Spoiler Warning for the mid-season peak of Friends at the Table Season 8: Palisade.

After an incredibly long time (not that I’m complaining about the length, of course: I love a long podcast), the eighth season of Friends at the Table, Palisade, has come to an end. Even the post-mortem has finished up. By the time you’re seeing this, the audio version of the post mortem stream should be up on the main podcast feed and you’ll have probably either settled in to listen all the way through it, have already listened to it, or have made plans to listen to its five-star runtime over the weekend (the stream was just over five hours long, so I’m sure the audio will be a similar length). If one of those three things does NOT apply to you, then there will be nothing for you in this post (or there was a in the podcast episode going up which, you know, happens). If you’re uncertain about committing to Friends at the Table but like a good audio story or enjoy a good tabletop gaming podcast, you should absolutely start listening to it (it’s also available in any podcatcher you might use, on Spotify, and, of course, iTunes). It’s got thousands of hours of entertainment, amazing science fiction and fantasy work, and a great general vibe that shifts from relaxed and fun storytelling between friends to tense and emotional storytelling between friends. I have easily listened to more hours of Friends at the Table than any other podcast and I would not be surprised to learn that I’ve listened to more Friends at the Table than all my other podcasts put together. It’s really good stuff, there’s so much of it out there, and now I’m going to need to fill my idle audio hours with something else while they take a break following the monumental undertaking that was this latest season.

This season, Palisade, finally made good on a threat the podcast’s crew made long ago. The group has been fond of saying that, sometimes, when they’re running through a finale that wasn’t as planned as they expected, that they’re going by the feel of the story and might wind up jumping out of finale mode and back into regular season mode. So, when they announced that there was another segment of the main game to be played through once the “finale” was done, I wasn’t that surprised. As they confirmed in the Post Mortem, I could tell that people didn’t really like the way the game was going during the finale and there was no big moment that felt conclusive enough to end the season on. So they launched into one final mission using this season’s game system (Armour Astir: Advent by Briar Sovereign, which will be fundraising to produce print versions at the end of September 2024) and wrapped it all up with a bang. It was a lot of fun to listen to, as it played out, even if I’m still struggling to grapple with my emotional response to the season.

In this season, one of my favorite characters died. This wasn’t the first character I liked who wound up dying as a result of action in the game, but none really had the impact on me that this character, Phrygian, did. You see, I grew off the internet in extremely Catholic spaces, and had no space to explore identity outside of the one assigned to me by my parents. By the time I had the emotional space to get to the point where I’d question or explore my identity, I was in my mid-twenties and utterly unprepared to really grapple with my sense of self. It took years of therapy to get to the point where I could convince myself that doing this internal journey of self-discovery mattered and even longer to actually get anywhere with it because I just didn’t exist in spaces that explored questions of gender or sexuality in the ways I didn’t know I needed. This character, though, whose entire identity and expression of self, existed outside of any frame of reference I’d even imagined, shook me up enough to start thinking beyond what I knew and to try, as Austin puts it while talking about creating the world of Twilight Mirage–Friends at the Table’s fourth season–to imagine a way of living that we can’t even conceive of because it is so different that it could never even occur to us, limited as we are by the present’s way of living.

So when I met Phrygian, a writhing mass of cables with a something approaching a face that wanted little more than to be some kind of room and who expressed their identity to other people of their homeland as a specific musical note their player played on a guitar, it expanded my ability to think about myself and what the truest expression of my “self” might be. I stayed fairly grounded, since I live in a world and am shackled to a specific body that will never be able to change its general shape, but I couldn’t help but connect to and feel attached to them. Phrygian was one of the first characters in which I saw the potential for discovering the truest shape of myself and they existed only in half of two different seasons of my favorite podcast. They showed up late and left early when the player, who did a great job portraying this character, realized his character wasn’t compatible with the general choices the party was making (and so made Phrygian) and then realized he needed to move on to playing someone else so he could have fun again (when Phrygian departed). And while Phrygian went out in style, I still struggled to get any feelings of closure in the episodes following it. The cast talks about it, both in the following episodes and in some of the cast interview episodes that went up on their Patreon feed afterwards, but they make a point of the people in-world moving on super quickly as they all did the same. After all, this was a war. The character did something heroic that changed the universe for the better, but the rest of the rebellion must fight on. There’s no time to stop and mourn.

Still, even with that personal emotional conflict, this was still an amazing season that had a rather high character turnover count. It was a rough season for a lot of characters, bother player and non-player, and the season really felt like it carried that weight well. It also set up a lot of interesting elements for future seasons in the Sci-Fi side of things (that the cast of FatT calls The Divine Cycle) and I’m looking forward to see all that bear fruit. It’ll be a while before they get to their Sci-Fi side of things, though, since they’ve got their fantasy season yet to start, which they’re currently calling “Perpetua” and tentatively using a system called Fabula Ultima–which, by the way looks absolutely sick and like it could be really cool for the kind of game FatT plays. Alongside that, they’re also going to be starting up their next season of Patreon campaign (which seems like a step aside from their old Bluff City campaign), using a system that Austin wrote and that they’ve teased a bit here or there, called Realis. Reportedly, this campaign is going to get a little dark somewhere in there, so the crew wanted to avoid returning to their dark fantasy setting seen in their seventh season, Sangfielle, at the same time. That’d be a little much, so I’m glad they decided to make the switch to their main podcast feed’s season. Both games sound amazing, though, Realis and Perpetua, so I’m looking forward to hearing what the group puts together!

In the meantime, I’m going to have to find a new home for fan-made Friends at the Table media. Most of the fans I knew of moved to Cohost at some point, but with that shutting down in a week and a half and me largely uninterested in the way massive Discord servers feel to use, I’m not sure where I will end up. I’m sure there’ll be people posting on Twitter or Tumblr or even Bluesky, but I’m not sure what the definitive “home” for all that stuff will be. Or if there will even be one. This past year (and 2023, to be entirely fair) have been rough on a lot of people, FatT cast and fans alike, and it seems like just staying off the internet has become a much more popular choice in light of how exhausting it is to exist in online spaces that are steadily worsening or ceasing to exist entirely. All I can do is keep a look out, begrudgingly join the Discord, and hope that I can find the people who made things I liked [such as this comic, which helped me work through my feelings about Phrygian and will only work at this current link until the end of 2024] wherever they land.

Personally, though, I’ll be wrapping up my Seasons of Heiron re-listen (and have already done so by the time you’re reading this) and probably diving back into some of the Patreon games once I’ve caught up on all my other podcasts. I want to give some new actual play podcasts a try, but its difficult to convince myself to do that when I’m feeling as burned out as I am. It’s much easier to spend time listening to a comforting podcast, especially when it’s the thing that got me through the worst, most-isolated years of the pandemic, when I barely saw my friends because they’d stopped doing things online and I wasn’t willing to risk doing things in public yet (I’m still not, but I’ve got a better mask so I’m at least better protected when I decide to go out than I used to be). Plus, it gets me fired up about running good games and trying out new things, which is energy I need to keep myself going when I’m struggling as much as I am right now. It’s just all so fun and nice to listen to.