(I wrote most of this a couple weeks ago, and it's just languished in a folder, so I'm determined to get it done tonight no matter what.)
So I'm still on my Friends at the Table binge, and by skipping the prior season, I managed to listen to Spring in Hieron, the finale of their five-year fantasy arc, just after it was released. Spring is absolutely not the place to start listening, but if you're wondering whether to start with Hieron (I recommend the Marielda mini-season) or their first SFF season COUNTER/Weight, I can at least tell you that Hieron by and large sticks the landing. (Their second SFF season, Twilight Mirage, is the one I skipped, so I can't comment on that as a starting point. Yet.)
(I did also, while this post was languishing, listen to a three-episode game they ran in the Fall of Magic system, which was very lovely and might also be a good starting point. It's an episodic quest story (here's a review of the base game), so it doesn't have the urgent narrative propulsion of their main seasons, but it has a lovely dreamlike tone, and gives a good sense of the kinds of characterization and imagination that the Friends tend towards. And I love how the ending snuck up on me.)
I said this is not the Hieron season to start with for two reasons. First, of course, there's two full seasons and one mini-season of backstory, and there's only so much that the recap episodes can do. Second, at the start of the season, the players are split into three groups, and the gameplay for one of the groups is not real cheerful listening—for good reason, no question about it, but I don't like to think of that strand as part of a new listener's introduction. (Shoutout to Ali, the show's producer as well as a player, who intercut all these strands. When the players are split into two groups, the groups alternate episodes, but cutting back and forth was definitely the right call here even though it must have been a substantial amount of additional work.)
Anyway, the season is in a bunch of parts. There's the opening three-strand part, which is focused on character development and worldbuilding rather than adventure (such good character development! They've all come so far!). Then everyone comes back together for a couple of downtime episodes, in which they regroup and debrief. I loved this, it was so great to have everyone together; plus, many of the players formalized their characters' changes by changing classes and/or alignments, which felt very exciting.
The bulk of the season is a series of two-team adventures (a home and an away team), interspersed with shorter everyone-together sections. I really, really liked all of this: exciting adventures, fun mixing-up of characters across the various teams, and thematically-satisfying conclusions to the big problems with exciting possibilities ahead.
And then there's an extended epilogue, about which I have mixed feelings. First, the players have made a considered and deliberate artistic choice to leave certain things open-ended. I understand and respect that, but to my taste, the epilogue is closer to last-minute cliff-hanger than life-goes-on. Second, a key element felt like getting hypnotized by the hard choices, in a way that I thought undercut a major theme of the season. Also, it made me sad. Don't get me wrong, there's some amazing stuff in the epilogue that I loved hearing . . . but the very last episode, I'm pretty on the fence about whether I want to have heard it.
(It was weirdly stressful listening in near-real time! I consume so little media as it comes out that I'd forgotten what that tension was like. It was nice being done in time to submit questions for the postmortem, though (I'm unjustifiably proud of having one answered). The next season, starting in a few weeks, is in the same world as COUNTER/Weight and Twilight Mirage, so I'm currently listening to Twilight Mirage; after that, I'll decide whether to catch up on the Patreon content before starting the season-in-progress.)
( Now, the SPOILERS. )
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jjhunter. You know I love me some logistics.
