February Posting Meme, part 2
Feb. 4th, 2019 07:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darchildregraveexcitement asked for favorite podcasts or podcast recs. This post got so long, I'm sorry. Look, no one needs me to tell them about the McElroy family of products, so although I listen to a lot of them, I'm going to assume that you know what you need to know there. (If not, The Adventure Zone is a super fun actual play show, My Brother My Brother and Me is a lot of fun, Sawbones is a great show about medical history, and you should try them out. Sawbones is my I-want-to-be-entertained-but-don't-want-to-feel-feelings show.) So instead, I will tell you about the other two podcasts I'm super into. Both of them are actual play podcasts, because that is how I roll.
First, Friends at the Table. Which, as the GM, Austin Walker, says every episode, is "about critical worldbuilding, smart characterization, and fun interaction between good friends." This show is divided into seasons, which have different settings and casts of characters. I'm in the middle of season...3? The show is in the middle of season 5. I will tell you a little about the first 2.5 seasons, since those are the ones I've finished.
Season One - Autumn in Hieron. This season, they're mostly playing Dungeon World. The first few episodes are almost all the PCs on one quest together, then they split into Boat Party and Ice Party and follow two different quest lines. Boat Party is Lem (the orc bard), Fero (the halfling druid) and Hella (the human fighter) - they fight pirates and have haunted swords and find a magic city and make bad decisions. Ice Party is Hadrian (the human paladin), Throndir (the snow elf ranger), and the Great Fantasmo (the elven wizard and my favorite because I make bad choices and love terrible people) - they meet goblins and various gods and discover magic towers and make bad decisions. I am an Ice Party girl - I like godstuff and terrible wizards - but both are good. This one ends resolved but with loose ends that continue in Winter in Hieron (and later, Spring in Hieron).
Season Two - COUNTER/Weight. The first few episodes are run in Mechnoir, then they switch to playing The Sprawl, with a few other games thrown in from time to time. This is a mecha noir cyberpunk story with giant robot gods and galactic politics. Our PCs are the Chime, a small group of criminals for hire made of up of Mako Trig (a hyperactive hacker with a hoverboard), Cassander Timaeus Berenice (exiled fish royalty and my favorite), Au-Dy (a parking robot who mysteriously gained sentience), and Aria Joie (whose official description is "what if Han Solo used to be Beyonce?"). This story gets big and beautiful and sad. This season is pretty self-contained.
Season Two-point-five - Marielda. This is a short season, set back on Hieron but hundreds of years before season 1. It focuses on, again, a small band of criminals. This season deals heavily with the gods introduced in season one and provides a lot of cool worldbuilding detail. (Weavers, you guys. Weavers are the best.) This season is also beautiful and sad.
Guides will often tell you to start with COUNTER/Weight or Marields, as they're a little more polished and the audio quality at the beginning of AiH is, well, not good. I started at the very beginning and do not regret it but I have a lot of tolerance for bad audio. If you do start with, say, Marielda, I would recommend eventually going back to season 1. It's got a bunch of really good stuff. There's a pretty good recap if you choose not to, though.
Friends at the Table tells unique stories. The emphasis on collaborative worldbuilding is really appealing to me. The players are all really thoughtful about their characters and committed to making decisions that both feel real and tell the best story. The music is gorgeous - I'm not often into instrumental music, but I love this. The theme to Marielda is my ringtone and the theme to Autumn in Hieron is my wakeup alarm. There's a song in COUNTER/Weight - the only one with words - that I immediately had to learn and now sing all the time.
A warning: while there are a lot of very very funny bits throughout the show (for instance, nearly everything involving Lazer Ted), Friends at the Table is, in general, sad. Actions have continuing consequences and sometimes they are very bad. People make bad decisions or die tragically or fail, even though they're doing their best. I cried so much while finishing COUNTER/Weight that I felt dehydrated after the finale. Holiday specials are generally especially harrowing, or any time they play Consulting Detective. I think it's worth it - I love this show - but I have to take breaks from it every once in a while.
Second, Campaign. Specifically, Campaign: Star Wars, which until recently was the only Campaign. Set between Clone Wars and the original trilogy, this is the story of three lovable dumbasses, an alien archaeologist, a tiny Force-sensitive child, and a super-intelligent dog being the worst rebels the GFFA has ever seen. This spun out of the One Shot podcast and there are few episodes of that that are essentially the first adventures of these characters, but they are not necessary to enjoy Campaign. All you need to know is that, in this universe, these are the people who stole the Death Star plans. (Campaign started before Rogue One came out, obvs.)
Our PCs are the crew of the Mynock: Tryst Valentine (a kimono-wearing pansexual dumbass horndog smuggler), Leenik Geelo (a Rodian bounty hunter whose plans always involve getting captured on purpose), and Bacta (an ex-clone soldier turned local-teen-dad-trying-his-best). Lyntel'luroon (the aforementioned Twi'lek Indiana Jones) and Tamlin (the most adorable proto-Jedi) are played by the GM. They are all fucking delightful.
There are four main arcs: Myrkr - the boys get trapped on a jungle planet, meet Lyn and a wonderful dog named Tony, adopt some lizards, and then escape the planet in the most convoluted possible way. Mandalore - the boys-and-Lyn attend a music festival, go on a ghost tour, attempt to make contact with some important Rebels, and meet some recurring villains. Phindar - the long one, in which the boys-and-Lyn attend a bounty hunting convention and a whole bunch of shit goes down, including a long-running matchmaking plot between two random NPCS, some crossdressing fake dating, and a hardboiled detective interlude. Roche - the boys get hired by some very nice insect people to clear out an Imperial base, which they proceed to make as complicated as they can.
There are also a bunch of side arcs. There's a couple flashbacks where we learn backstory about various of the PCs. There's a side arc about two of Tryst's childhood friends. There's the aforementioned noir interlude, in which the 5-year-old tiny Jedi decides to Solve A Mystery. And there's Evil Campaign, which is my favorite thing in the world.
Evil Campaign is the adventures of four of the recurring villains, doing villainous Imperial things. They are: Aava Aarek, a super-cool and badass Sith lady who has a recurring thing with Tryst. Synox, a clone soldier (who used to be Bacta's commanding officer) who now stars in a propaganda tv show and runs a Boy Scout troop. Minister Blue, the most annoying person ever and the guy running the propaganda show. Zero, Blue's bodyguard, part-time DJ, definitely in love with his boss. I love them all so much.
This show is also great at collaborative play - while Kat (the GM) plays a lot of the NPCs, the players also frequently join in. Occasionally, this leads to things like an entire episode of the PCs going through customs, which was fucking hilarious, or the boys making up an absurd list of bounty hunters that later they have to fight. They get sidetracked a lot and do a lot of goofing around and it's delightful.
This show is kinda the opposite of Friends at the Table, in that there are sad bits - no one in Star Wars escapes tragedy in their background - but mostly this show is absurdly funny. I have literally never laughed harder than while listening to Campaign. I love every PC beyond the telling of it and most of the NPCs.
Warning: while it is entirely unnecessary to know much about Star Wars beyond what anyone who would listen to an actual play podcast already knows, this show might turn you into a Star Wars nerd. This show convinced me to watch the Clone Wars cartoon. This show caused me to read a whole bunch of Star Wars novels. This show convinced me to rewatch the prequels. I have so many feelings about clone soldiers now and it is entirely because of Campaign. (Both Bacta and Synox are my favorites forever.)
The Star Wars version of Campaign is now ended - I haven't listened to the end yet because I love it so very much and if I never listen to the end, that means it never ended, right? But most of the cast (and a couple new folks) are now part of Campaign: Skyjacks, which I will also recommend. Skyjacks is about a crew of weirdo skypirates who are also possibly necromancers or shapeshifters or fallen angels. It hasn't been quite as funny yet as the Star Wars campaign but we're only a few episodes in and it's starting to hit its stride. I'm really enjoying it so far.
Other shows I'm into, though not as much as the ones above: The Broadswords (cool ladies playing D&D!), One Shot (the podcast Campaign spun out of - please listen to the Feng Shui episodes), Autonomic (where the other cast members from Campaign went after the Star Wars version ended - I've only listened a few episodes so far but it's pretty adorable and the setting is neat), and The Thrilling Adventure Hour (not an actual play but instead an homage to old time radio - Beyond Belief seems like the fandom's favorite but I personally love the Sparks Nevada episodes best).
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Date: 2019-02-04 03:36 pm (UTC)Campaign sounds like fun. I tried listening to the original One-shot once and kinda got bored in the middle, but maybe I'll give it another try.
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Date: 2019-02-04 05:32 pm (UTC)I didn't listen to the original One Shot episodes until I was pretty far into Campaign proper and I still don't think they're really necessary. (One Shot can be a lot of fun but is often hit or miss for me.) It feels like a shaky pilot episode that settles down into a more cohesive show in its own podcast.
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Date: 2019-02-04 05:26 pm (UTC)FatT is so good and makes me so happy even when it's very sad.
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Date: 2019-02-04 05:35 pm (UTC)I recently picked up WiH where I left off before taking an I-don't-need-these-emotions-right-now break and it is still so good. I'm constantly impressed with how ambitious the stories they're telling are.
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Date: 2019-02-04 09:05 pm (UTC)Hah, yeah. I love how ambitious they are -- Twilight Mirage is incredible in part because of the scale, and they spend a lot of time talking about how that taught them a lot about trying big things and succeeding partway but still creating something amazing. It's my favorite season, so far.
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Date: 2019-02-04 08:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-04 09:23 pm (UTC)The boys try to be very stealthy.
An overly elaborate and increasingly surreal description of a box.
Leenik touches a lizard.
I should note that they are not playing D&D but instead Edge of the Empire, so the game mechanics are very different. It's a lot more storytelling focused than D&D, which tends to lead more towards combat. (Knowing the game is not necessary to understand the show, though.)
Campaign is probably my favorite podcast. If you do try it, I hope you enjoy!
no subject
Date: 2019-02-07 09:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-05 06:38 am (UTC)