Friends at the Table @ Gen Con this week!!

Transcriber: Cole

Austin: Hey everyone, it’s Austin here with a couple of announcements. This is not a regular episode. And that is in fact one of- in fact, the first announcement that this is not an episode, and there won’t be one this week because uh, Sylvia^[1], Art, Ali, Keith, Dre, and myself are all in Indianapolis this week for GenCon. Which if you don’t know is a huge tabletop gaming convention. It’s been going on for fifty years [light laugh] which is wild. Huge convention for tabletop, card games, board games, role-playing games, LARPs- everything in this broad space of tabletop gaming.

We are doing a live show. We’re doing a show of Marielda there. It’s gonna take place in that year that we never covered during our Marielda campaign. And that show is uh, Saturday at 6PM in the Westin Ballroom number four. And the reason I say that is because despite the fact that it seemed like we sold out of tickets when we announced the show back a few months ago, they have since given us another hundred seats. And I know what you’re thinking, where would they put the seats if the room was already filled with seats? Well, it turns out the room was bigger, and we learned that the room was bigger, and in fact, would already have the seats in it. And so, we were like, ‘Wait, can’t we sell tickets for those seats, too?’ And they were like, ‘Oh, yeah. Uh huh. Yeah, that’s- Sure. That makes sense.’ And I don’t know why we were the ones who had to decide that and go to them, but apparently that is how that happened.

Uh, so… [light laugh] There are more tickets available. Again, that is at 6PM at the Westin Ballroom number four on Saturday. Saturday 6PM Westin Ballroom number four. You do have to- er you should register ahead of time to get a ticket. Um, you can also come with what GenCon calls generic tickets. It’s twelve bucks, so I think it’s six generic tickets? I don’t know. Goo- Google it. Uh, or ask us on Twitter or Discord or whatever. So, that is why we don’t have an episode this week. So, that’s one.

Two is if you’re in Indianapolis or near Indianapolis, but aren’t attending GenCon, but you still want to come say hi, on Friday at 1:30 at the Hudnut Commons- H-U-D-N-U-T Commons, we’re gonna be doing a big fan meet-up, so everyone who I just listed before will be there. You can come through. You can say hey. You can shake hands. You can… say hi again. You can- Just a lot of saying hello. Uh, lots of saying like, ‘Oh, hey. Cool… How’s the show goin’... for you? You guys see anything interesting? Like… cool. I’ll see- I’ll try to see that,’ but I won’t cause I won’t have time to see it, but I’ll say… ‘Yeah, definitely. Oh, that sounds rad. Totally.’ What I’ll do is I’ll write it down and then go home and google it and be like, ‘Wow, that sounds rad.’ And then I just won’t have any free time, so sadly I won’t see the thing you recommend to me. Um, ever… Hm.... [long pause] Shit. No. Ok. Here. I’m gonna make a promise. If you recommend a thing to me, I’m going to do my best to prioritize it and find time to at least watch a video of it, even if I can’t actually put hands on it. Which is to say, you should definitely come to our meetup Friday at 1:30 at Hudnut Commons. Uh, so that’s- that’s- you know, announcements. Let’s call that- let’s call that announcements one and two.

Uh, three. If you missed our last live show because you were not in Vancouver or because you’re not a patron, well, guess what? SHUX, or Shut Up and Sit Down is going to- is uploading all of the videos from last SHUX still, and our video, where we played BFF- uh, Best Friends Forever, by Ross Cowman, is going up this week. We think on Wednesday. So, that’ll be up on the Shut Up and Sit Down Youtube channel this week. Which is really exciting. It was a really fun game to play, and so you should definitely go check that out.

Three. There is a Twilight Mirage zine. It is uh, something you can find more info about- we’ll just plug it right away- by going to twitter.com/tm_zine. Z-I-N-E, like a magazine. Zine. Uh, and then- Or you can go- If you’re like, ‘No, I don’t even need more information. What I need is to give someone my credit card number,’ you can go to fundly- F-U-N-D-L-Y dot com slash tmzine. It is called ‘It’s a Garden.’ It has a ton of incredibly illustrations. Over forty-five contributors right now. And those contributors are gonna get paid, which is good. You know, some of the money is gonna go to the contributors, to the editors, to artists, writers, anyone who is contributing to the- to the zine. And the rest of that money is gonna go to RAICES. To the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, which is a fantastic charity down in Texas that is doing incredible work on the U.S. southern border during this immigration crisis, which I think given some of the themes of Twilight Mirage, pretty- pretty important. Um, and so shout outs to the incredible team that is uh, that has wrangled all the incredible artists to- to put together some great stuff for this zine.

I just want to note that like, there’s cool stickers that are available through the zine. There’s a CALCI-YUM sticker. There’s like, all sorts of- There’s a Beloved Dust and Beloved Ivy sticker. There’s a Demani and Gray sticker. There’s a- there’s a… an exuvia sticker. And then there is just like, a sticker of um, the… I guess it’s- it is actually a Notion sticker, but it’s like, different colors for each member of the Notion. It’s very good. All of the art I’ve seen has been incredible. I’m so excited to see this. And so again, you can support this by going to twitter.com/tm_zine or fundly.com- F-U-N-D-L-Y- Hm, F-U-N-D… L-Y, fundly.com/tmzine. Z-I-N-E.

Uh, so that’s our th- third announcement? I’m just gonna count them again. No episode this week cause of GenCon. Uh… two, GenCon tickets, they’re available. We got more of ‘em. BFF, it’s goin’ onto the Shut Up and Sit Down Youtube channel this week. Four, TM zine this week. Um… I thought I had a fifth one. Oh! Uh, part of the GenCon stuff was- was ‘Hey, there’s a meetup. Come to that meetup.’ Let’s call that four and a half. And let me give you a fifth one. We have a bunch of cool stuff going up on the Patreon right now, especially for one of our higher tiers, which is our Pusher tier. We have three big updates going there uh, this week. And I don’t- I do my best not to oversell some of those higher tiers. One, because like most patreons, we are like, running late on a bunch of stuff still. Life is very busy, and we were ending a- a season- or a show that we’ve been doing for five years. We were ending Seasons of Hieron, which has been a show that has been running for almost five years now.

But we are catching, and we, in fact, are putting up three incredible updates this week for Pusher tier backers, which is the fifty dollar back- backing level. Those three things. One, uh, a really funny [light laugh] segment where we had to do a pick-up- a big pick up for episodes thirty-five through thirty-eight of this podcast in which I got a sword wrong, and I had- we had to fix what happened there because we- it was the wrong sword. I talked about this on a recent Tips at the Table also, so if you’re a- if you’re a Patreon backer, you can go listen to that and listen to me explain what happened with swords. And why I’m very thankful that- that uh, a great fan named Linda has a document called ‘Facts About Swords.’ Another thing we’re gonna upload this week is the character creation for Art and Keith’s Marielda characters who they’ll be playing in the GenCon episode.

And then three, uh, Jack and I recorded and then just released for the Pusher tier a two hour long conversation talking about the song ‘Tell Me’, which is the song that played during a very… essential episode this- early on this season. I want to say it‘s episode fifteen. It’s a song that a character sings, which is a rare thing for our show. Um, and it is us talking about the process of writing that song together. Talking about some of the influences in it, sharing um… both the music that we listened to while writing it, but also the uh, various demos that Jack recorded and sent me. And we kind of worked around- we kind of wrote the lyrics to some of those demos, and then they- they kind of took those demos and tightened them up, you know? So, you can go listen to that also.

And the reason, like I said, I don’t normally push the Pusher tier stuff that much.  It is because it’s fifty bucks. It’s fifty bucks a month. But what I do want to say, and I know that this is gonna- what this causes is just like a huge spike that then disappears, but I- I do want to say, if you are a five dollar backer, if you’re a one dollar backer, and you’re like, ‘You know what? Grandma caught me at- caught my birthday- sent me a check for fifty dollars.’ If you want to give us that fifty dollars for one month, dive through all that content, listen to all the bonus podcasts, all that stuff, and then drop back down to another tier or quit entirely? No one can stop you from doing that. And it’s ok also, [light laugh] more importantly. It is totally ok if you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. I want to pay fifty bucks this month to catch up on Pusher update stuff that I didn’t see before.’ Go ahead and do that. Like, that is why that tier is there. There’s a huge- huge catalogue of stuff there now.

If you’ve never backed us on any level of the Patreon, let me tell you, every day is the best day to do it because there’s more stuff than there was, you know, at the previous update. So, at this point, just to let you know, and like, I know I’m doing a hard sell here, but we don’t do a hard sell on the Patreon that often, so please…  I appreciate that you’re still listening to me. We have a bunch of different tiers. For a dollar a month, you can hear us do Clapcasts, which do you remember the bit earlier on this season where for whatever reason, Keith, Ali, and I and- and Jack looked at boats on the internet for some weird reason? Imagine that, but for like, an hour. It’s made up of all the little conversations we have mostly before recording, before we clap um… which sets our time the same. It’s complicated. We clap- if you don’t know that we clap, we clap. Uh… and so like, those conversations are really funny because it’s just us kind of hanging out, shooting the shit. Um, that’s for a dollar a month. And there’s a bunch of those. There’s- We’ve been running this for two years now. So, there’s, you know, twenty-four of them.

Uh, for five bucks a month, you get access to h- just a really overwhelming amount of content. You get the whole season of the first Bluff City, which is a great season- er a great show that I love that we’re about to go back to that is set in a fictional uh, Atlantic City that ends up running the gamut from- in terms of genre, from pro-wrestling and action movies to kind of Ghostbusters-esque, supernatural mystery to kind of some stuff that feels like, film noir or even something like, Twin Peaks. Um, there’s a huge range of games. You know, all of it- all of it splattered with some Coen Brothers style hijinks that is really good. Five dollars. You got that. Five dollars also gets you all of the live games we’ve ever- we’ve ever done. And also access to any future live games that we’re gonna do- um, to the live streams.

You can watch live for five bucks, as we continue the Road to Season Six, a series of games that is tracking the- the world and the plot between Twilight Mirage and the next season that we’re starting soon. Which is a sci-fi season that takes place in the same universe as COUNTER/Weight and Twilight Mirage. It’s gonna be a- It’s going to be- and I say this carefully, our first season about giant robots. It’s gonna be the first time we make a show about mechs. [amused] Not just a show with mechs in them, but a show about mechs. Uh… also, a show about like, court. And by that I mean like- like, noble court. Not like, trials. It’s not a- it’s not a procedural. It’s not Law and Order. That would- that would happen in Bluff City, not in Season Six. Um, it’s also gonna be about faith and all the other stuff that we always do shows about.

Um, so you can listen to the Road to Season Six live games or past live games where we’ve come up with all sorts of wild worlds. If you want to hear us come up with a world that is literally like, nineteen-thirties… bee colony… where like, what if Pixar made a movie set in the nineteen-thirties, but it was a bee colony? And there was like a- Actually, it was nineteen-tens. It was the nineteen-tens cause I think it was like, the fall of- of like, the old order, the kind of fall of old Europe, basically. Um, but it was a bee colony. Really great. You can hear us do that. You want to hear us talk about sky whales? That shit’s in there. Um, five bucks.

Uh, and then we also do- I also do a show called Drawing Maps. I need to do a new Drawing Maps very soon. Um, where I share some of my prep. And I- and I- you can take a look at like, ahead of arcs what I’m doing. Um, that’s not a podcast; it’s only a stream. But the stream is archived for all people who are at the five dollar level. Um, and that is like, ‘Hey, what type of monsters might we fight in the next Dungeon World arc?’ Or ‘Hey, what is like, the core dilemma?’ If you thought some of the stuff that happened in like, Alcyon was cool, you can go back and watch the stream where I come up with some of the Alcyon stuff. Or come up with- You know, there’s that list of- there’s- You don’t know this. Um, you might not know this. I have a list of things that could have happened when Ephrim made the move where uh, where if someone would show up to like, tell- tell Ephrim what was going on in the kingdom or in the settlement, I have like, a list of thirty or forty things that that could have been. And I wrote that list on a stream that you could watch at five dollars.

It goes up from there. There’s a billion different things, but there’s just a ton of content, and so, right now, as we finish this season, if you think this season has been good, even if you want to just give us a buck, it is totally worth it for us. For even if like, you know, each one of you gave us a dollar, it would be live-changing. You can do that by going to  friendsatthetable.cash or going to Patreon.com and searching for Friends at the Table. That is my last announcement, which is have- have you seen our Patreon? I think it’s pretty good.

Um, [light laugh] thank you so much for your support. We still have another few episodes to go, Ali, in- in Hieron? This epilogue is not just gonna be one episode. It’s gonna be… I think we’re gonna be here till- till at least September. But it’s done. We’ve recorded it all, so that’s exciting. Uh, so stay tuned for that. I hope you enjoy what comes next. I think it’s something really special and really unique. It is not just… it is not… I sat down and thought we’d be recording a certain thing, and we ended up kind of recording that, but we also really recorded something I could never have imagined, and so I want to thank y’all for listening.

And in this moment, where I get to just say whatever I want, I want to thank my players. Friends at the Table will have been going for five years as of September… I want to say fifteenth. Um, and it has been so fantastic. It is the thing that I am most proud of in my life. I love telling stories with my friends. I love being able to tell stories for y’all. I love being able to play games. Like, I- we talk about this show as a story-telling show a lot, but it is also a game playing show. And I love all of that. I love seeing it all come together. And I- I love the fact that y’all trust us to tell really complex and- and often challenging stories. Um, so much so that some of you have made a zine about maybe our most challenging season. You can find out more about that.  twitter.com/tm_zine 

Um, so, thank you. And I hope that you enjoy everything that comes next. Until then- Oh! We will announce a Post Mortem date closer to when our Post Mortem is. Don’t send in questions yet, I think. You’ll want to wait until you hear some of this epilogue. Uh, alright. Until then, peace.