Perpetua Prelude 01

Austin Walker (0:18)

A clock strikes. A bell rings.

Welcome to Friends at the Table, an actual play podcast focused on critical world building, smart characterization and fun interaction between good friends. I am your host, Austin Walker, and joining me for this, the beginning of a new season, Jack de Quidt.

Jack de Quidt (0:48)

Hi, Austin, I'm Jack. You can get any of the music featured on the show at notquitereal.bandcamp.com. Once again, it's that time, I haven't written it yet, but I will have by the time you hear this.

Austin Walker (1:00)

Ali Acampora.

Ali Acampora (1:02)

Hi, my name is Ali. I also have another Star Wars podcast. It's morecivilization.net. Type it into your browser. I'm on that.

Austin Walker (1:11)

Just in case someone's like a new listener to this, I'm also over on that.

Ali Acampora (1:16)

Support us at friendsatable.cache. I host a show over there called Gathering Information, where I talk to all the people that you're listening to right now.

Austin Walker (1:24)

It's true. Janine Hawkins.

Janine Hawkins (1:27)

Hi, I'm Janine Hawkins. I'm a little sick right now. I don't know how I sound because in my head, I sound weird.

I'm bleeding heart on places. I do the newsletter on our Patreon, which is friendsatable.cache. You can subscribe to, you can follow us there for free and then the newsletter is free and it just shows up in your inbox and you can look at it.

Austin Walker (1:50)

Easy. Let you know where we're playing games. Let you know when there's new stuff in the Patreon feed.

Sylvia Clare (1:55)

When there's streams happening.

Austin Walker (1:56)

When there's streams happening.

Janine Hawkins (1:58)

Well, it happened.

Austin Walker (2:00)

Where streams have happened.

Sylvia Clare (2:01)

Sorry, if you go to the Patreon for free, you'll get when streams are happening because we tend to play them when it's on.

Janine Hawkins (2:06)

Yeah, that's true.

Sylvia Clare (2:08)

Yeah, that's true. I mixed it up, my bad.

Austin Walker (2:11)

Art Martinez-Tebbel.

Art Martinez-Tebbel (2:12)

Hey, how's it going?

Sylvia Clare (2:14)

Hi, Art.

Austin Walker (2:14)

You all right?

Art Martinez-Tebbel (2:15)

Yeah, I'm fine. I just, as I was on our most recent Patreon recording, I'm just discouraged with social media. So don't, don't bother.

Austin Walker (2:27)

Don't bother. You heard it here first.

Art Martinez-Tebbel (2:29)

Volume, volume nine, so sold out.

Andrew Lee Swan (2:32)

So sold out.

Austin Walker (2:34)

Ah, Keith Carberry.

Keith J. Carberry (2:37)

Hi, I'm Keith J. Carberry. You can find me on Twitter and bluesguy at Keith J. Carberry. Don't follow Art. You can follow me instead. I don't like it either, but I'm still posting because I like to post. You can also find me on YouTube. youtube.com/runbutton where I do Let's Plays and stuff. And I have been for pretty much as long as you could be doing that on YouTube. And also listen to Media Club Plus, the Hunter Hunter right now, the Hunter Hunter podcast that me and Jack and Sylvi and Dre are doing. And with Ali and Austin also being on sometimes. It's really good. It's a great show. You should listen to it.

Austin Walker (3:14)

It is a blast. Sylvi Bullet.

Sylvia Clare (3:17)

Hey, I'm Sylvia. You can find me everywhere at Sylvi Bullet. And everything else I'd plug has been plugged already. So you can just move right on.

Austin Walker (3:26)

And finally, Andrew Lee Swan.

Andrew Lee Swan (3:28)

Hey, you can find me on Twitter. I'm at swandre3000. And then I've been posting on Instagram a lot lately. I don't know why. I'm just doing it. You can follow me there at Andrew Lee Swan.

Austin Walker (3:40)

Did you post that table you built?

Andrew Lee Swan (3:42)

I did.

Austin Walker (3:42)

There you go. You all want to see a table, you go to Dre's Instagram.

Art Martinez-Tebbel (3:47)

Yeah, I bet there's no table in your podcatcher right now.

Andrew Lee Swan (3:52)

Fucking got them. Yesterday, I posted one picture of the skyline at noon. And then I posted a picture of the skyline at 8 o'clock.

Austin Walker (4:00)

Killing them. That's right. You had to do it to them. You had to do it to them. Speaking of needing to do it to them, we are here, new season. We will, this season, be playing Fabula Ultima TT JRPG, a game inspired by all of our favorite JRPGs. And that game is by Emmanuel Galletto. But before we get there, and for new listeners, this might be a surprise, we have to do some world building. And Fabula Ultima has some really fun world building rules. You know, there's a great set of kind of questions that are established for like, hey, you should have ideas about, you know, what's the shape of the world? What is the role of magic and technology? What are the major kingdoms and nations? What are the big mysteries, et cetera? And we like answering those sorts of questions just in that way. But what we really love to do here on Friends at the Table, if you are new, is play games. And so today, we are going to play Cartograph Atlas Edition, a solo role-playing game of map making and discovery by Brandon Lee, that does explicitly have hacked in a multiplayer mode officially on page 41, and also a mode that is less journaling game and more traditional kind of RPG. We will not be playing with eight-player characters though. I think that would take us literally forever, though this is a pretty fast and light game. Cartograph is a solo journaling RPG about map making, exploration, world-building, and resource management. Quote, To the heart of this game revolves around the creation of a map, which you will fill out with detail as you play. You'll take on the role of a budding cartographer, arriving at a new land with a blank map book and a desire to explore. Slowly but surely, the history of the new world will emerge, and your cartographer will have a journal full of notes and stories to reflect that. You'll be sketching locations on an ever growing map and exploring these locations through journal prompts. There's a cycle of play that we'll all come to learn as we play. We all have a copy of this book. This book is really cool, and we were playing in role 20, which means that to some degree, we are going to be playing with a, let's say a compromised version of the game. This is a game about throwing dice on a table and seeing where they land, and then like drawing forests where they land. And there's a little way to kind of do that in role 20 But after some testing with Jack, we realized that things like what your screen size and resolution are will make it really fuzzy. That for instance, if I rolled a die and it landed on seven, eight on my screen, it might land on ten, five for you. So we have decided to hack in a sort of x, y axis value dice rolling macro for all of us as we play this game. And there might be some other rules that we end up kind of shifting as we go. I know Jack, you kind of thought through ways to do this with eight people.