. if you’re looking for dice rolls, you won’t find too many here, but you will find CLOCKS. austin loves clocks.
there are a bunch of different seasons and they made a helpful diagram to help you figure out what you should listen to first, and also the first episode in their catalogue is austin going through that a bit more. but this is my manifesto, and I’m incredibly biased, so I’m gonna tell you what I think you should listen to.
people usually recommend starting with marielda, and that’s definitely fair - it’s a fun, soul destroying, campy romp with a gang of knowledge thieves, impending doom, and fraught gay gods at the heart of it all. listen here if you’re more here for fantasy than sci-fi. I’ve been one episode away from finishing it for, uh, months, because it’s very much a lot. the episodes are mostly heist-style adventures, which are really fun and go to some absolutely wild places, in terms of character choices. they start the season with just a whole bunch of worldbuilding and it’s so cool and interesting, seeing the world unfold along with some key characters for the rest of the season. the friends are very very good at worldbuilding.
marielda is a prequel to the seasons in hieron: autumn and winter and soon to be spring. hieron isn’t really my bag, so I’ve got a bit less to say about it. hieron is a D&D style world which, when we first see it, is post-post-apocalypse; something bad happened a long time ago and things are only just starting to recover. it takes a lot of the traditional fantasy tropes and turns them completely on their head, especially re orcs; no inherently evil species here friends!! it follows two bands of adventurers doing adventurer things and slowly figuring things out about the world.
now what i think you should listen to!!! I started with twilight mirage, the current season, and it’s absolutely my favourite. it’s the weird space magic faith-is-good-actually utopian future, and it’s weird and fun and aesthetic as fuck. it’s currently ongoing, but the finale is coming up soon, so if you start here you probably won’t be waiting for it to complete. this takes place in the far flung future of COUNTER/weight, another season which I will talk about below. it focuses on divine robot gods; each protag is from a different spaceship settlement of a robot god. the series starts with this divine utopia in decline, and we follow two sides of the story. one is planet-side with half the group investigating the possibility of settling a colony with the remainders of the spaceship settlements. the other follows the rest of the group in space trying to figure out why things are going so wrong. then things switch up partway through and some really fucking cool things happen, but i won’t go into details bc spoilers. twilight mirage does so many interesting things with technology and faith and morality and scarcity and colonialism and ideas of utopia and just, it’s really fucking cool.
so last but definitely not least, COUNTER/weight is the space cyberpunk capitalist nightmare, and it is very sad and very good. the protagonists are a sentient robot who gives no fucks and owns my heart, a former pop star turned revolutionary, a space fish person, and an absolute disaster gay who has real funky tech powers. they start off as like, minor-level guns for hire, but quickly get embroiled in big picture, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it shit.
it starts off a bit slow largely because of the game system they were using, but they switch after a few episodes and it gets much much better. they play a bunch of different games over the course of the series, which means they get to explore all sorts of interesting different parts or the world, but probably the best aspect of this is that they have a faction game in addition to the usual game that follows the protags. in the faction game, you see all the different big players in the system, including rat space pirates, divine robot gods and their empires, super shady space spies and the usual fucked up cyberpunk big corps. it’s so fucking good, and really helps build the tension as everything moves towards the terrifying conclusion.
some warnings! well. less warnings and more things to keep in mind. the friends are great and very thoughtful about what they do, but they’re still people. they occasionally misgender non-binary characters (of which they have many). in particular, one of the protags in COUNTER/weight who is from a species with different ideas about gender than humans, and they only really clarify what those ideas are about halfway through the series. however! other than that it is not frequent.
big Big BIG warning: this show is Sad. like really sad. they absolutely earn the sadness and it’s very satisfying, but also very heavy. there’s plenty of levity and humour and fun character interaction and development, but it’s definitely frequently Quite Grim. so keep that in mind. this definitely applies more to the hieron seasons and COUNTER/weight, less so twilight mirage and arguably less so in marielda, though idk people may disagree.
anyway that’s friends at the table!! I tried to keep it short and still ended up rambling, so apologies for things I skimmed over or missed entirely. they have a patreon with even MORE content, which I haven’t even touched because it’s a whole different thing (but the content is VERY GOOD, and if you get into the show at all I recommend checking it out).
if you have any questions, want detailed content notes for seasons/episodes, have corrections or concerns about how I’ve presented the show, I always want to talk about FatT. leave a comment - anonymous commenting is enabled.
do you like critical world building, smart characterisation and fun interactions between good friends? do you want more quality tabletop rpg podcasts to listen to? do you like any of the following: d&d fantasy tropes turned sideways, character names like Public Person and Grand Magnificent, consistently stunning and gorgeous musical accompaniment, space cyberpunk that fully commits to the anticapitalism and takes it to its most horrifying conclusion, visions of a utopian future with weird space magic and explorations of faith, characters of colour everywhere and never as an afterthought or textual queerness in not just characters and relationships but inherent in the very storytelling itself? my friends, you should listen to friends at the table.
friends at the table is a tabletop RPG actual play podcast with a solid crew of lovely, thoughtful people who I won’t go into here or I’ll get off topic. most important to know are austin, the perennial game master, jack, the music wizard, and ali, who’s produced the show since s2 iirc. they play a variety of cool and interesting and thoughtful games which focus more on character choices and meaningful consequences than like, repetitive fight scenes. if you’re looking for dice rolls, you won’t find too many here, but you will find CLOCKS. austin loves clocks.
there are a bunch of different seasons and they made a helpful diagram to help you figure out what you should listen to first, and also the first episode in their catalogue is austin going through that a bit more. but this is my manifesto, and I’m incredibly biased, so I’m gonna tell you what I think you should listen to.
people usually recommend starting with marielda, and that’s definitely fair - it’s a fun, soul destroying, campy romp with a gang of knowledge thieves, impending doom, and fraught gay gods at the heart of it all. listen here if you’re more here for fantasy than sci-fi. I’ve been one episode away from finishing it for, uh, months, because it’s very much a lot. the episodes are mostly heist-style adventures, which are really fun and go to some absolutely wild places, in terms of character choices. they start the season with just a whole bunch of worldbuilding and it’s so cool and interesting, seeing the world unfold along with some key characters for the rest of the season. the friends are very very good at worldbuilding.
marielda is a prequel to the seasons in hieron: autumn and winter and soon to be spring. hieron isn’t really my bag, so I’ve got a bit less to say about it. hieron is a D&D style world which, when we first see it, is post-post-apocalypse; something bad happened a long time ago and things are only just starting to recover. it takes a lot of the traditional fantasy tropes and turns them completely on their head, especially re orcs; no inherently evil species here friends!! it follows two bands of adventurers doing adventurer things and slowly figuring things out about the world.
now what i think you should listen to!!! I started with twilight mirage, the current season, and it’s absolutely my favourite. it’s the weird space magic faith-is-good-actually utopian future, and it’s weird and fun and aesthetic as fuck. it’s currently ongoing, but the finale is coming up soon, so if you start here you probably won’t be waiting for it to complete. this takes place in the far flung future of COUNTER/weight, another season which I will talk about below. it focuses on divine robot gods; each protag is from a different spaceship settlement of a robot god. the series starts with this divine utopia in decline, and we follow two sides of the story. one is planet-side with half the group investigating the possibility of settling a colony with the remainders of the spaceship settlements. the other follows the rest of the group in space trying to figure out why things are going so wrong. then things switch up partway through and some really fucking cool things happen, but i won’t go into details bc spoilers. twilight mirage does so many interesting things with technology and faith and morality and scarcity and colonialism and ideas of utopia and just, it’s really fucking cool.
so last but definitely not least, COUNTER/weight is the space cyberpunk capitalist nightmare, and it is very sad and very good. the protagonists are a sentient robot who gives no fucks and owns my heart, a former pop star turned revolutionary, a space fish person, and an absolute disaster gay who has real funky tech powers. they start off as like, minor-level guns for hire, but quickly get embroiled in big picture, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it shit.
it starts off a bit slow largely because of the game system they were using, but they switch after a few episodes and it gets much much better. they play a bunch of different games over the course of the series, which means they get to explore all sorts of interesting different parts or the world, but probably the best aspect of this is that they have a faction game in addition to the usual game that follows the protags. in the faction game, you see all the different big players in the system, including rat space pirates, divine robot gods and their empires, super shady space spies and the usual fucked up cyberpunk big corps. it’s so fucking good, and really helps build the tension as everything moves towards the terrifying conclusion.
some warnings! well. less warnings and more things to keep in mind. the friends are great and very thoughtful about what they do, but they’re still people. they occasionally misgender non-binary characters (of which they have many). in particular, one of the protags in COUNTER/weight who is from a species with different ideas about gender than humans, and they only really clarify what those ideas are about halfway through the series. however! other than that it is not frequent.
big Big BIG warning: this show is Sad. like really sad. they absolutely earn the sadness and it’s very satisfying, but also very heavy. there’s plenty of levity and humour and fun character interaction and development, but it’s definitely frequently Quite Grim. so keep that in mind. this definitely applies more to the hieron seasons and COUNTER/weight, less so twilight mirage and arguably less so in marielda, though idk people may disagree.
anyway that’s friends at the table!! I tried to keep it short and still ended up rambling, so apologies for things I skimmed over or missed entirely. they have a patreon with even MORE content, which I haven’t even touched because it’s a whole different thing (but the content is VERY GOOD, and if you get into the show at all I recommend checking it out).
if you have any questions, want detailed content notes for seasons/episodes, have corrections or concerns about how I’ve presented the show, I always want to talk about FatT. leave a comment - anonymous commenting is enabled.
no subject
Hard same.
Except I started in Hieron and love it
and have never gone back to COUNTER/weight.ALSO.
Subbing to Austin's Patreon is WORTH IT because Bluff City is probably his magnum opus, tbh
no subject
i think hieron stresses me out too much to properly enjoy? idk. i got halfway through wih and it was just Too Much, i hope to one day have the emotional fortitude to continue
no subject
Esp ART. Omg Art.
Art: yeah ... I'm gonna play a dick this round bc I'm tired of carrying the emotional burden of the plot
Austin: here. have the emotional burden essential to the plot
Art: .... no
Austin: yes
Art: .... NO AUSTIN
Austin: AUSTIN YES
Jack: I'm gonna play a character without memory so that I don't have to bear so much responsibility to the plot
Austin: that's cute.
Janine: GODDAMNIT ALL OF YOU I'M READY I'M GONNA BE RESPONSIBLE THIS TIME
(LOL tbh the fact that Marielda was Janine's first time RPing anything just is... unbelievable. that makes Signet only her SECOND OC in this long-burn format and I just.... she's so perfect. She lets Signet get drunk and pick a fight at Christmas dinner and honestly wow so brave)
no subject
janine is fucking incredible, i don't even KNOW. her characters are so good. i don't remember her name but the boxing lady she played in the first bluff city arc? AMAZING
no subject
DUDE HAVE YOU LISTENED TO THE SHORT ONE-OFF (aka 3-episode) ARC OF FALL OF MAGIC? OMG IT'S SO GOOD.
It's a "live at the table" arc and so originally just on the patreon thread - but to give them space between TW finale and Hieron:Spring, Austin/Aly posted it. It's just Jack, Dre, Austin, and Janine and J A N I N E.
I don't even know.
no subject
no subject