My Year in Hieron

I didn’t have a chance to listen to a lot of podcasts the summer of my senior year of college. I’d spent a month studying abroad in Luxemburg only to come home to another full month of a full time college summer theater program. Between the travel, the Shakespeare, and the dirty-mouthed Muppets, I couldn’t squeeze in a lot of podcast listening time. Once things were starting to slow down, I could actually address my self-imposed podcast backlog. 

I was also deciding which show I wanted to focus on marathoning. I would put episodes of the show I was working through the backlog of episodes of shows I was regularly listening to. I was trying to stay caught up on shows while also getting into new things. As someone who is currently backlogged with podcasts from October, this method hasn’t worked out in the long run.

I spent the second half of my junior year catching up on The Adventure Zone. I wanted to try out another show where people played games to tell stories, an “actual play podcast” or “AP podcast” or whatever it’s called. Griffin McElroy had referenced one show several times over the course of TAZ, so I figured that would be a good place to start. 

Also Read: “The Adventure Zone: Graduation” Was Fine

Here’s my professional advice on how to binge 3.5 seasons of an actual play podcast over the course of 10 months: Don’t own a car. 

So, in the beginning of August 2017, at the dawn of the busiest year of my life and my final year as a full time student, I hit play on Friends At The Table, Autumn In Hieron 00: We’re Not Calling It Duckburg. 

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I wouldn’t recommend listening to Friends At The Table (FATT) the way I listened to it. 

It’s a daunting task to start any AP podcast from the first episode, especially when the show’s episode count is in the triple digits. It was close to 200 when I started but now it’s around 350. 

FATT agrees with me on this, so they recommend various different starting points. Showrunner Austin Walker gets more in depth in the attached episode. I’ll add that if you want some southern gothic weird horror vibes, check out the currently running Sangfelle series. 

But I didn’t follow this advice. I started at episode 0 and worked my way up. It took me from August of 2017 to May of 2018 to get fully caught up on the podcast. The stories being told on Friends at the Table became the soundtrack to a formative year of my life. 

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Here’s my professional advice on how to binge 3.5 seasons of an actual play podcast over the course of 10 months: Don’t own a car. 

My apartment senior year was about a half hour walk from the main campus of my school. Of course there was a hill. Samol was getting into the story of the Seven’s great heists signaled a change of eras in Marielda while I walked uphill in snow like everyone’s grandparents back in their day. 

I figured, This must be what adult life is, while chugging a black coffee since we didn’t have milk most days.

When I look back on the actual work I was doing my senior year, I recognize in hindsight that I was absolutely burning myself out. My mom once told me “if you work for four years, you can party for the rest of your life.”

Well, I worked for four years and, folks, this party sucks. 

I did an internship my senior year, which was an interesting choice on my part because I didn’t really need to. However, I was in college. When you’re in college and an incredible tryhard, internships seem like the first step in making ties that get you places in the professional world. 

This didn’t happen. 

It doesn’t matter what the internship was (the usual intern cog work). What mattered was that it was a 2 hour commute for me, taking the bus and train two towns over, and then back again at the end of the day. 

I figured, This must be what adult life is, while chugging a black coffee since we didn’t have milk most days. Normal people who put themselves through that do it for money, but I was doing it for free because it would “look good on my résumé.”

The plus side to all of this was that I was able to spend the travel time listening to FATT. I was at a breakfast place near my internship eating an egg and cheese sandwich(the cheapest option on the menu) looking over a nearby river while Hadrien confronted one of the suspects of the crime the perpetually unnamed Hieron party was tasked with solving for their first holiday special. The sandwich was meh but the scene was surprising. 

I didn’t really take any actual learned experience from that internship. The strongest memory I have of that office was finishing up the Autumn In Hieron post mortem and hearing the first peek at the next season in a new setting, counter/WEIGHT.

Why the fuck did I do this terrible internship? That’s a great question. I wish I had a satisfying answer for you, just so I could have it for myself. At least I dropped the habit of taking on large scale tasks that nobody asked for. 

Read more: Every Super Smash Brothers Fighter as a Podcast

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The weird thing about listening to FATT with this dedication was that it didn’t seep into the creative work I was doing. I was a theater kid (in case that wasn’t obvious from my past articles here or my general overall vibe.) I acted, wrote plays, and ran an improv group among other things.

Maybe I just wasn’t absorbing the themes of the show to a degree that would have made them show up in my work at the time. In creative stuff I’ve done since then, I can see some roots tie back to FATT. There are ongoing themes of smaller players in universes tussling with forces broader than their scopes. I also like mechs now. 

While not influencing my creative work, FATT did influence my interest in fiction. I’ve recently found myself intrigued by complex narratives and lore. The more impenetrable or weirdly complicated a piece of media is, the more intrigued I am to actually check it out. I don’t know if I liked FATT because of the complex and intricate worldbuilding or if that’s what led me to like the show in the first place. 

Also read: Is Your Favorite Podcast a Homestuck?

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I feel like I listened to the majority of counter/WEIGHT over winter break. I remember this because I was listening to the second half of the season while playing Nier Automata, which anyone familiar with both the show and the game will find thematically appropriate. 

I got through Marielda as I was getting back to school after vacation. While I remember the events of the show clearly, I didn’t actually tie it to any specific memories.  Weirdly, if I had to tie the season to a video game, it’d be Super Mario Odyssey. This one’s just a coincidence. If anyone wants to do a deeper dive on the connections there, be my guest. 

Winter in Hieron took a good chunk of my spring semester to listen to. I felt like I was riding the tip of a wave, with the future coming in at full speed. I wasn’t nervous. I was very good at distracting myself.

I was plotting out a rewritten musical based on Jonathan Coulton music on my apartment wall (which my roommate loved). Hella and Hadrian are best friends who might kill each other. 

I am dipping my toe into job applications in Massachusetts, but my school only has resources for jobs in Connecticut or New York. Throndir learns the truth about his old friend, The Great Fantasmo.

I felt like something was ending, It was also beginning. Hieron didn’t really have much to do with that part, but a parallel could be drawn, on accepting endings. Maybe that’s why Seasons of Hieron holds such a special place in my heart. 

I remember getting caught up on Twilight Mirage. I was sitting in an airplane heading back from Ireland after my cousin’s wedding. I’d been staying in Blacklion for a week and was on my way back to school for Senior Week. I thought I would have the energy to power through the jet lag and basically party for two full weeks. I somehow barely made it though, and it terrifies me thinking about doing that now. 

There’s something fascinating about feeling like you’re in the writer’s room of some complex narrative, watching the bones be picked apart and rearranged into the most satisfying or thematically appropriate shape.

The moment I was caught up wasn’t eventful. It was the middle of one of the missions in the second half of the season. I distinctly remember Keith J. Carberry’s futuristic streamer Gig Kephart asking a teen if they had heard of him. Walker, after pausing to roll, stated “Gig Kephart sucks!”

And just like that, I was caught up on Friends At The Table. 

(Some spoilers to Twilight Mirage in this video, since it’s literally the ending of the season, but it’s also heartwarming out of context and doesn’t actually spoil what happens. It’s just warm.)

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Did getting caught up on FATT in a year change my life? No, but it left an impression. It opened me up to a broader range of AP podcasts and trained me on how to listen to them. It was one of the dominoes to fall in the chain that led to me writing on a podcasting website. 

It didn’t help get me into playing TTRPGs, at least while I was binging it. I played my first full campaign in 2019, after college. It really says something about how much I was burning myself out in college that I had more time on my hands after graduation to get into TTRPGS. Most people thrive in doing their roleplaying in college. Not old Eddie Feelz. It’s probably for the best since the people I knew in college who were playing RPGs were playing long D&D campaigns. I’ve gotten the FATT bug of liking contained shorter campaigns with a variety of different systems.

Since getting caught up on the show and as I’ve continued listening to it, I’ve also discovered that I just have a deep seated love of narrative collaboration. I can easily tie this to my time in college, where I’d just be sitting down with a bunch of other artys students, talking about art, writing,  storybuilding and narratives. There’s something fascinating about feeling like you’re in the writer’s room of some complex narrative, watching the bones be picked apart and rearranged into the most satisfying or thematically appropriate shape. I loved listening to and  being a part of it.

Read more: How Friends At The Table Spreads Around Authorship

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That’s not to say I still don’t have sticking, formative memories connected to Friends at the Table. 

On a cold October night in 2020, I sneak out to the front desk to smoke a cigar my cousin gave me a few weeks ago. I rarely smoke, partially because it’s a bad habit to get into but it’s also a little inconvenient. I was still living with my parents, so I waited until everyone was asleep before going to the front. I didn’t dare turn the lights on, like a teenager trying to get away with something even though I’m 25. 

I clumsily cut and light the cigar in the darkness and, without any headphones, listen as Austin Walker and Jack de Quidt tell the story of the pilgrimage that created The Witch In Glass.

This show is still a part of my life and continues to find ways to blow the air out of my lungs.