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Nov. 8th, 2017 09:48 pmIt seems like over the last year or so all the cool kids have been getting into actual play podcasts such as The Adventure Zone or Critical Role. I probably will listen to one or both of these things at some point in the future!
However, I am a very slow podcast listener, and right now I have instead been spending all my podcast time listening to a completely different actual play podcast called Friends at the Table. This is entirely the fault of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nextian, who casually dropped me a remark about an orc archivist who accidentally screws over all his friends when seduced by the siren call of primary source materials. Now I'm perpetually out of the zeitgeist because I can't stop listening to FATT which means I can't listen to anything else! THANKS EMMA.
The orc archivist appears in the first season of Friends at the Table, which takes place in a more traditional fantasy setting, but there's a second season of that I haven't listened to yet so I'm not going to talk about that yet. Instead I'm going to talk about the second, stand-alone season, which I have finished. It's called Counter/Weight and it's a very long, frequently very good noir-themed audio anime about robots and capitalism and space revolution!
Counter/Weight is set in a backwater bit of the universe where two enormous, intermittently warring galactic superpowers converge. The People's Conglomerate of Orion, aka OriCon, is a fairly standard space capitalist semi-dystopia dominated by giant corporations; the Autonomous Diaspora is in theory a perfect democracy, and in practice dominated by powerful, symbolic AIs called Divines that are called things like Grace and Righteousness and Peace (also known as Order), and have symbiotic relationships with humans called Candidates. Also in the mix are the Apostolosians, a declining empire of Greco-Roman fish people who claim to be descended from the founders of Atlantis. Everyone has giant robots to pilot, including the fish people.
Our player characters/plucky protagonists are the Chime, a team of small-time mercenaries for hire, and include:
AuDy: short for Automated Dynamics; a car-parking robot that gained sentience in a development as mysterious to itself as to others, and subsequently quit their job as a valet in order to pilot a spaceship of their very own!
Mako Trig: a mouthy runaway from a deeply sinister school that trains psychic kids to hack into Divines!
Aria Joie: a former pop idol with a sparkly dancing robot and a fashion sense borrowed from Utena Tenjou; relatedly, READY and EAGER to become a revolutionary icon, except for the minor inconvenience that space Disney still holds the IP to her image and all her most popular songs!
Cassander Timaeus Berenice: an EXILED FISH PRINCE
And some of my personal favorite NPCs:
Orth Godlove: the Chime's occasional employer, a former ace robot pilot turned extremely stressed-out bureaucrat who essentially does not sleep over the five-ish years of series continuity;sovay-bait
Jaqui Green: a giant hitwoman with two metal arms whom Aria keeps attempting to flirt with rather than fighting, derailing several missions
Sokrates Nikon Artemisios: Cass' older sibling, ANOTHER exiled fish prince, who betrayed their people during the last war out of strong moral convictions and an optimistic vision of the future that was not particularly fulfilled
Ibex: candidate of the Divine Righteousness, one-scene wonder rapidly elevated to occasional series villain; a revolutionary or an amoral would-be tyrant depending on your point of view. Perfectly and reasonably willing to put galactic conquest temporarily on hold for the greater good when necessary!
(The actual series villain is Fordian labor efficiency.)
The first several episodes largely involve the cast members tripping over their own feet, getting beat up, and accidentally purchasing large quantities of robots they don't want, in the finest noir traditions. Every couple of episodes the DM gets together with a different group of players for a "faction" game, which is essentially a way to further develop the politics of the broader world of the story. Eventually the stuff that happens at the higher level begins to impact the players on the ground, and vice versa, all up and down the timeline; for me, this is when the story really starts coming together. There's something very neat about a kind of fiction where you get to watch the world get fleshed out in real time (or, if you're me and a slow podcast listener, substantially more than real time, but.)
Other Counter/Weight selling points:
- I am not sure I have yet properly conveyed the quantity and quality of interesting and weird artificial intelligences
- everyone's hilarious outfits are very lovingly described
- it's very funny tragedy, which is, alas, one of my favorite genres
- SO MUCH worldbuilding
- compelling character arcs developed around legitimately difficult choices and conflicts of ideals
- not one, but TWO major plot arcs set at SPACE PROMS
- cast members are not all white, not all straight, and not all cis, which definitely comes through in the storytelling
- what I mean to say is that it's very gay
Things that may not be selling points:
- kind of a slow start, especially for the faction game episodes
- Murder DM Austin Walker will probably murder at least one of your darlings
- the ending ... works very well in some ways and not so well in others
- honestly I'm still kind of mad that [spoiler] gets fired into the sun
- they keep trying very hard to make Apostolosian gender not just Gender As We Know It and it really doesn't happen, though I personally find the effort endearing
- I've gotten a lot of weird looks while walking around with near-invisible headphones in and giggling to myself
However, I am a very slow podcast listener, and right now I have instead been spending all my podcast time listening to a completely different actual play podcast called Friends at the Table. This is entirely the fault of
nextian, who casually dropped me a remark about an orc archivist who accidentally screws over all his friends when seduced by the siren call of primary source materials. Now I'm perpetually out of the zeitgeist because I can't stop listening to FATT which means I can't listen to anything else! THANKS EMMA. The orc archivist appears in the first season of Friends at the Table, which takes place in a more traditional fantasy setting, but there's a second season of that I haven't listened to yet so I'm not going to talk about that yet. Instead I'm going to talk about the second, stand-alone season, which I have finished. It's called Counter/Weight and it's a very long, frequently very good noir-themed audio anime about robots and capitalism and space revolution!
Counter/Weight is set in a backwater bit of the universe where two enormous, intermittently warring galactic superpowers converge. The People's Conglomerate of Orion, aka OriCon, is a fairly standard space capitalist semi-dystopia dominated by giant corporations; the Autonomous Diaspora is in theory a perfect democracy, and in practice dominated by powerful, symbolic AIs called Divines that are called things like Grace and Righteousness and Peace (also known as Order), and have symbiotic relationships with humans called Candidates. Also in the mix are the Apostolosians, a declining empire of Greco-Roman fish people who claim to be descended from the founders of Atlantis. Everyone has giant robots to pilot, including the fish people.
Our player characters/plucky protagonists are the Chime, a team of small-time mercenaries for hire, and include:
AuDy: short for Automated Dynamics; a car-parking robot that gained sentience in a development as mysterious to itself as to others, and subsequently quit their job as a valet in order to pilot a spaceship of their very own!
Mako Trig: a mouthy runaway from a deeply sinister school that trains psychic kids to hack into Divines!
Aria Joie: a former pop idol with a sparkly dancing robot and a fashion sense borrowed from Utena Tenjou; relatedly, READY and EAGER to become a revolutionary icon, except for the minor inconvenience that space Disney still holds the IP to her image and all her most popular songs!
Cassander Timaeus Berenice: an EXILED FISH PRINCE
And some of my personal favorite NPCs:
Orth Godlove: the Chime's occasional employer, a former ace robot pilot turned extremely stressed-out bureaucrat who essentially does not sleep over the five-ish years of series continuity;
sovay-baitJaqui Green: a giant hitwoman with two metal arms whom Aria keeps attempting to flirt with rather than fighting, derailing several missions
Sokrates Nikon Artemisios: Cass' older sibling, ANOTHER exiled fish prince, who betrayed their people during the last war out of strong moral convictions and an optimistic vision of the future that was not particularly fulfilled
Ibex: candidate of the Divine Righteousness, one-scene wonder rapidly elevated to occasional series villain; a revolutionary or an amoral would-be tyrant depending on your point of view. Perfectly and reasonably willing to put galactic conquest temporarily on hold for the greater good when necessary!
(The actual series villain is Fordian labor efficiency.)
The first several episodes largely involve the cast members tripping over their own feet, getting beat up, and accidentally purchasing large quantities of robots they don't want, in the finest noir traditions. Every couple of episodes the DM gets together with a different group of players for a "faction" game, which is essentially a way to further develop the politics of the broader world of the story. Eventually the stuff that happens at the higher level begins to impact the players on the ground, and vice versa, all up and down the timeline; for me, this is when the story really starts coming together. There's something very neat about a kind of fiction where you get to watch the world get fleshed out in real time (or, if you're me and a slow podcast listener, substantially more than real time, but.)
Other Counter/Weight selling points:
- I am not sure I have yet properly conveyed the quantity and quality of interesting and weird artificial intelligences
- everyone's hilarious outfits are very lovingly described
- it's very funny tragedy, which is, alas, one of my favorite genres
- SO MUCH worldbuilding
- compelling character arcs developed around legitimately difficult choices and conflicts of ideals
- not one, but TWO major plot arcs set at SPACE PROMS
- cast members are not all white, not all straight, and not all cis, which definitely comes through in the storytelling
- what I mean to say is that it's very gay
Things that may not be selling points:
- kind of a slow start, especially for the faction game episodes
- Murder DM Austin Walker will probably murder at least one of your darlings
- the ending ... works very well in some ways and not so well in others
- honestly I'm still kind of mad that [spoiler] gets fired into the sun
- they keep trying very hard to make Apostolosian gender not just Gender As We Know It and it really doesn't happen, though I personally find the effort endearing
- I've gotten a lot of weird looks while walking around with near-invisible headphones in and giggling to myself
