I reached a couple of significant milestones related to actual play tabletop RPG podcasts in the last few months.

1. I finally caught up on Friends at the Table after starting from the beginning sometime in 2016 or 2017.
2. I finished production on Ensuing Confusion, the podcast I recorded with a group of friends (and which absolutely wouldn't have happened if I hadn't started listening to Friends at the Table).

I'd like to talk about what they each meant to me for a little while. There are no spoilers for either podcast in this post.

Friends at the Table

Listening to Friends at the Table has been a constant in my life through long roadtrips, moving house, and starting my first post-college career change. Also throughout cleaning the old apartment, setting up in the new house, doing dishes, scooping litter boxes, and other miscellaneous chores. (I can't just sit and listen to podcasts, I have to be doing something with my hands at the same time. But I also can't be doing anything that requires any degree of thoughtfulness or else I won't be able to follow what the hosts are saying and I'll end up rewinding the same section three or four times over. So chores it is.)

While there's no question that there is a lot of Friends at the Table out there, and that it obviously kept piling up as I was listening (I think Marielda was in progress as I started on Autumn in Hieron), this chore-only context is probably the main reason it took me so damn long. But it's meant I've gotten to listen to the show and hosts as they grew as players, creators, and people over the course of years. All in something approaching real time, yet entirely on a schedule all my own --- never with any other fans to share in this exact moment of the journey at this exact moment in time.

Now that I've caught up, and have listened to the first few episodes of Friends at the Table's eighth season (called Palisade and played in an RPG system I love, Armour Astir: Advent), I am contemporary with both the players and with my fellow fans for the first time. Of course, now I'm dipping even further back into the depths of time to listen to Bluff City too, so my comfy little AP RPG podcast time bubble can keep floating along in much the same fashion.

Beyond providing a steady series of narrative backdrops to the daily errands of my life, Friends at the Table has helped me solidify what it is I actually want from the experience of playing a tabletop roleplaying game. I'm tempted to describe it as the outline of a story that, together, we all fill in. Sometimes we agree to color outside the lines, but most of our play occurs within that more narrowly tailored "possibility space." My (current) favorite kind of RPG is a shortcut to creating certain known types of stories.

It's sort of an overly broad reading of an old piece of RPG jargon, but, "genre emulation." When we agree on the broad strokes of the sort of story we want to tell, we can spend more time having fun as we figure out how to get there. We can wield cliches like vorpal swords to cut through the parts of a story that don't grab our imaginations, then beat the swords into plowshares when we're ready to plant something new. As I thought about the many moments of Friends at the Table I loved, and the few that frustrated me, I kind of settled on a baseline reaction: When in doubt, snicker-snack, and see what shape the pieces fall into.

So naturally, I wanted to try doing an AP podcast myself.

Ensuing Confusion

I played in a D&D campaign with some folks that we streamed out onto Twitch for a few years (and that is just now teetering on the edge of its final battle as I write this). I wanted to try running and producing a different game for an actual play podcast, and I asked several of the players there to join me in trying this new thing out.

At first I wanted to do a sci-fi or cyberpunk game, but after we talked through everybody's interests for a while, we ended on something that I inaccurately described as dieselpunk. What I really meant was something with airships like the Flutter from Mega Man Legends --- whatever else had to happen for us to get there was fine.

After playing a game of Microscope to establish the history of our setting, we ended up with a world of floating islands in the sky (landbergs, I would soon insist on calling them for reasons that are still not entirely clear to even myself) that was home to many different peoples and cultures. We'd soon take to calling this world The Vast, and an early standout force within it was the pirate dynasty led by a charismatic figure known as The Empress.

Seeing an opportunity to bring in one of my favorite recurring themes --- bureaucracy showing up wherever it's least expected --- I decided this old pirate fleet would become the de facto authority once we moved on to playing a modded version of Scum & Villainy in our homegrown setting. Over decades of unquestioned sky supremacy, The Empress had begun to appreciate the greater efficiency of extracting wealth via customs and tariffs rather than broadsides and boarding axes.

Sadly, our Microscope session's recording was lost to technical difficulties. But we bounced back and recorded 53 more episodes worth of play after that. My players surprised me, delighted me, and made me grow as a game runner, storyteller, and empathetic person in each one.

Ensuing Confusion was almost all played in Scum & Villainy with Beam Saber's connection and Cut Loose mechanics bolted on, though we did fill out one character's home landberg with a very productive session of i'm sorry did you say street magic.

I game mastered or facilitated each session and I produced each episode, which was typically one 3-ish hour recording split in half then edited to keep the sound quality listenable and the content mostly on task. I also made a habit, at least for a while, of writing and recording a piece of microfiction from the perspective of an offscreen character when we were otherwise going to miss a week (did I mention I listen to Friends at the Table). Each standard episode took roughly four hours to produce, closer to three by the end when I'd really gotten the process down.

It was a lot of work! And not a lot of people listened. I'm not sad or angry about making an obscure actual play podcast; there are so many out there, and I only fully appreciated that fact once I made a few half-serious attempts to promote my own. I never had any ambitions of achieving Friends at the Table's profile (which they often remind fans is still quite small next to some productions out there), but I won't conceal the fact that I did have some ideal daydreams about getting noticed. Reading fan email. Starting a Patreon so my friends and I could get a little financial reward for our efforts. That kind of stuff.

The most listens we ever got for a typical episode was 10 to 20, according to my podcasting platform's analytics. I know at least some of those listens were myself and my players (and I suspect, though don't know for sure, that several were bots as well).

But hey! With the sheer number of AP podcasts that people could choose from as they wash dishes, or scoop cat litter, or move house, or do whatever else they do as they listen in, I think we did OK. Even more importantly, we did the thing. We told a fulfilling story that we could all be proud of, one with as many unforeseen consequences and wild digressions as foreshadowed encounters and inevitable goodbyes. One with (OK minor out of context spoilers I guess) a desperate descent down the pressurized waterfall at the heart of a landberg one week and a cozy exploration of alternative family and social structures in a city suspended amongst giant trees the next.

And I did the thing. I edited at least 60 hours worth of radio drama from individual voice files, complete with music that I composed… mostly by attaching a bunch of effects to an arpeggiator in Ableton, but it still counts.

So once more, in character name order:

• Tony as Augustin the Speaker, thank you for making big plays that sent us off on wholly new directions and for piloting the darn ship.
• Kathryn as Gadget the Mechanic, thank you for the excellent cover art and for always being true to Gadget's lovably maladjusted self.
• Cleric as Myriad the Muscle, thank you for envisioning a more caring culture and what kind of a person would still end up running from it.
• Kitty as Quell the Mystic, thank you for being a font of imagination and for never letting any NPC, from the smallest of brick bees to the most sheltered of envoys, be just set dressing.

Together, we made something cool.

Epilogue

Today I flipped on Pinecast's "Icebox" subscription setting for Ensuing Confusion, which will keep the feed alive at a discounted rate in exchange for losing the ability to edit existing episodes or upload new ones. I plan to leave it this way for a least a year or two. Maybe I'll talk it up some more like I'm doing now, and it will catch a second wind in syndication like so many great episodic sci-fi stories before it.

Or maybe it will be a little flag planted on a sandy beach, marking the world and story we crafted for a while before one day it quietly splashes back into the sea, persisting only in the memory of those who wove it and the curious few who stopped by in time to hear the tale. This metaphor isn't super consistent, but it's kind of pretty, so I'm keeping it.

Oh, uh, also it will keep persisting on my hard drive. I mean, I somehow still have a folder full of high school assignments that's survived half a dozen hard drive transfers, there's no way I'm ever going to just delete this cool thing we all made. So if you ever want the downloads even after I get tired of paying for hosting, hit me up I guess? We'll figure something out.