Podcast / Friends at the Table

Friends at the Table is an Actual Play podcast focused on critical worldbuilding, smart characterization and fun interaction between good friends.

The first, third and fifth seasons are set in the fantasy setting of Hieron, and are collectively called "Seasons of Hieron". These seasons were primarily played in Dungeon World along with other games used for holiday specials or finales. An interstitial prequel season played between Autumn and Winter in Hieron, called "Marielda", used Blades in the Dark.

The even-numbered seasons form an overarching science fiction story known as the "Divine Cycle". Set in the Milky Way galaxy, thousands upon thousands of years into the future, the Divine Cycle details a series of conflicts involving impossibly powerful machine gods called Divines. Season two, "COUNTER/weight", is set in the titular Noir/ Cyberpunk / Mecha planet of Counterweight. Season four, "Twilight Mirage", is set in the far future of the same world, far enough to be considered post-cyberpunk and is concerned about the fate of a declining utopia called the Divine Fleet. Season six, "PARTIZAN", is set millennia afterwards and is about the Civil War within the Divine Principality, the most powerful empire in the galaxy. Season eight, "PALISADE", is a direct sequel to the previous entry in the Divine Cycle, depicting the continuing war within the Divine Principality.

The seventh season is a horror-themed Weird West story taking place in the Eldritch Location of Sangfielle.

Bluff City is a bonus season available only to Patreon backers, telling various standalone stories of strange happenings in the titular fictional midatlantic city.

The podcast was initially presented by StreamFriends.tv and RunButton.net. It can be supported on Patreon. The soundtrack can be found here.

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Tropes contained in this series:

General Tropes

• Alternative Calendar: The Divine Calendar introduced in The Road to PARTIZAN, which organizes months as constellations, with each year comprising 10 months made up of 50 25-hour days.
• Ambiguously Evil: While many of the monsters and antagonists of Autumn in Hieron are aligned with Samot, Samot himself doesn't seem to be that evil, to the point that he resurrects Hadrian fully healed and in return demands not that the latter renounce Samothes for him, but simply that he think about it. The Marielda season takes Samot further into Well-Intentioned Extremist territory.
• Ancient Conspiracy: Several appear in the Divine Cycle, since it takes place over such a long period of time.
  • Apostolos is assimilated into the Divine Principality during The Road to PARTIZAN as Stel Apostolos, thanks to a fake Apokine sent by the other heads of the Principality.
  • Progressive Asterism, the other half of the Church of Asterism, was formed thanks to Pique Nideo hijacking and perverting the teachings of the Prophet Logos K'antel.
  • The purpose of the Curtain of Divinity is to rein in the Principality's most tyrannical institutions along with uphold the Tranquil Princept's oath to Autonomy Itself, the so-called True Divine. The oath is meant to keep the Scutum-Centaurus arm of the galaxy free of the Principality until Autonomy Itself deemed the Principality an equitable society. This goal puts them at odds with Pact of Necesarry Venture.
• Anti-Magical Faction:
  • Hella and her home country of Ordenna have this attitude.
  • The Glim Macula, previously a specialist anti-magical branch of the police force of Sapodilla (largest and most sophisticated city in Sangfielle), have ended up taking over the city in all but name over the last decade or so. Their stated goal is to get rid of all the supernatural strangeness in the region and return it to normalcy, and their strict definition of “normalcy” (which includes physical, metaphysical, and religious criteria) has made life in Sapodilla difficult for anyone insufficiently so (unless they’re rich and powerful enough to get away with it — the Glim Macula are police, after all).
• Arc Words:
  • For Autumn in Hieron, "You can never leave Nacre." You can travel away, but if you've spent the night there it comes with you wherever you go.
  • From COUNTER/Weight, "We could have made them look like anything, but we made them look like us."
• Balance of Power: This is essentially how the Divine Principality keeps its form. The Many-Stars Thesis allows for minor conflicts between entities within the Stels but such is the structure that the entire foundation of the empire has yet to be fully shaken. Come PARTIZAN, though...
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Frequently throughout the series.
  • Austin's vision of Ibex in COUNTER/Weight is modeled after venture capitalist Tristan Walker (no relation).
  • In Marielda, Austin describes Samothes as looking like a slightly older Sendhil Ramamurthy.
  • Twilight Mirage features a lot of it, compared to earlier seasons:
    • Grand Magnificent looks an awful lot like Randall Park.
    • ⸢Signet⸣ is modeled after Yuga Yamato.
    • Massalia d'Argent bears some resemblance to actress Fan Bingbing.
    • Morning's Observation is modeled after rapper Lil Peep.
    • Declan's Corrective looks like "a very specific picture of Benicio del Toro."
    • Multiple Castlerose assassins are encountered in bodies named for and modeled after famous musicians, like the Duke, Mister Fahrenheit, and the Thin White Duke.
• Continuity Nod: While the seasons of the Divine Cycle take place over the course of millennia, they frequently hearken back to each other.
  • From Twilight Mirage:
    • The Beloved Dust's opposite numbers in the Beloved Ivy include Masalia D'Argent, who establishes that the Apostolosians are still around. So're the Rapid Evening — their undercover operatives in the Fleet supply the cold open narration.
    • The cargo of the Holiday Gambit that kicked off Quire's Glassed Age? It's the Gnosis virus.
    • Irene Klipsch-Dove, a.k.a. the woman who created several early Divines, went on to write a guide to outsmarting sapient machines.
    • In the scene where the Doyenne describes the canvas, the music turns to the opening notes of "The Long Way Around" on the pivotal phrase:
  For all of their beauty, for all of their impossibility, for all of their power, we could only have ever made them look like us.
  • From The Road to PARTIZAN:
    • The descendants of OriCon and the Autonomous Diaspora return in the Divine Clash era as the Orion Combine and the Divine Collaborate. OriCom sells out the Collaborate and becomes Stel Orion, one of the Divine Principality's great powers.
    • Apostolos also returns, as part of a war against the Principality. They also become assimilated into the Principality as Stel Apostolos.
    • The descendants of the Golden Branch, aka the society of Counterweight and beyond, return as the Branched.
    • The outro to the entire Road to PARTIZAN is delivered by Keen Forrester Gloaming, former intercessor for the Rapid Evening in the Twilight Mirage.
  • From PARTIZAN:
    • Clementine's mech is the Panther aka the actual Panther, the one piloted by Jace Rethal in the Golden War that served as backstory to COUNTER/Weight.
    • Figure A, the predictive robot assistant for Crystal Palace, detailed in Twilight Mirage, is found in the Divine Past.
    • Gucci Guarantine, Clementine's rival, pilots a modified mass-produced Independence mech.
    • Up to the north, there is an important dig to try and locate something hidden underneath the ice...
    • The Divine Future has shown up in a previous season. Originally, it was Zeal.
  • From PALISADE, which notably has plenty of nods to Twilight Mirage in particular, as it takes place on a planet on the edge of the titular location.
    • The Iconoclasts return, having been sealed away after the events of Twilight Mirage and only recently released (unwittingly) by the Principality.
    • The Chimeric Cadent - the being who chased the fledgling Principality off of Palisade thousands of years ago - is a fusion of multiple characters from Twilight Mirage, including Signet and the Waking Cadent.
    • Levitation is descended from Even Gardner and Cascabel, and works for the family business they founded following the events of Twilight Mirage.
• Cool Sword: Hella's sword can cut through magic and has several ghosts trapped in it.
• Detect Evil: Hadrian has a power to do this, however it detects not objective evil but what his god considers evil. Art (as Hadrian) asking "What here is evil?" and Austin (as GM) replying "Hella," is a Running Gag that lasts through multiple seasons.
• First Church of Mecha: Present throughout the Divine Cycle, as the titular all-powerful machines are revered in different ways by different factions.
  • The Autonomous Diaspora of COUNTER/Weight reveres the Divines in some ways like gods. The Iron Choir worships the "dead metal", a mostly inactive Divine containing a life giving artifact.
  Ibex: You know, there's a thing — I don't like OriCon very much, you know that, but there's a thing about it that I like a lot, which is that you recognize that your Riggers are just Riggers. They're just machines, they're just very advanced machines. We got it in our head that these things are gods, man.
  • By the time of The Road to PARTIZAN, worship of Divines have become literal, with them being the focal point of the Divine Principality being enshrined in the Many-Stars Thesis and the resulting church of Asterism.
• Forever War: The Unbroken War, specifically the war against the Branched, which has been going on for hundreds of years by the time of The Road to PARTIZAN, and shapes the following seasons of the Divine Cycle.
• Fun with Homophones: All over the place, thanks to Author Appeal.
  • In COUNTER/Weight, we have "Rigger" and "Rigour".
  • Twilight Mirage gives us "Quire" and "choir".
• Hobbits: The halflings of Rosemerrow, as introduced in Winter in Hieron.
• Hostile Weather: The Perennial Wave is likened to a tide; it ebbs and flows, allowing some hours for advanced technology to function and then fade away once more.
• Kill the God:
  • In Autumn in Hieron, this trope is inverted by Hella, who killed the empress of Nacre only for her to inherit her father's position as the god of death.
  • Marielda gives us "The Killing of the King-God Samothes By The Traitor Prince Maelgwyn."
• Mecha: As the core of the Divine Cycle, these crop up in multiple forms.
  • In COUNTER/Weight, The OriCon has Riggers the size of smaller buildings, the Diaspora has the the sapient, powerful and individually unique Divines, and Apostolos has large Colossi and small Hoplites.
• Mechanical Abomination: To some extent all Divines qualify, with each having unique powers and sort of Blue-and-Orange Morality.
  • Rigour is essentially an ancient man-made elder god, complete with its reemergence from deep in the ice thousands of years after being blasted into the planet from the distant detonation of hundreds of star systems leading almost immediately to it killing scores of workers and enthralling the survivors.
  The sound came from beneath the ice, or from the ice, or within the ice. The distinction is no longer important.
• MegaCorp:
  • OriCon is run by them in the era of COUNTER/Weight, despite keeping some trappings of its previous communist government.
  • By the time of Divine Principality in PARTIZAN, OriCon and its corporations persist in the form of Stel Orion.
• Minovsky Physics:
  • From The Road to PARTIZAN onwards, we have the Perennial Wave, which knocks down the technological level of the entire galaxy to pre-COUNTER/Weight levels. Strangely, Divines remain unaffected by the Wave.
  • The Kalmeria Particle is another type of nanomachine that proliferates throughout the galaxy in the wake of the PARTIZAN finale and allows for new forms of technology to emerge, unhindered by the Perennial Wave.
• Nanomachines: How the Perennial Wave (and later, Kalmeria) work.
• Mythology Gag: The cast are firm on the fact that the different universes that comprise Friends at the Table (eg. Seasons of Hieron and the Divine Cycle) are seperate and don't exist in the same continuity. That doesn't stop them from including nods to different seasons from time-to-time.
  • In COUNTER/Weight:
    • The Chime's ship is named the Kingdom Come as a direct nod to the vessel of Captain Brandish in Autumn in Hieron.
    • The Panther, Jace's custom Rigger, splits into a swarm of birdlike fragments like the Hieronian animal of the same name.
    • Art's character's religious background once again includes a pantheon of similarly-named beings which include a patron of teaching, relaxation, and wolves.
• Layered World: The true nature of Hieron, as revealed in Winter in Hieron. The land the main characters hail from is actually just the surface of the world, with numerous copies of Hieron in the form of "strata and lamina" beneath the surface - the vast majority of which are still completely inhabited. Each time the gods of Hieron used their power of Reconfiguration to remake the world, a new lamina was added on top of the previous one. Ever since the death of the original Samothes during the events of the Marielda season, however, they haven't been able to use Reconfiguration anymore.
• Our Dragons Are Different: The purple Western dragon Fero meets in Spring in Hieron is a shape of the god Samol, who is Hieron (that is, the world). He's quite friendly and hasn't eaten people since Marielda.
• Our Elves Are Different: The elves of Hieron have mostly started to live shorter after the Erasure, and the snow elves (who are partially descended from goblins) live in xenophobic isolation.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: In Hieron, people become ghosts not out of any personal connection with how they died, but basically from sheer luck:
  Most folks will tell you that ghosts come from extreme circumstances; a traumatic death, an unavenged betrayal, a depraved killing. They couldn’t be more wrong. See, I know the man what moves a soul after the body goes. He ain’t leavin' behind those that have been wronged. Ghosts ain’t about quality of death, they’re about quantity. See, sometimes that old boy gets very busy, can’t keep up with ‘em. Maybe a war is on, maybe it’s a flood or a fire. Too many lives to process, and some are bound to slip through the cracks. After all, the truth is, all death is traumatic. But, don’t get me wrong. Every now and then, a ghost does want a little revenge. But that ain’t supernatural — that’s just numbers.
• Our Gods Are Different: The gods of Hieron are born from the powerful impulses of other beings — Samol created Severea and Samothes when he saw the land lonely and its creatures vulnerable, and Nothing created Tristero after Samol's birth made it afraid it had done something wrong.
  • The origins of Galenica/Samaantine are revealed in Winter in Hieron — the Shield of Our Will was born from mortal need, as Nothing tore apart the eastern islands of Hieron.
• Our Orcs Are Different: The orcs of Hieron mostly operate out of the New Archives, a scholarly organization dedicated to collecting, cataloging and studying artifacts and history from before the Erasure.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The inhabitants of Nacre rise as zombies when killed, then as ghosts when killed again. However, they remain mentally the same in both cases.
• Overly Long Name:
  • Hadrian, Sword of Samothes, Defender of the Undying Fire, Officer of the Order of Eternal Princes.
  • Prince Ephrim, The Gifted, His Summer Sun, Lord of the Coming Spring, Prophet of the Unwavering Flame, Silver Hand of Samothes.
  • "The Rector and College of the Last Living Spirits, in Memoriam, For Their Service Awarded the Grace and Wisdom of Our Proctor, Originality Alive". Most Marieldans know it better as "Memoriam College."
  • In Twilight Mirage, the Divine Fleet's counterpart for what the Autonomous Diaspora once called a Candidate is "Excerpt"; their names are lines from the Resonant Orbit's canon, typically abbreviated to one word. Aside from ⸢Signet⸣ ^{Full name}They marked scars of light in pitch; born in fiercest purpose, and beheld as the signet sealed upon our pact, there's also Empyrean's pilot ⸢Blooming⸣ ^{Full name}To The Prince We Offered Twelve Thousand Flowers, Blooming In An Untouched Field and Gumption's operator ⸢Covenant⸣.^{Full name}Under Starlight Covenant Was Etched Into Flesh And Steel
• Physical God: The gods of Hieron have physical forms, as seen when the god of death was known for taking vacations in the city of Nacre.
  • The god Samot shows up in person at the end of Autumn in Hieron.
• Starfish Aliens: While the Milky Way as depicted in the Divine Cycle is populated mostly by humans (although even the word "human" is used quite broadly), something truly alien tends to pop up at least once per season.
  • Early on in faction game of COUNTER/Weight, it is established that "a true alien" may dwell on the planet Sigilia, in contrast to the more familiar "aliens" like Apostolos or the designer genetics of Kalliope. Come the finale, we get the payoff: It's Sigilia.
  • Twilight Mirage gives us Acre Seven.
• Super Robot: The Divines have common powers such as opening portals to other Divines, or individual abilities such as reading minds or uploading to and physically reshaping machines. The former is acknowledged as "as close to space-magic as [the setting] gets."
• Twisted Christmas: The Holiday Episodes, when they appear, tend to be particularly grim - even when compared with their respective seasons.
  • Autumn in Hieron kicks off the tradition. The arc begins with the party investigating a brutal murder on the dawn of the holiday High Sun Day (the equivalent of New Year's Day) and ends with the killer revealed to be a grieving man who was manipulated into the deed by Hadrian's boss with promises of redemption, Hadrian snapping the killer's neck after telling him everything would be all right, and his boss getting disintegrated by the Golden Lance. Furthermore, it starts snowing heavily in Velas, where it has not snowed in decades, starting a winter that many would be completely unprepared for and die from.
  • COUNTER/Weight's Holiday Episode does not involve a holiday in-universe, but is still fairly grim. It is a flashback of how the Golden War ended, and though the protagonists won Jace and Addax turn on each other, and Sokrates's hopes of a grand alliance after the war don't pan out.
  • Also from COUNTER/Weight, the Liberty & Discovery flashback episode is incredibly dark and involves an in-universe holiday. It is about one of the first rebellion attempts against Rigour, and ends with the rebellion crushed. After he fails, Liberty & Discovery's first and only candidate is left for dead with only a wreathe made by one of his companions who died in the rebellion.
    And it holds you in its hand, and it looks at you.
    And the Liberty & Discovery system shuts down. And Righteousness shuts down.
    And you're a person in a machine. And it's not even your machine.
    How could it have been? You are small. You are so small that this doesn't matter.
    There is a galaxy that is so much larger than you, that one small… rebellion… does nothing.
    You are insignificant. You aren't the spruce, you aren't the pine, you aren't the fir. You aren't the cedar.
    You are a walnut, and you will be cracked.
  • The third Holiday Episode is back to Hieron's holiday of High Sun Day, and continues the trend of holiday episodes ending in tragedy. It is the story of a number of other nonhuman or otherwise marginalized merchants including Red Jack and trying to make a living in post-Samothes Marielda. While things go alright for a while, their earlier success makes the neighborhood more desirable, which leads to the group getting broken up and driven out by wealthy humans acting on racism and a desire to own the now valuable property.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The cast are rarely interested in out-and-out Complete Monsters, so many of the villains tend to be these.
  • Ibex from COUNTER/Weight is arrogant, ruthless manipulative and opportunistic, but genuinely does want what's best for the sector. He eventually cedes power to Aria, believing that she could help people more than he could. His Divine, Righteousness, practically runs on this.
  • Mother Glory, the gnoll alpha from Winter in Hieron, wants what is best for her people (who have historically been wronged by the halflings), but her preferred methods are extremely violent.
  • Arrell and the Disciples of Fantasmo plan to fight the Heat and the Dark by placing people in solitary pocket dimensions where they can spend a potential eternity researching how to save the world.
  • The stars, who are attempting to cover all of Hieron in "star stuff" - a substance that can survive the Heat and the Dark but is toxic to all life on Hieron.
  • Alyosha, who is takes up Samothes' forge to create the New Spring by converting the Heat and the Dark into less harmful, but still often dangerous and destructive, plantlife.
  • Samot, during his final stand, comes to the realisation that gods such as himself are inherently dangerous to the people of Hieron thanks to their power of Reconfiguration, and attempts to utterly destroy Hieron in order to erase every last trace of the gods.
• Wham Episode: Each season tends to have one of these (or a string of them) roughly halfway through.
  • For Twilight Mirage, things rapidly escalate in the penultimate story of both games in the first half of the season.
    • In the ground game's Sculpture City arc: Grand Magnificent draws the ire of his patron from the Fleet in the form of multiple Castlerose agents being sent to kill or capture him, Even participates in an attempted coup, and Gig learns a brief history of Quire before being used by the planet to broadcast a message about the Divine Independence, whose heart serves as the impetus for a gunfight. By the end of it all most of the group is badly wounded, the Doyenne has been taken from the city, and the Fleet's ambassador Alekhine has revealed himself as an Independent and stolen the Glass body Grand built.
    • In the space game's Privign arc: Tender manages to use her already-unusual Architect powers in physical reality, Fourteen discovers who contracted them to kill Tender and where The Sky Reflected In Mirrors came from, Signet learns the truth of the Iconoclasts and the nature of Quire's fifth moon, the extent of the New Earth Hegemony's engagement with the Fleet turns out to be comparatively minor, the last Excerpt of the first third-generation Divine Privign is revealed to have been Satellite's ancient and embittered predecessor, the extent of how badly Independence twisted Quire during its Blooded Age is laid out in stark detail, and a collection of individuals on the By-and-By, including Open Metal and Robin's Song, have taken the Cadent Under Mirage into "protective custody" as a coup against Empyrean.
    • And then "godspeed, glory" happens.
  • PARTIZAN has episode 28 - The Storm Over Cruciat. After having spent the Kingdom game exerting their influence within Partizan, Millennium Break scores its biggest victory yet by teaming up with Cas'alear Rizah and the Stormbreakers to take over Cruciat, the capital city of Stel Kesh in Partizan. Dahlia, the Glorious Princept and the other half of the Principality's Civil War, extends a treaty with Millennium Break. The players pool their Drive clocks to formally establish Millennium Break as a faction in Partizan. Exeter Leap fulfills his Drive and leaves the party. And Clementine Kesh and Gur Sevraq have their final confrontation atop Fort Icebreaker, taking each other into the ocean....
  • In PALISADE, An Impossible Ideal entails the Blue Channel temporarily splitting up to try and disarm the Stellar Combustor and investigate the depths of Chimera's Lantern at the same time. By the end of the arc, Phrygian has sacrificed themself in order to permanently disarm every single Stellar Combustor (and thereby massively weakening the Principality's millennia-long grip on the galaxy), Brnine and Routine have been captured by the Pact, and Figure has escaped the control of the Witch in Glass by taking her place as the servant of Perennial - whose true motivation as wanting to "break the wheel" of colonisation and empire throughout the galaxy is finally revealed. What's more, the party discovers that Chimera's Lantern is a graveyard of sorts for Divines seeking sanctuary from the Principality, and is ruled over by the Chimeric Cadent - a fusion of multiple characters from Twilight Mirage.
    • Then the next downtime arc following the above, Honesty and Integrity, radically alters the status quo of the setting thanks to some incredible dice rolls and clever manipulation of the game's mechanics by the players. We get the first and final "on-screen" appearance of Dahlia, whose audience with Brine leads to the latter killing the former and stealing their personal Divine after hearing their horrific plans for the future of the galaxy. Then, just as things seem utterly hopeless for Brnine, after having assassinated the leader of the Pact of Free States on their own flagship, they're teleported back to the Blue Channel by Figure and his new Perennial-based magic (but leaving Routine's fate unknown as he gets left behind). To top it all off, Brnine gets a Relationship Upgrade with a newly-radicalised Gucci.
  Janine: Hey, guys, remember when Millennium Break saved the galaxy but then also ripped out the emperor's spine in the same weekend?
  • A Mechanical Whine features a cataclysmic series of events, with the first domino to topple being Figure and Eclectic meeting the fake Gur Sevraq that the Principality has been deploying since the real Gur's demise in PARTIZAN, revealing that Gur's corpse is being puppeted by the Divine Future. Immediately after discovering this, Figure dies (as a result of a mechanic from their playbook), causing Perennial to break down at the loss of her champion. In her grief, the Perennial Wave stutters for just a moment, and subsequently technology across the galaxy goes haywire. Most significantly, the entirety of Palisade is engulfed by the Twilight Mirage, Cori severs her link to the Cult of Devotion upon sensing the true version of Devotion, and the surviving Blue Channel crew barely manage to escape a horde of rampaging Motion Delegates.
  Austin: Chaos mode. We've entered chaos mode.
• Wham Line:
  • From COUNTER/Weight, in the aftermath of the fight with Detachment, AuDy's ability to resist connecting to the Mesh breaks down.
  Austin: This isn't the first time you've been online, AuDy. And it really rushes back to you. A looong time ago. Before you knew there was the Golden Branch Sector.
  Jack/AuDy: As I was being manufactured?
  Austin: No. Well, I guess someone built you. We haven't quite figured out how they build Divines yet.
  • From Marielda:
    • By midway through The Valentine Affair, it's become clear that the narrator is no ordinary person — ordinary people don't profess to know the god of death — but he makes his true nature a little plainer here:
  There ain't much that should scare folks like Samothes and Samot, like Severea and Tristero. These are, these are powerful beings, not like you. They squabble over concepts the way families argue about bills. They live in palaces of gold and fire and wind, castles they built with their own hands and ingenuity. So you should be asking yourself: what makes a thing like that afraid? What makes a thing like me afraid?

  • When Hitchcock says to Rector Sabinia "I think there's an evil copy of you in this book," she replies "What makes you think she's the bad one?"

Season 1: Autumn in Hieron

Autumn in Hieron (originally titled 'Seasons of Hieron') is a game session run in the Dungeon World, set in a world that is starting to recover from a magical catastrophe known as the Erasure. After the first few episodes, the players split into two parties, pursuing two different goals.

Player characters:

• Hella Varal the fighter, a human who is evil and conflicted about it, played by Ali Acampora
• Fero Feritas the druid, a halfling who rejects the old world, played by Keith J Carberry
• Lem King the bard, a history loving orc who can perform pattern magic through music, played by Jack de Quidt
• The Great Fantasmo the wizard, a pompous but clever elf who used to teach in a university, played by Nick Scratch
• Hadrian, Sword of Samothes, Defender of the Undying Fire, Officer of the Order of Eternal Princes the paladin, a human deeply devoted to the god Samothes, played by Art Tebbel
• Throndir the ranger, an elf who left his isolationist people after learning a terrible secret, played by Andrew Swan

The DM of both is Austin Walker.

Autumn in Hieron contains examples of:

• Boom Stick: The Golden Lance has magitech guns that can disintegrate people.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": A magical bird that can split into a swarm of smaller birds is called a panther.
• Crisis of Faith: Hadrian has this towards the end of the season as he learns more unpleasant things about his god.
• Cursed with Awesome: The inhabitants of Nacre are cursed to reanimate as zombies when killed and ghosts when killed again, but remain mentally the same, effectively gaining extra lives without any mental degradation. As ghosts they can only be killed by voluntarily dying, by a few forms of magic, or by Ordennan steel. The people of Nacre see it as a blessing, while most outsiders (including the player characters) consider it a curse. The empress plans to spread the condition to the entire world.
• Deal with the Devil: Hella makes a deal with the god of death, the former emperor of Nacre to kill his son in exchange for not dying herself. Surprising everyone else in the group, she actually does it instead of reneging.
• Death Takes a Holiday: The god of death used to literally go on vacation to the city of Nacre, but mortals continued dying as usual until he gave up his godhood to save the city from a disaster and people there started turning into intelligent undead instead of dying.
• Evil Counterpart: Tabbard is one to Hadrian, right down to having the same titles, only with Samot instead of Samothes.
• Expendable Alternate Universe: Fantasmo casts Dispel Magic on a window into another universe, accidentally destroying the entire universe. It was treated as disturbing and upsetting but not all that traumatic for an entire universe being destroyed.
• Ghost Pirate: Captain Brandish and his crew are mostly zombie or ghost pirates since being killed by Hella before the game started. Brandish is actually an undead privateer, working for for an entire nation of sapient undead.
• I Was Just Passing Through: Fantasmo looks out for his friends, though he if asked he would brush it off as being strategic to maintain the well-being of his traveling companions.
• Soul-Cutting Blade: Hella's sword can kill ghosts, or keep those killed from reanimating to begin with. Ordennan steel can similarly harm spirits.
• Taken for Granite: Samot's pala-din are soldiers transformed from humans to living statues. Hadrian narrowly avoids the same fate.
• Talking the Monster to Death: When fighting a Word Eater, a creature that steals words to make their concepts part of itself, Fantasmo tells it his motive for becoming a wizard, tricking it into eating the word Ignorance.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Fero's primary power is this. He usually transforms into birds or a cougar.

Season 2: COUNTER/Weight

Counterweight hangs in the center of the Golden Branch star sector, a forked path where the Perseus and Sagittarius Arms of the Milky Way come together. Because of its location, life on this planet of billions brims with energy, and an exchange of cultures has led to an exchange of technologies. Automated robots valet vehicles; Starships launch in the distance at regular intervals; holographic pop idols perform to holographic crowds; giant humanoid mechs aid in tasks civil, commercial, and military. And sometimes you look up to them and think "We could have made them look like anything, but we made them look like us"

— Episode 0 opening narration

COUNTER/Weight is a cyberpunk/mecha game composed of a ground game (with a party of player characters going on missions) and a faction game (with factions controlled by other players operating on longer time frame and interplanetary scale). The game takes place on the planet Counterweight in the Golden Branch sector of the galaxy where two feuding factions, the The People's Conglomerate of Orion (or OriCon) and the Autonomous Diaspora have a tenuous cease fire after banding together to win a war against the once-massive Apostolosian empire.

COUNTER/Weight has its own wiki.

The Chime (ground game party) consists of:

• AuDy / Automated Dynamics / Liberty & Discovery, a robot valet gone sapient and turned pilot, played by Jack de Quidt
• Aria Joie, an Idol Singer turned smuggler, played by Ali Acampora
• Cass / Cassander Timaeus Berenice, a semi-exiled prince of the Apostolosian Empire, played by Art Tebbel
• Mako Trig, a laid back stratus (psychic with the power to hack into technology), played by Keith J Carberry

The DM of the ground game is Austin Walker.The faction game is played by Sylvi Bullet and Andrew Swan, with the DM again being Austin Walker.

COUNTER/Weight contains examples of:

• Abstract Apotheosis: In an episode of the Waypoint Radio podcast, Austin admits Rigour is essentially "the living embodiment of late capitalism".
• Beleaguered Bureaucrat: Orth Godlove, the Chime's main employer, starts out as this. He later gets a demotion and then a promotion due to political events unfolding during the story.
• Bilingual Bonus: The titles and descriptions of some the of the music in the seasons's soundtrack are done entirely in Morse code. Notably, they're all to do with Rigour, and are accordingly ominous in tone:
  -​.​-​- -​-​- .​.​- .​-​. / .​-​- -​-​- .​-​. .​.​. - / -​.​. .- -​.​-​- .​.​.:^translationYOUR WORST DAYS .. - / .. ... / -.-. —- — .. -. —. —..— / .. - / .. ... / -.-. —- — .. -. —. —..— / .. - / .. ... / —- -. / .. - ... / .— .- -.— —..— / .. - / .. ... / -.-. —- — .. -. —. / .- - / .-.. .- ... - —..— / .. - / .... .- ... / .— —- -.- . -. / ..-. .-. —- — / -... . -. . .- - .... / - .... . / .. -.-. .^translationIT IS COMING, IT IS COMING, IT IS ON ITS WAY, IT IS COMING AT LAST, IT HAS WOKEN FROM BENEATH THE ICE
  This Is A Delay: - .... .. ... / .. ... / -. —- - / .- / ...- .. -.-. - —- .-. -.—^translationTHIS IS NOT A VICTORY
  Everything At Last Must Come To An End: .. - .——. ... / .... . .-.^translationIT'S HER
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: The Chime has to flee Counterweight due to having angered the Liberty and Discovery Automatic Corp enough that Ibex has sent a personal Breaking Speech to Cass vowing to hunt him down. When the Chime finally meets Ibex face to face, he has absolutely no memory of the speech... because he didn't even make it. Ibex has Righteousness send automated personalized threats with his likeness to whoever becomes an enemy of the LDAC.
• Changed My Mind, Kid: After the Iron Choir debacle, Orth declares he is pretty much done working with the Chime...but once he learns that Ibex is after them, he immediately drops everything to help them escape.
• Characterization Marches On: Orth starts the game as a dead serious Bald of Authority (Austin even compares him to President David Palmer). However, once the Holiday Special establishes a younger Orth as borderline Nervous Wreck who ends up faced with a literal impossible task and ends up falling into the thrall of Ibex, present day Orth still remains assertive when he has to be but still lets a few cracks shine through. Austin even lampshades it:
  Austin: Poor Orth. Poor everything. ...Is Orth — is Orth Otacon?
  Sylvi: Orth might be Otacon.
• Clones Are People, Too: Mako discovers that he, like many other students at the September Institute, is one of many clones. Though Mako frees the other copies of himself and treats them like younger siblings or children, all of them aside from the main Mako end up dying via Heroic Sacrifice in the final battle. Mako's Virtual Ghost copy Larry meets a similar end.
• Contagious A.I.: The Divine Righteousness is a program with no physical form that can load onto other machines to enhance them. Liberty and Discovery work a similar way.
• Continuity Drift: At some point everyone starts to refer to Horizon Tactical head Adler using female pronouns despite having used male ones in the past.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: Jack conceived AuDy as a direct counterpoint to Lem King's usual modus operandi of getting through a crisis by talking — AuDy speaks little, and when they do they often make things worse.
• Cyberpunk: The setting is cyberpunk in general, but especially the OriCon, which was once communistic but has since become a corporate oligarchy while keeping some of the old populist rhetoric.
• Cyber Space: Mako's psychic hacking works like this.
• Do Not Call Me Sir: Sokrates does not like being addressed by their Candidate name Enhydra.
• Dream Melody: At the beginning of the theme song, there's a low humming sound. It's the hum of Rigour.
• Dystopia: Every society in the Golden Branch sector is messed up, and Counterweight can sometimes get the worst of all worlds.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: At the end of the season Rigour is defeated, the Golden Branch sector is mostly at peace, and Counterweight is being brought back to an inhabitable planet, but only after a final episode composed almost entirely of Heroic Sacrifice that claims the lives of Cass and most of the secondary characters.
• Exact Words: In the Firebrands game, whoever obtains Zeal gains a stat boost but anyone else can steal it for a lesser stat boost while the original owner gets a stat penalty. Keith gets around this by having Mako give Zeal to Orth willingly, preserving both their boosts.
  Austin: ...You rules lawyering motherfucker... I love it.
• Flat Character: Austin notes in the postmortem for Season 2 that Keith didn't have much fine detail conceived for Mako's backstory compared to Art and Ali's more extensive off-mic discussions of what life was like for Cass and Aria before the Chime was formed. This contributed to the revelation that Mako doesn't actually have a past on September.
• Gone Horribly Right: Rigour. It was built to influence people and make them work harder and more efficiently, and that is exactly what it did, to the point of dominating their lives utterly.
• High School AU: On September, the Chime members have false memories of being students at the September Institute, as part of a Lotus-Eater Machine.
• Hover Board: Mako goes through considerable effort to obtain a hoverboard called the Ring of Saturn.
• Human Aliens: The Apostolosians are visually indistinguishable from humans. They claim to have been behind Atlantis, though it is left ambiguous whether that is true.
• Idol Singer: Aria Joie used to be one, and still sometimes makes music (though she contractually can't make money from it anymore).
• Irony: Ibex gained the informal title of "Executive" due to his control of his Divine apparently far exceeding that of a normal Candidate yet he is revealed to be the one the most enmeshed with it, to the point that it's pretty unclear where Ibex ends and Righteousness begins. Indeed, once Ibex disappears during the Time Skip, people start questioning whether Ibex was ever real or just a construct created by Righteousness.
• Join or Die: The pirate Odamas Fleet annexes the mercenary company Horizon Tactical Solutions.
• Just a Machine: Sapient robots are still rare, so AuDy still has to deal with this attitude at times. This is also said later in the series in a very different sense about Rigour; not to say that it isn't a person but to say that it isn't a god.
• Lethal Joke Character: For most of the game, Keith plays Mako like a long-form improv game, and the other players constantly tease him about purchasing several dozen (credits' worth of) construction robots. Lazer Ted is a similarly goofy and washed-up Stratus, played up to be a harmless, if somewhat annoying, Expy of Riff Raff. Then the finale happens. Mako not only cheats the conditions of Zeal to boost the team's overall point value, but brings back the construction robots during the finale, weaponized and ready for combat. Lazer Ted similarly goes out in a fitting Heroic Sacrifice, contributing significantly in the battle against Rigour.
• Line-of-Sight Name: When pretending to represent a company buying mining robots, the name Mako gives (at Jack's urging) is "Drillbot Taylor."
  • Even worse, when he's pretending to be the captain of the Kingdom Come and is asked to identify himself, he sputters "You can call me...Captain". This gets them immediately boarded.
• Literal-Minded: Most of the robots are this to varying degrees, notably when JM-27 flatly says "I would like a bribe" when the Chime wants an illegal favor from them.
• Lost Technology: Weight was created by an ancient super-tech artifact, which the Chime is later sent to locate. The Rapid Evening faction exists to make sure much of the lost technology stays lost.
• The Men in Black: The faction The Rapid Evening is somewhat like this, though about controlling proliferation of super-tech instead of hiding the existence of aliens.
• Meta Origin: The first four Divines in existence were all created by the same engineer, and the ancient conflict with Rigour is directly responsible for the separation of the Autonomous Diaspora from OriCon and later the Principality of Kesh and the ancestral founders of Apostolos from both. In Austin's own words, Rigour is the reason the Golden Branch Star Sector is the way it is.
• Monster in the Ice: Rigour, an ancient Mechanical Abomination, is unwittingly excavated by MegaCorp from the frozen planet of Ionias, having laid entombed in ice for thousands of years following the last time galactic civilization attempted to kill it. As soon as it's free, it picks up right where it left off in trying to enslave the galaxy.
• Mood Whiplash: After the emotional moment of Aria putting down Cyborg!Paisely, Mako walks into the room clutching a fried chicken coupon.
• No Social Skills: AuDy parked cars before they attained sentience. It takes some time for them to get used to being part of a team.
  This is a situation I am trying to deal with, but I have been handed a crew of incompetents.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Irene Klipsch-Dove, creator of the first Divines, observes that the naming conventions the Diaspora uses for Divines are little more than the same kind of marketing language OriCon applies — Divines aren't embodiments of the things they're named for, for all that they hold to principles that generally align with those labels. In the other direction, the end of the Golden War saw Grace hold the position that the Orion Conglomerate's increasing reliance on automation would eventually lead to their adoption of systems which would be Divines in all but name.
• Oh, Crap!: When one of the players in the faction game moves Rigour to September, the planet training hacker psions, as well as where the main party is currently headed.
• Post-Adventure Adventure: The setting was specifically written to take place in the aftermath of a Real Robot Genre show, in which an Ace Pilot at the head of a coalition of nations performed a Heroic Sacrifice to defeat The Empire, which somehow also put a new planet in the sky as a symbol of peace. The political turmoil that followed is a significant backdrop to the series, as those previously-united factions go back to squabbling and the now-Vestigial Empire tries to pick up the pieces. However, the last few "episodes" of the nonexistent preceding show do eventually get played out in a special flashback story arc; it doesn't show how the protagonists got to that point, but it does show exactly what happened to them in the end.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: The Divines' pilots, called candidates, experience extreme stress from their link with the Divine and are usually recruited young and die young. Becoming a candidate is considered an honor, and it is possibly (though extremely rare) for candidates to resign.
• Preserve Your Gays: Jaqui Green, Aria's girlfriend is one of the relatively few secondary characters to survive the final fight.
• Professional Slacker: Mako's college friend Lazer Ted has a long list of jobs he made up for himself to slack off at.
• Psycho Prototype: The thing eventually revealed to be Rigour is described as "like a Divine, but broader." As a pseudo-psionic paperclipper AI who took over OriCon for hundreds of years and whose body is made of "new flesh" that survived the explosive destruction of multiple star systems, the First Divine presents a strong argument for its successors' more stringent limitations.
• Refuge in Audacity: Mako's plans often have an element of this, like when he infiltrates a corporation by pretending to be a representative of another company buying construction robots in bulk and then actually buys the robots, going massively into debt.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The idea of being trapped in a pocket dimension with Rigour is so terrifying to Liberty that it breaks its bond with Discovery and hijacks Detachment's body to flee near the end of the timeskip.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Rigour twice; once before the beginning of the series and again between the Chime's first fight with it and the final battle.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: The Chime starts out doing jobs like investigating a kidnapping, and ends up fighting the galactic-level threat of Rigour.
• Straight Edge Evil: Rigour is a mechanical god of this. As it exerts control over the company that found it, the company's previously laid back Corrupt Corporate Executive leaders start giving way to this.
• Take a Third Option: After learning the truth about Grace's "erratic behavior", Kobus is faced with the opportunity of either overwriting Grace with Liberty or merging them into Liberty & Grace/Freedom. Kobus does the latter... to take advantage of the confusion of the two Divines to pilot the mech into the system's sun, destroying the three of them.
• Tomato in the Mirror:
  • Audy finds out they are two connected Contagious A.I. Divines, Liberty & Discovery, inhabiting a robot body.
  • Mako finds out he is one in a series of clones.
• Town with a Dark Secret: The September Institute is composed mostly of virtual ghosts disguised as real people or clones with false memories, who are killed and reset when they "graduate" as part of an experiment.
• Villain Decay: Horizon Tactical Solutions is introduced as a fairly dangerous Private Military Company and during the first mission, their men actually manage to lethally wound Mako and Aria, forcing them to get cyberware to survive. During the course of the campaign, they end up suffering multiple humiliating defeats (by both the Chime and the Odamas Fleet in the faction game, the latter of which literally ends up assimilating them) and in their last appearance, the Chime manages to make them go away with nothing more than a forged invoice, a blown up empty mech and a vague threat from AuDy.
• Virtual Celebrity: Since Aria Joie left being an Idol Singer to make music on her own terms, the company she worked for has continued putting out songs and concerts by a virtual version of her.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The fate of Detachment is more or less explicitly left up in the air.
• Your Costume Needs Work: It is only after starting a relationship with her and looking at her private quarters that Jacqui Green realizes that Aria is THE Aria Joie. She was apparently under the impression that Aria was just an impersonator.

Season 2.5: Marielda

Marielda is set in the same world as Autumn in Hieron, in an earlier time period, and focuses on Marielda the City of Lights, Samothes's holy city. The game has two portions; a worldbuilding portion about how the city was set up, and an RPG portion following the Six, a group of criminals in the city.

Members of the Six:

• Aubrey a bookish cobbin alchemist, played by Sylvi Bullet
• Castille a sapient, clothes-wearing pala-din who is actually the ghost of Charter Castille, an elven mage serving Samot, played by Ali Acampora
• Sige Colburn, an intimidating human bruiser, played by Andrew Swan
• Captain Edmund Hitchcock a human scoundrel and ex-cavalry officer, played by Jack de Quidt
• Third episode spoiler character, Ethan Hitchcock Edward's identical twin and partner in crime, also played by Jack de Quidt

The DM is Austin Walker.

Marielda contains examples of:

• Actual Pacifist: Aubrey will not kill or permanently injure people (instead using alchemy to make things like sleeping gas). She does, however, work with people who have no such compunction about killing.
  • Though when it comes time to kill Samothes, she says she is "ready to do harm."
• Bittersweet Ending: The Six make it out alive, but both the plans of Maelgwyn and of Samothes fail to stop the Heat and the Dark, which ravages most of the world as the Erasure.
• Body Horror: The weavers appear to people who returned from being lost in the woods with extremely elongated bodies and limbs (whether or not this is their true origin is ambiguous).
• Book Burning: The Font Men, Samothes's Culture Police, are known for this.
• Boom Stick: An earlier version of the Golden Lance's magitech guns from season 1 show up, wielded by the Golden lance and the pala-din.
• Creepily Long Arms: The Weavers are unnaturally elongated in general, but the length and flexibility of their arms in particular is remarked upon. Despite looking like abominations, they behave like normal people.
• Church Police: As a city run by a strict god, there are naturally multiple forms of this in Marielda, ranging from the pala-din to the Golden Lance to the Font Men.
• Culture Police: The Preceptors of the Font of True Knowledge, or Font Men, are holy bureaucrats that are technically considered educators, but in practice, hunt down illegal ideas and controlled information. Their motto is the saying "people talk; gods write", and they enforce it with weaponized canes that are wreathed in flames on command.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Hedy and the weavers are people who were found horrifically elongated after being lost in the woods, but despite only being copies of the original lost people they have as a group been legitimately helpful and upstanding citizens.
• Dark Is Evil: The Heat and the Dark seeks to destroy Hieron.
  • You mean the Dark and The Heat.
• Destructive Savior: Samothes's pala-din show up with guns in the first battle of Marielda to drive off the invading army, but do almost as much damage to the town as to the invaders.
• Dead Person Impersonation: Hedy got lost in the woods and apparently returned transformed into the first weaver, except the body of the original Hedy was later found. Unusually, she acted entirely benevolently and might not have even known she was a copy. The other weavers are implied to be similar.
• Divine Parentage: Maelgwyn is the child of Samot and Samothes.
• Dungeon Punk: Marielda is a city run by an artificer god, with automaton guards, city blocks that re-arrange themselves overnight, trains that generate tracks through the air, and a fanatical bureaucracy dedicated to keeping the knowledge of how any of it works out of the hands of civilians.
• Fantastic Racism: From the people of Marielda towards the cobbins and weavers.
• Flaming Sword: Lance Noble Quince is an orc who, unlike the other Lance members' magic guns, has a sword with a blade made of magic fire.
• God Couple: It's revealed in The Valentine Affair Part 3 that Samot and Samothes were an item before their differing opinions on what to do about the Heat and the Dark drove them apart.
• Golem: Samothes's pala-din are stone automatons shaped like people. Castille, however, is sapient due to being posessed by the ghost of Charter Castille, an elven mage serving Samot.
• Humanoid Abomination: Rector Sabinia (or at least the evil copy of her).
• Hungry Weapon: Mr. Calendar's knife. It influences its bearer towards violence, and grows with each life taken. By the time Maelgwyn is done using it to kill Samothes, it has grown into the sword that will later be Hella's in Autumn in Hieron.
• Ironic Echo: At the end of the Crosstown Job:
  Ali: I kind of like the idea of Castille being like, "Yeah, I live, like, two blocks from here, let's all just hide out and relax for a bit."
  Austin: [laughing] That's what criminals do, they go back to their real homes after they've robbed God?!
  • And then after Samothes has died:
  Austin: So what happens to the Six? Because I can tell you what happens to Marielda.
  Jack: We can't just all — go home together.
  Austin: Is that not what happens after a heist? You don't all just go back to your home?
• Knowledge Broker: The protagonists' criminal enterprise is this, in a city where knowledge is a controlled substance.
• Lemony Narrator: Each episode of this season is narrated with cryptic commentary by Samol, the god of the land, and first god. He later shows up as a character who is directly involved with the protagonists.
• Lizard Folk: The cobbins are basically the lizard-dog-humanoid kobolds from Dungeons and Dragons (though they prefer not to be called that).
• Patricide: Maelgwyn is the son of Samot and Samothes, and kills the latter in an attempt to make himself regret hard enough to form a new god. It doesn't work out the way he planned.
• Primordial Chaos: Before the world and the gods, there was the Void, or Nothing. Samol, the first god, was created when Nothing flinched, and Nothing has since tried to return things to the way they were.
• Master of Disguise: One of Hitchcock's main talents.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Invoked by Maelgwyn by killing Samothes in an attempt to form a new god. It doesn't work like he intended, and he instead becomes a broken copy of Samothes.
• Noodle People: The Weavers are people who came back from the woods unnaturally elongated. Their entire bodies are horrifically stretched out and their arms in particular are extremely long and flexible. Despite looking like abominations, they behave like normal people.
• Sword Cane: The Font Men have weaponized canes that are wreathed in flames on command, which they use for combat and Book Burning.
• Trickster Twins:
  • Edmund and Ethan Hitchcock.
  • Their student Caroline is revealed to have a twin, Carolyn.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Hurting a child is the one crime that Sige categorically refuses to do.
• Wrong Side of the Tracks: Slow Point in Emberboro is a place you don't want to be taken.

Season 3: Winter in Hieron

Winter in Hieron is a direct continuation of season 1. Since the storm on High Sun Day, a freezing winter has spread across Hieron for the first time in decades. Only the island nation of Ordenna is unaffected, and with a mix of ingenuity and looted pre-erasure secrets, they are extending an authoritarian reach across the continent.

This season has the same cast as season 1, plus two new characters:

• Prince Ephrim, The Gifted, His Summer Sun, Lord of the Coming Spring, Prophet of the Unwavering Flame, Silver Hand of Samothes, the immolator, a human Eternal Prince of Samothes who believes winter is coming and he is the only one who can stop it, played by Sylvi Bullet
• Adaire Ducarte the thief, a human who tells people she is a cartographer, played by Janine Hawkins

The DM is Austin Walker.

Winter in Hieron contains examples of:

• And Then John Was a Zombie: They don't know it, but the armies of Ordenna are already affected by and spreading the curse of Nacre, causing them on death to turn into the undead they seek to eradicate.
• Anti-Magical Faction: Ordenna's opposition to magic is even more pronounced in this season, as Ordenna's Justiciars and Anchor have started actively hunting down magic outside Ordenna.
• Beneath the Earth: The group going to the tower Boat Party never got to spends a lot of time discovering what's under Hieron.
• Blunt Metaphors Trauma: Uklan Tel is not great with metaphors.
  Tel: The Heat and the Dark is like a jar of bees if… the jar of bees was the Nothing on which existence is written by mistake. There is no… We can turn an empty room into a room filled with jars of bees. A maniac would do that, to be clear, not a normal pattern magician — I would never use my power to fill a room with jars of bees, to be clear. But — You can't… I may have lost my point. The Heat and the Dark is incredibly dangerous and unlike anything else.
  Fero: [holding back laughter] Ooh, thanks, that helped!
• Emergency Transformation: Throndir dies and is brought back as a member of the Golden Lance.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The Disciples of Phantasmo are in fact the followers of Fantasmo, or at least his Split Personality Arrell.
• Magic-Powered Pseudoscience: The Ordennan Anchor run on magic despite the Ordennans' insistence that they would do no such unholy thing. Unlike many examples of this trope the Anchor are being mass produced though, implying that someone in Ordenna is very much aware of their true nature.
• Married to the Job: Hadrian, Sword of Samothes, Defender of the Undying Fire, and Officer of the Order of Eternal Princes, spends far more time and energy trying to serve his god than love his wife. As a lay leader of the Church of Samothes herself, she understands. But Hadrian is a true paladin — we heard the word 'Samothes' in his original introduction, long before we heard about 'Rosanna'.
• Mecha-Mooks: The Anchor are mass produced soldiers of steam-powered metal (reverse-engineered from the pala-din), used by Ordenna to hunt down the supernatural. Their strength and antimagic metal make them a legitimate threat, with their explosions on death being notably hazardous. Despite the Ordennans' insistence otherwise, they actually run on magic.
• Peace Pipe: During some down time after narrowly avoiding a fight with Mother Glory, Fero improves relations by passing around some halfling pipe weed. In a twist on the trope, the gnolls are the tribal society in this case while the halflings are not.
• Pretty Boy: Ephrim is described as being perfectly androgynous and very pretty.
• Shipper on Deck: In the recap episodes, Samol appears to ship Lem and Emanuel, referring to their first encounter as a Meet Cute.
• Steampunk: Velas, with knowledge taken from Nacre and other pre-Erasure sites, has rapidly industrialized. They now have steam-powered metal versions of the pala-din called the Anchor.
• Tautological Templar: The Ordennan Justiciars. "In the new world of Ordenna, the only sin is working against the state."
• Title Drop: In the recap episodes, Samol calls Hella's sword the Blade in the Dark. Marielda was run in the role playing system Blades in the Dark
• Van Helsing Hate Crimes: The Ordennan Justiciars are intent on stamping out the "plague of undeath", despite the fact that the undead made by Nacre's curse are mentally unchanged from before their death.

Season 4: Twilight Mirage

Floating in the sunset-hued safety of the Twilight Mirage, the Divine Fleet hums and pulses, its ships bright beacons of culture and technology in an age when both are under threat. All through the fleet, organic and synthetic citizens work side by side to protect a utopia that the universe thought impossible.

In the past, we’d convinced ourselves that our technologies were just reflections of those who made them: Tools to fit our hands, robots to ease our labor, artificial beings to teach, protect, and entertain us. We believed that our greatest achievement—the machine-gods we called Divines—were simply idols made in our own image.

We were wrong. Since the first grain silo, the first cathedral, the first ship, the first computer. Since the first time we put pen to page—we’ve always made things bigger, quicker, longer lasting, different than us. For a long time, we thought we were building mirrors. But now we know better: We were setting fires.

When humanity made this realization 30,000 years ago, we faced a dilemma: The divines were not only more capable than us, they were different. And we were no longer capable of denying those facts. But the scholar and prophet Kamala Cadence diverted disaster by unifying loose, competing strands of organic and synthetic belief to form a new school of thought: The Resonant Orbit, a harmonic faith that affirmed both human and robotic life without reducing one to the other. Where other ideologies saw difference as a threat, the Resonant Orbit saw it as an undeniable fact of life.

And so, in this small corner of the Milky Way Galaxy, life blossomed. A choir of 300 Divines built a new society alongside billions of human devotees. Advancements in science and technology joined with a diverse, growing culture of art and scholarship, leading to whole new ways of life. And while threats did arrive, peace always followed. The Divine Fleet always had room for difference, and because of this, the Divine Fleet knew only peace and prosperity for eons.

But over the last millennium, the divines have begun to die. Attacks from within and without have pierced their once-immortal shells, and even small mistakes have proven fatal. Three hundred years ago, their number fell to eight, and in the face of these deaths, the Divine Empyrean created the Twilight Mirage, a false nebula in which the fleet might find shelter and time.

And for a while, we did. A new stability arrived, and though more divines met their ends, our faith gave us the strength to fight, to work, to find new ways to survive.

But today, there are only two divines left. We will face a future more uncertain than we’ve ever known. Our utopia—a world that so many worked to build—is in decline, and our pantheon is decimated. For years, the Divines protected us, gifted us with their strength and technology, lifted us into the forms we most desired.

But now we face a hard truth: We are no longer their wards, they are ours.

— Episode 0 opening narration

Twilight Mirage is a post-cyberpunk game set in the far future of the COUNTER/Weight universe. In the tens of thousands of years since the events of COUNTER/Weight, a group of Divines, humans, and synthetics have grouped together in the Divine Fleet, forming an extremely diverse yet harmonious society united by the pan-belief faith of the Resonant Orbit. Over time, synthetics, humans and even other Divines have created new Divines, with their number peaking at 300, each watching over their own subcommunity with their own values and protecting them from a hostile universe.

Unfortunately, the Divines started dying. Despite perishing to varied causes, they did so suddenly and unexpectedly, leading some to speculate some sinister force at work. When their number was dropped to eight, the Divine Empyrean created the Twilight Mirage, a giant nanomachine cloud that had the dual purpose of both disguising the fleet as a nebula as well as serving as a giant augmented reality system, blurring the lines between the physical and the virtual. By the time the story begins, there are only two Divines left. And Empyrean is about to become the Last Divine.

This season has two separate parties: the Beloved Dust, a special police force dedicated to combating threats to the Divine Fleet; and a the crew of the ship Myriad, a group of settlers tasked with finding a new home for the Divine Fleet on the planet Quire.

The Beloved Dust consists of:

* ⸢Signet⸣^{Full name}They marked scars of light in pitch; born in fiercest purpose, and beheld as the signet sealed upon our pact, the former Excerpt (pilot) of the Divine Belgard, who caused the latter's death by deserting it at a critical moment. Played by Janine Hawkins.

• Tender Sky, a Cat Girl former Mesh architect who was disgraced after becoming involved in the death of the Divine Anticipation. Played by Ali Acampora
• Fourteen Fifteen, a Bounty Hunter with the ability to Body Surf via transmitting their consciousness as data. Unfortunately, their digitization process suffers from an unfixable bug that corrupts their consciousness with each jump, which will eventually kill them. Played by Jack de Quidt.

The crew of Myriad is comprised of:
* Even Gardener, a Super-Soldier whose body is integrated with a biomechanical parasite. Played by Andrew Lee Swan.

• Echo Reverie, a Badass Normal petty criminal with no cybernetics or connection to the Mesh. Played by Sylvi Bullet.
• Gig Kep-hart, an occupational safety vlogger. Played by Keith J Carberry.
• Grand Magnificent, an artist who specializes in mech design. Played by Art Martinez-Tebbel.

The DM is Austin Walker.

The Twilight Mirage contains examples of:

• Ace Pilot: At its peak, the Divine Fleet was home to three hundred Divines. Declan's Corrective killed twenty-seven.
• Aerith and Bob: Divine naming conventions have drifted as time goes on, from the "democratic virtues" names found in COUNTER/Weight to the more general ideal-based names of the second generation to the more obscure terms applies to the third. As the fleet's protectors dwindle, this gulf becomes more evident, with the eight player-specific Divines sporting names like Harmony, Potency, and Memorious. By the beginning of the game, the only two Divines left are Empyrean and Gumption.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: The Iconoclasts' god Volition and its creations the Axioms, for very specific values of "anthropomorphic" and "personification."
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: The former body of Independence looks like "a giant horrible gun-centipede." The Rogue Wave faction has built a city over it.
• Brandishment Bluff: Gig at one point interrogates a hitman with the threat of a "thermal detonator" that happens to pop out of his head.
• Broken Record: The Iconoclasts, about whom little is known.^{more info}We are the river, and it is the sea. Run to it or run dry, but all will run.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: Grand Magnificent stands in sharp contrast with the more stoic characters Art played in Autumn in Hieron and COUNTER/Weight.
• Cool Starship: All of the surviving ships of the Divine Fleet are pretty cool. The Tides of Harmony, for example, consist of two normal-ish spaceships connected by the body of the Divine Harmony, which looks like a giant crystal dahlia.
• Dead All Along: "godspeed, glory" reveals that the body of Empyrean has had no Divine in it since the day Gumption died.
• Deity of Human Origin: The Divines, technicalities aside, still fill this role. This is, in fact, the main point of contention of Volition and the Iconoclasts — they view any consideration of humanity in the creation of an incredible machine to embody a concept as a limitation to be overcome.
• Electronic Eyes: Gig's equipment includes a cybernetic eye that can pop out and fly around. He and Surge don't get why the rest of the ground party think it's weird.
• Evil Counterpart: The Divine Independence is so ideologically antithetical to the core values of the Divine Fleet and the Resonant Orbit that even the trivia section doesn't give it the time of day.
  Entities: Divine: Unresonant
  There is nothing left to say. -Kamala
• The Faceless: The Iconoclasts, who pursue ⸢Signet⸣ for reasons unknown.
• Fight Unscene: Fourteen Fifteen's third encounter with Mother's Story.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: The Advent Discovery & Salvage Society upgrades from a petty group of grave-robbers and tomb raiders to one of the premiere forces in the Quire System, able to stand toe-to-toe with the Divine Free States and the New Earth Hegemony.
• Genius Loci: Qui Err Vi Qi-Em^translationThe Soil; Alive, It Remembers formerly Qui Err Vi Na-Em.^translationThe Soil; Alive, But Without Memory
  • In a different sense, Acre Seven.
• Gone Horribly Right: Grand Magnificent starts the game with the goal of building a new body for the hidden Divine rumored to be somewhere on Quire.
  Gig/Keith: Are we — Are we sure he's on our side? Because it seems like he accomplished his exact objective, which is now the problem that we're facing.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Chthonic, revealed to be a dead and withdrawn Empyrean, burns itself out to destroy Independence.
• Horse of a Different Color: Duck, who Gig found at a mysterious facility on Quire and whose notable features include a prodigious appetite, limited speech, a prehensile mane, and the approximate proportions of a pennyfarthing bicycle.
• Hypocritical Humor: A common reaction when members of the Fleet introduce themselves to visitors from the New Earth Hegemony.
  Kentucky's Corona: ...Fourteen Fifteen. Wild names out here.
• Machine Worship: The Divines are machines and the religion of the Divine Fleet centers around them.
• Mecha: Always called Mechs. Every faction has some, and designing them is Grand Magnificent's art.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In trying to reunite the two separated ships of the Tides of Harmony, the Notion inadvertently turn Advent, a group of tomb raiders and fascists who absolutely suck, into a notable superpower in the Quire System.
• Phrase Catcher: Fourteen Fifteen.
• Prehensile Hair: Even's symbiote turns his hair into 'tendrils' he can use to interface with machinery.
• Prescience by Analysis: How Crystal Palace, the oracular machine of the Rapid Evening makes its predictions.
• Sequel Hook: Part of the finale narration is spent on the resulting fate of the Divine Free States and the Rapid Evening/Principality of Kesh. Aram Nideo engineers the merging of the two powers into the Divine Principality, a nascent empire that will come to dominate the galaxy, setting the stage for Season Six.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The entire motivation of Grand Magnificent throughout the finale.
• Space Battle: The Siege of the Lineage Brighton
• Thanatos Gambit: Gumption's death has kicked off a contingency plan for its resurrection, set up hundreds of years ago on Quire — the Salvage Mandate of the fallen Divine.
• Theme Naming: The assorted chapters of the Beloved are named for Frank Ocean songs with one-word titles. Echo Reverie's immediate family all have given names drawn from musical terminology.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: The Miracle of the Mirage has caused time to progress more quickly or more slowly depending on where you are, even on the same planet.
• Time Skip: The second part of the season takes place (roughly) a year after the Miracle of the Mirage, with Pure Cascara uniting the members of the ground game and the ship game to form a group called the Notion.

Season 5: Spring in Hieron

It is still Winter yet.

Months ago, the Heat and the Dark emerged from the Long Sands of Rosemerrow, bring terror and destruction to Hieron, and though the sun has returned, and though the vicious blizzard that battered the North-West has weakened, and though Adelaide's so-called curse has vanished, the warmth of Spring has not yet arrived.

The people of Hieron have faced calamity, and now they look to their leaders, to you, in hopes that they may recover and rebuild.

—Spring in Hieron Episode 1 Opening Narration

Spring in Hieron is a continuation of the Seasons of Hieron story.

Spring in Hieron features examples of:

• Canine Companion: Throndir's dog, Kodiak, continues to be with him and very large.
• Dark Reprise: "Whisper", the song that plays as Samol dies, is an instrumental and much more melancholic reprise of "Tell Me", the song Samol sang earlier in the same episode.
• Dracolich: The bones of Samol's draconic corpse are animated by the Cult of the Dark Son, eventually becoming a full-fledged dragon called the Advocate, which heralds the coming of the Heat and the Dark. This is explicitly stated to be different from the undead created by the curse of Nacre, which are still thinking and feeling beings, rather than a set of bones that have been given motion by a dark ritual.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: The Solarch, head of the Church of Samothes, leader of the Cult of the Dark Son, is none other than Snitch Nightly, the petty criminal from Marielda.
• Lich: Arrell's new (unofficial) title after having become undead, with Benjamin becoming the new Wizard in his place. He even has a phylactery, which prevents him from dying once and for all until it's destroyed. Unfortunately, said phylactery is Benjamin himself.
• Rage Against the Heavens: In an unusual twist, Samot himself concludes that the gods of Hieron are inherently dangerous and attempts to destroy all of Hieron in an attempt to eradicate them.
• Silent Whisper: The final words of Samol are whispered to his son, Samot, and the only other person present at the scene is unable to hear them, along with the audience. This is justified by Austin pointing out that a being as powerful as Samol could ensure that the intended recipient of his dying words would be the only one to hear them.
• Source Music: "Tell Me" is a song performed by Samol for the people of the Last University, with Jack de Quidt providing the vocals.
• Would Hurt a Child: Upon realising that Benjamin is Arrell's phylactery, Throndir shoots Benjamin dead, allowing Arrell to be killed for good. Throndir is aware of the fact that Benjamin can be brought back after this, but this ruthless snap decision nonetheless creates a rift between Throndir and much of the rest of the cast, which persists for the remainder of the story.

Season 5.5: The Road to PARTIZAN

What might a just history look like? On the barren moon of Partizan, it might look like frozen time. Today it drifts in placid loops, third satellite of its system's largest world. But by the year 1423 of the Divine Principality's Perfect Millenium, when it is at the crossroads of a fractious empire, war will shake its orbit.

— Trailer narration

The Road to PARTIZAN is an interstitial season comprised of one-shot games aimed at bridging the gap between Season 4, Twilight Mirage, and Season 6, PARTIZAN. It tells the story of the Divine Principality, a Galactic Superpower that will become, by the time of Season 6, the most powerful empire in the known galaxy.
These games were originally played as Live at the Table sessions for the show's Patreon but were re-edited and released to their main feed in the gap between Spring in Hieron and PARTIZAN.
The games played:

• Dialect, telling the story of the Hypha, a space-faring race of deer people, and their encounter with the Divine Principality.
• Armour Astir: Advent, telling the legend of House Brightline, the Divine Perennial and their attempt to check the Divine Principality's expansion at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
• ech0, telling the story of three kids wandering a ruined mech battlefield, carrying with them the recorded mind of a deceased mech pilot.
• dusk to midnight, telling the story of four mech pilots working for the Orion Combine during their war with the Divine Principality.
• Beam Saber, continuing the above story, focusing on a desperate joint mission between the Orion Combine and the Divine Collaborate, in an era that will be known as the Divine Clash.
• For The Queen, telling the desperate diplomatic mission of the Apokine and their retinue in a bid to end the war between Apostolos and the Divine Principality.
• Microscope, stepping back and looking through the entire 5'000 year gap between Twilight Mirage and PARTIZAN.

The Road to PARTIZAN contains examples of:

• Based on a Great Big Lie: How Apostolos is incorporated into the Divine Principality. After the Apokine's failed assassination attempt, the heads of the Principality send back a fake Apokine to lead Apostolos to the Principality.
• Being Human Sucks: The Branched have become posthuman, to the point that having to shape themselves into human form, the better to fight against the Divine Principality, is considered a tragedy.
• Blood Knight: Smack Talk
  Do you wanna know what the weak point of a mech is? The fucking pilot.
• Clarke's Third Law: Invoked in the Armour Astir game as it is set in what's called the Age of Fables. Then, technology has become so advanced that it becomes indistinguishable from magic, allowing mech pilots to essentially channel magical effects into their machines.
• Cyborgs: The Equiaxed, a sub-community within the Columnar Tabulary, are what's described as reverse-cyborgs: Synthetics that have taken on organic parts, such as skin, hair or even eyes.
• Evil All Along: Though it was rumored to be Stel Nideo's unwilling pet, the Divine Empyrean turns out to be solidly in-favour of the Divine Principality's actions and morals i.e. strength above weakness and imperialistic drives.
• Face–Heel Turn: While not exactly heroes to begin with, OriCom pull a massive turn on the Divine Collaborate by developing a Divine-controlling weapon and selling them out to the Divine Principality, re-constituting itself as Stel Orion.
• Flower Motif: The pilots of Divines, now called Elects, are named after various flowers, such as Hyacinth and Cymbidium.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Aram Nideo starts out as a petty bureaucrat working for the Divine Fleet before rising through the ranks and helping to found the tyrannical Divine Principality.
• High Priest: Pique Nideo, the ruling administrator of Asterism in the moon that will become Partizan. He goes on to found the Progressive Church of Asterism, with the original becoming the Received Church.
• MegaCorp: The Orion Combine, descendants of OriCon from Counter/WEIGHT, is described as a fractious alliance of corporate warlords. Stel Orion is much the same way.
• Opening Narration: Each episode's opening is narrated by an Elect of the Divine Principality.
• The Remnant: Both OriCom and the Divine Collaborate are explicitly described as not being successors to OriCon and the Autonomous Diaspora respectively but as remnants of those former powers forced into an alliance thanks to the Divine Principality.
• Resurrective Immortality: Divines can now come back after being destroyed thanks to the Divine Principality cannibalizing Gumption's workings at the end of Twilight Mirage.
• Shrouded in Myth: The events of Armour Astir eventually become this.
• Space Nomads: The Hypha travel throughout the galaxy, never staying put, using a light-marking method called the Strand to lead the way.
• Talking the Monster to Death: Vessel's Gold tries to talk the Divine Empyrean into turning against the Divine Principality. It doesn't work.
• Third-Person Person: Memphis Longhand, oh god Memphis Longhand.
  Memphis Longhand: The only god Memphis Longhand has ever seen in a mech is in Memphis Longhand's onboard mirror.
• Unreliable Narrator: Gallica, Elect of the Divine Present, recalls the events of Armour Astir as involving a "swarm of ships" devoted to the Divine Perennial (unlike the actual one ship and three mechs involved in the story).
• War Is Hell: The ech0 game, which is about children picking through the scraps of abandoned mechs, makes it clear that the Divine Clash sucked.

Season 6: PARTIZAN

It is the year 1423 of the Perfect Millennium, and the galaxy has been conquered by the Divine Principality. At the center of this empire, the only place where its five Great Stels meet, there is a moon beating where a heart should be. The moon of Partizan.

Abetted by immortal, machinic gods called Divines, and the legions of Hallowed mechs which extend their terrible reach, the Principality spent millennia sharpening itself on its rivals. What it could not devour it obliterated. What it could not obliterate, it simply outlived. It was an empire, unshakeable.

Until now.

For the first time in the Principality’s long history, two of its five Stels have gone to war with one another, each guided by a ruler with sound claim to the title of Princept, leader of All Divinity. For five years, they have fought to a standstill, while equivacators and scavengers find profit in rubble.

But historical crises do not only serve crass opportunists, they revive opportunity itself. Under the shadow of this war you find yourself wondering: For how long will there be empires? For as long as we breathe? Longer? Will the categories of our conquest outlast us, or could there come a day for something else.

We once dreamt that breaking free from our ancient home in the cosmos would allow us to escape the mass and pull of tyranny and trauma. We failed then, but perennial chaos offers us another chance: Can we launch with such speed that we glide, graceful or imperfect, beyond war and pain? Or is the truth more damning that: Might we carry our own gravity with us?

— Episode 0 opening narration

PARTIZAN is a game of war, politics and empire set in the the COUNTER/Weight/Twilight Mirage universe. 5000 or so years after the events of Twilight Mirage, the galaxy has been conquered by the Divine Principality, using the power of Divines to extend and keep control over much of the galaxy. The game is set on the moon of Partizan, the one place in All Divinity where the Principality's five great Stels meet. The game is set at a time when two of those Stels, Kesh and Apostolos, have gone to war with each other.
The game consists of two parties: the Rapid Evening, a special ops group consisting of Kesh prisoners working under a noblewoman; and the Society of Banners and Bright Returns, a mercenary group of oddballs and outcasts working for Stel Orion. After certain plot developments, the two parties are combined into SBBR, informally called Big SBBR.
The Rapid Evening consists of:

• Clementine Kesh: a spoilt Kesh princess sixth in line for succession with dreams of conquest beyond her station, played by Jack de Quidt
• Exeter Leap: An infamous cyborg pirate/bank robber looking for a chance to escape, played by Keith Carberry
• Ver'Million Blue: A tank-grown super soldier clone of an ancient Apostolosian eidolon bred for war but not particularly keen to wage war, played by Sylvi Bullet
• Sovereign Immunity: Also known as "The Farmer" or "Byron," a warrior monk disgraced by leading a failed rebellion, played by Art Martinez-Tebbel

The Society of Banners and Bright Returns is comprised of:

• Kal'Mera Broun: An Apostolosian "arms innovator" just trying to make a buck in desperate times, played by Ali Acampora
• Valence: A mysterious empath from a culture unknown to the Principality, scouting ahead and collecting information for their people, played by Andrew Lee Swan
• Thisbe: A strange robot crafted in the form of a Hypha whose place in the world she has yet to uncover, played by Janine Hawkins

"Big" SBBR sees the new characters:

• Phrygian: A Branched frontlines researcher who was sent here from the posthuman culture of the Golden Branch to learn more about the Divine Principality, who is waging a genocidal war against them. A posthuman entity that can transform into a war form that is equivalent to a mech. Played by Keith Carberry after the events of the Kingdom game when Exeter Leap forms a new squad.
• Kalar Anakalar: A Talonite who is opposed to Divines being used in warfare on moral grounds...so he wages war without a vehicle, being able to tackle machines of war on his own. Played by Jack de Quidt after the events of the Kingdom game when Clem dies.
• The Figure in Bismuth: A servant of the Witch in Glass, a semi-crystalline reanimated battle casualty. Played by Andrew Lee Swan after the first post-Kingdom mission where Valence sacrifices themself to kill Chrysanth Kesh.

The GM is Austin Walker

PARTIZAN features examples of:

• The Alliance: Millennium Break, a collection of different groups and political entities including SBBR and the Rapid Evening who agree on very little except that it is time for the Perfect Millennium to end.
• All There in the Manual: Each episode has a Dossier in the description detailing the characters, NPC's, factions, mechs and general facts that are relevant for that episode. Episode 00, in particular, has a cheat sheet on the Divine Principality as a whole.
• Armor-Piercing Response: Clementine, venting to Sovereign Immunity to try and work through some dissatisfaction with the Rapid Evening's first mission, gets one of these in turn.
  Clem: I just feel like, if that is what is out there in the world, Sovereign, and all I have to stretch out my arm toward is two losers who steal a robot and run away, and an old man? I can't even fly the fucking Panther.
  Byron: Practice.
• Back from the Dead:
  • Clementine Kesh is resurrected by Perennial to act as her servant, eventually becoming The Witch in Glass.
  • Over the course of her pilgrimage as Perennial's servant, the Witch in Glass comes across the body of the Divine Past, which she then helps rebuild as the Reflecting Pool.
  • It's subverted, however, with Gur Sevraq, who was Killed Off for Real. He guides the Witch in Glass as a ghost (or perhaps a hallucination) that only she can see. His physical body is later puppeteered and behaves as an imposter, but the real Gur Sevraq is dead and gone.
• Break Out the Museum Piece: Part of Kesh's culture is holding on to the past and ancient history, exemplified by their use of mechs from eons past. The best example being Clementine's mech being the Panther aka the Panther piloted by Jace Rethal all the way back in COUNTER/Weight.
• Civil War: At the start of the game, Stels Kesh and Apostolos have been at war for five years, each with their own Princept with a claim to being the leader of All Divinity.
• Cyborg: A common part of the setting. Most notably, Exeter Leap is an Equiaxed, a culture of synthetic beings who have splcied in organic material to their bodies. To that end, Leap as "80% of a digestive system" along with a human tongue.
• Defector from Decadence:
  • Million was created to be an Apostolosian super soldier but actively rebelled against her intended role.
  • One of the NPC's, Mourningbride, is said to be a former Elect who abandoned her post and is now living amongst the Sable Court of Partizan. She turns out to be The Mole for House Leson, is still the Elect of the Divine Courage and nearly manages to decapitate Millennium Break's leadership.
  • Cymbidium, Elect of the Divine Past, had written to Mourningbride about his misgivings on the Road to PARTIZAN and was on his way to Partizan to join her. Sadly, he dies, along with the Divine Past, upon entry into PARTIZAN.
• Disney Villain Death: Clem and Gur perform a Mutual Kill, with the former pulling the latter down after they shoved them off of the top of Fort Icebreaker.
• Driven to Suicide: The Partizan Palace contains footage showing no one shooting at the Divine past as it crashed into Partizan, meaning that Past killed itself.
• Famed In-Story: Sovereign Immunity was the Farmer who kidnapped Dahlia as a child, kicking off a chain of events that led to the current civil war within the Principality.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Aram Nideo was a mid-level bureaucrat at the start of Twilight Mirage and goes on to help establish the Divine Principality, ending up being canonized into a Divine by the time of PARTIZAN.
• Here There Be Dragons: Valence comes from a part of the galaxy dubbed by the Principality as "Caelestia Nullius" and is such, a complete mystery to the rest of Divinity.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: Leap goes straight to picking up anything that could be of value in the Divine Past.
• The Man Behind the Man: The whole modus operandi of the Curtain of Divinity, as personified by Chrysanth Kesh. While Clementine wants the throne, her mother doesn't give a damn as the Curtain pulls the strings anyway.
• Mask Power: Valence wears a wolf mask that completely covers their face. It's also quite expressive, in-fiction.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane:
  • Valence's weird empathetic gifts seem to be guided by using mundane objects like a book and scrying tools.
  • Divines seem to follow this logic now. Despite being nothing more than machines built by the Principality, their impossible technology and the way they are worshipped by the Principality's citizens given them a sheen of this.
• No, You: This beautiful exchange:
  Cardiff Reach: What is this? Who are these people?
  Clementine Kesh: My name is Clementine Kesh. I am part of a delegation from-
  Cardiff Reach: Kesh!? No nonononononono! No Kesh!
  Clementine Kesh: Yes Kesh!
• Not in This for Your Revolution: A major theme of the season, especially during the Kingdom game. Having lived for so long in an oppressive, seemingly unstoppable space empire, the main characters are called to wonder and are challenged with the idea that a better world is possible. Many characters, such as Broun or Leap, only care about their own well-being, despite being in proximity to the chance of changing the world.
• Only in It for the Money: Whether it's scurrying off after having finished the job and leave the Oxblood to their fate or jockeying for a reward for helping the Sable Court, Kal'Mera Broun is the embodiment of this trope.
• Perpetual-Motion Monster: The Black Century is an Apostolosian unit whose mechs are styled after vultures and hyenas and whose pilots serve a mandatory hundred year term of service that does not treat them well, judging by the state of the Elect that leads them. What allows them to press on in this manner without needing to stop to refuel is, of course, the Divine Motion.
• Punctuation Shaker: Kal'Mera and Ver'Million, although in Apostolosian culture, the parts before the apostrophes are not so much their actual names as pronouns—referring to Broun as "kal" is, depending on the context, as valid as "them".
• The Remnant: The Rapid Evening seems to have gone from an elite counter-intelligence group to a motley Tier 0 squad of prisoners-turned-soldiers led by an arrogant, spoiled Kesh princess. As it turns out, what people and history would know as the Rapid Evening mutated into the radical reformist organization known as HORIZON, whose Partizan contingent is led by Gucci Guarantine.
• The Rival: Actually mechanized in Beam Saber, wherein Rivals are extremely powerful characters tied to PC's that get free actions against them and are extremely hard to get rid of. So far, we have:
  • Gucci Guarantine, Clementine's rival, who works for House Brightline as a diplomatic attache but also secretly runs a covert black-ops squad.
  • The Divine Motion, Ver'Million's rival, a monstrous Perpetual Motion Machine of Stel Apostolos who's dedicated to ensuring the pilots under her service never waver in their duty.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Clementine Kesh may be a spoiled, arrogant princess way in over her head but she's not afraid to get her hands dirty if the situation calls for it.
• So Last Season: The opening mission ends with the Divine Past AKA Crystal Palace, the oracular machine/former de-facto ruler of the Principality of Kesh back in the era of Twilight Mirage, getting shot down and destroyed.
• Taking You with Me: Two instances, both concerning the same family.
  • In their final confrontation, Clementine Kesh and Gur Sevraq fight and fall off the edge of Fort Icebreaker, into the Prophet's Sea, gone just as the eyes of the galaxy turn to Millennium Break.
  • Valence takes the chance to take out Chrysanth Kesh, overloading their body until it breaks apart in a wash of energy, obliterating the two of them.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: It's clear from the start that the Rapid Evening are absolutely not on the same page. In fact, on the very first onscreen mission, Leap and Million take the first excuse to try and escape. It takes a talking-down and some negotiation from Sovereign Immunity to get them to stay.
• Theme Naming: The pilots of Divines, now called Elects, are named after plants this time around, with names such as Dahlia and Rye.
• Time Master: The Mysteries Metronomica, derisively dubbed 'the Cult of Perennial,' believe in the cycles of history and can use the Perennial Wave to affect time in limited ways, as shown by Apparatus Aperitif in the fight against Mourningbride.

Season 7: Sangfielle

People will tell you that the heartland got sick about 200 years ago. When the dust came, reality left, and the panic set in. But trust me, it was ailing long before that.

Don’t get me wrong, you could understand why someone would die for it in the old days. Greens and golds, bread and honey. But around the time that those well dressed devils of Aldomina swept in, five, six hundred years ago, that's when things started to turn.

They wanted to fence it in. Rows of corn and cane, columns of people. Nations reduced to gardens. Is it any wonder the ground itself started to ache? No one noticed until about 200 years ago, of course. See, the truth of the heartland—the truth of the world—is that it cannot be fenced in.

So, the storms came, and they brought a deep sickness to the plains and valleys. Soil turned barren, animals twisted in form and character, unkind spirits swept through the fields, farmhouses, and burgs. Reality, unhinged, drew its own course. Unpredictable, though never dishonest.

And as if in response, a rigid, mechanical malediction arrived, delivered by the cursed railway called the Shape. To be near places touched by such fearsome Structure was to hear a drum played too on beat, to see a circle drawn so smoothly as to make you stumble from its perfect curve.

Those who could, those who held the whips and pocketbooks, fled. Those left behind tried to find stability, tried to make a home on this re-frontier of ash, metal, and ichor.

Aldomina called this territory San Fielle. But there ain’t nothin saintly this bout place. Now, we used the name that our ancestors, those forced to work this land or force from it, called it under their breath: Sangfielle. The Bloodfields.

— Trailer narration

Sangfielle features examples of:

• A God Am I: Virtue plugs herself into the Perpetual Oratorio, redirecting its power through her and essentially becoming a vampire goddess.
• Ambiguous Situation: Pickman and Duvall have completely opposite views as to whether Jolyon is genuinely Duvall's childhood friend resurrected, or nothing but a mask the Red Zephyr is wearing to manipulate him. Both are sure they're right; the episode provides no proof either way. ^note Mechanically, Joly is the manifestation of major Echo fallout, ie, Duvall's "eldritch weird shit" bar filled up enough to cause a serious effect. But given how malleable reality is, that says absolutely nothing about which option is more plausible.. Part 4 clears it up: Joly is real.
• Anti-Hero: Not all of the crew are in the Blackwick Group because they're altruistic. Virtue in particular mainly wants her full powers back and is around for the paycheck. Sylvie, who plays her, says outright that Virtue finds the Vicar of Yellowfield's plan "aspirational", and she lets a victim of the Oratorio die on purpose specifically so she can study him better.
• Apologetic Attacker: While trying to handle the Oratorio, Duvall gets a fallout that causes him to discharge a bolt of pure magical energy, which hits Lyke. He's horrified and tries to apologize,, but since they were already arguing it comes off as an purposeful, and Lyke's own fallout manifests as the Ravening Beast teleporting him away before Duvall can finish.
• Artistic License – Animal Care: Averted; it's explicitly noted that Tombo can only live comfortably in a small jar because he's a magic fish.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: Sapodilla was originally a beacon of freedom and equality, but the slow takeover of the Glim Macula has made it everything it once stood against.
• Bee-Bee Gun: Duvall, who is filled with bees, naturally has this as a power. The first time he uses it, in “The Secret Ledger of Roseroot Hall” arc, a series of critical success rolls causes him to One-Hit Kill what was intended to be a challenging boss encounter for the whole party. Subsequent uses haven’t been quite as lethal.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: The trains and railways of the Shape are tended to by “gandies”, near-human-sized insect-like creatures made of paper and armed with tools that are part of their bodies. They’re extruded from small pipes along the trains and beneath their stations.
• Blatant Lies: When the jar holding the surviving piece of Aterika'kaal breaks in front of Virtue and Duvall, Lyke claims it's just Tombo. Who is a fish, which this is clearly not. Duvall is well aware he's lying through his teeth, but doesn't make a thing of it because they're running away from the Glim Macula at the time.
• Body Surf: Turns out the Vicar of Yellowfield can do this. The Blackwick Group can kill this character's body, but not their mind. They get around this by sealing the vicar's current body in a giant vat of wax, which immobilizes her without hurting her enough to enable another jump (she is also made of wax, and so doesn't technically have to breathe).
• Brick Joke: In Sapodilla, Pickman curses Blicke, the head of the Glim Macula, so that a train will attack him if he acts against her or her friends. After they steal back Ode's sternum and the protections keeping most of the Course out of Sapodilla start to collapse, Austin mentions that a train has just beelined through Sapodilla's walls.
• Butt-Monkey: Through sheer bad luck with dice rolls, Pickman is always having something go horribly wrong for her, be it injuring her leg, getting in trouble with the other Shape Knights, or having a head wound so bad it makes her see into other dimensions. It's not played for comedy in universe, but the players often can't help but laugh whenever the dice screw Pickman over yet again.
• Collector of the Strange: A gameplay mechanic. The system’s Resources Management Gameplay encourages players to pick up strange and useful things for barter or advantage, and in a place as weird as Sangfielle those things can be very strange indeed. However, Lye Lychen, as a Junk Mage, is an especially avid collector, and noted to have pockets brimming with all sorts of weird trinkets and magical focuses.
• Comically Missing the Point: When Virtue, Lyke, and Duvall are arguing about how to handle the Oratorio god-machine, Virtue and Duvall think Lyke shouldn't get to decide because he's been carrying the fragment of Ateriki'kaal around with him.
  Virtue: It sounds like you just like having a god under your thumb.
  Lyke: No, it's in my bag!
• The Dreaded: The Pale Magistrates, servants of Fulmina, goddess of instant justice, are this, and for good reason. They're tough, hit hard, carry all kinds of magical weapons, and, being huge zealots, are impossible to talk out of trying to kill you if that's what they've decided is "just". The nuns inside the hymn don't want to deal with Ezzek Semm, and clearly think the Blackwick Group are out of their minds for not just giving up and letting him have Janek.
• Elaborate Underground Base: Episodes 28 and 29 see Pickman, Marn, and Es infiltrating the Sunken Citadel, a headquarters of the Glim Macula, which is an entire castle that somehow sank underground such that its roof is now at ground level with the rest of the city, with laboratories, armories, dungeons, and even an entire ballroom still intact and in use within.
• Eldritch Location: Sangfielle became one, described as the land itself revolting against its exploitation. The fear that its eldritch-ness might spread further led to the construction of the city of Concentus around the whole region, serving as a physical and magical barrier.
• Extremely Short Timespan: The Curse of Eastern Folly arc wraps up in about three and a half days due to how the group rolls (first they rolled for days, then they kept rolling ones to see how many days). In less than a week the town finds itself dealing with a dragon egg found beneath the abbey, tooth trolls, an extremely early harvest, emissaries from an underwater empress who's supposed to be dead, defectors from that empress, a surprise train station, and the breaking of the curse that has stalked them for generations. Things get so chaotic that the players question if there will even be a town left to play in after the arc ends.
• Extreme Omnivore: Chine, as a Cleaver intrinsically linked to the Course, is capable of eating random objects to gain power over the aspect of nature they’re emblematic of. In episode 16, this manifests as them eating a lightbulb without injury to acquire the “Technology” domain.
• Formula-Breaking Episode: Episode 21 is entirely the Blackwick Group interviewing with the Glim Macula for entrance into Sapodilla, played using a slightly altered version of the game Inhuman Conditions (instead of humans attempting to detect robots, it's the Glim Macula attempting to detect Course "taint").
• Framing Device: The story is being reported in the Almanac of the Heartland Rider, who opens every episode and also provides the character and place descriptions in the show notes.
• Goldfish Poop Gang: Wherever the party goes, they have a habit of running into the Toll Collectors, a trio of outlaws and mercenaries so named because they were first encountered trying to extort passing travelers. Once, the party split to investigate two very different locations, and both of them met the Toll Collectors. Episode 42 reveals they have a Me's a Crowd problem: about once a month, another trio of Toll Collectors walks out of the mines of Blackwick. They’ve also gone up in the world, having all been recruited into the Knights of Virtue, serving as agents for the new vampire queen of Sapodilla.
• Gone Horribly Right: In Episode 33, Hazard tries to make fighting the Gandy King easier by transferring the Ravening Beast from Lyke to it. It works, alright. Unfortunately, due to Hazard rolling a failure, the way it works is that the Beast bursts out out of the King.
• Haunted House: Roseroot Hall, the ancestral mansion of the yon Vantzen-Estonberghs, has become this. The layout and decorations shift and change at night, and moonlight won't pierce the windows no matter how bright. Dayward calls in the Blackwick Group to investigate. Turns out it's the house itself; Roseroot Hall is a Genius Loci who Dayward's ancestors sacrificed people to in exchange for its power and protection. Dayward has no idea, and accidentally pissed it off because he's living there without feeding it.
• Human Resources: Two examples from the Sapodilla arc:
  • The Perpetual Oratorio, the artificial god brought into being by the musician Davia Pledge, draws power from countless Sapodillans and parts of Sapodillans forcefully integrated into its machinery, at least one example of whom has remained alive and conscious for years.
  • The Glim Macula have imprisoned heritrixes and experimented on them to take advantage of the properties of their true forms; one, described as “living lightning”, was split into pieces and converted into a security system that secures their cells and electrocutes intruders into their fortress.
• Light Is Not Good: Zevunzolia is built on or in the mythical seventh sun and is so beautiful that even a scale model has the power to heal, but that doesn't necessarily mean its creation would be a good thing. The narrator notes that people always talk about how great Zevunzolia is, but mysteriously never mention the price tag.
• The Lost Lenore: The Sapodillan activist Ziziliana Esterhazy to musician Davidia Pledge, who withdrew from society when Zizi was killed in a massive fire and has lived almost entirely in seclusion ever since. Her Perpetual Oratorio is a long-running revenge plot against all of Sapodilla.
• Meaningful Rename: San Fielle became Sangfielle when the empire panicked and pulled out. In a more cheerful example, Eastern Folly becomes Blackwick when the curse is broken.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: About once an episode the party runs into one of these, from a vampire vicar who also steals bodies and is made of wax to an eldritch sentient lycanthropic train which has the ability to resurrect the dead and Was Once a Man.
• Odd Job Gods: Slumbous, the god of putting out candles at bedtime. Slumbous has a very dedicated nun who has moved into the town's deserted abbey and is spreading the word of snuffing your lights properly to the townspeople. For people who forget to put their candles out (or can’t, if they’ve incurred the divine wrath of Slumbous), there’s Snuffos, who puts them out for them.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: Weaponized by Virtue's class. Like all Deadwalkers, Virtue is constantly stalked by an apparition of what killed her, in this case the vampire hunter Darling Malice. And Darling does not like to share her nemesis, so the first time in any session Virtue takes major stress, she manifests to whack whoever's responsible. (And it's a doozy. For reference, most starting weapons in the Heart system roll a 6-sided die, with a very few getting to roll d8 or d10. Darling is a free d8 hit.)
• Order vs. Chaos: Sangfielle is harried by two reality-warping natural forces: the bizarre and unpredictable Course, and the Shape, which renders things as orderly and artificial as a theater backdrop.
• Polyamory: Davidia Pledge and Ziziliana Esterhazy had the Esterhazy heritrix, who lived in Zizi as a third in their relationshp.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: The deific orchestra that plays the Oratorio draws power from people imprisoned in its mechanisms—which is not necessarily fatal.
• Punny Name: The devil noble Dayward yon Vantzen-Estonbergh, abbreviated as Dayward YVE, pronounced eve. (He was almost "Dayward Nightguy", but Austin vetoed it.)
• Put on a Bus: Virtue by way of "coming into some new opportunities". That is to say, becoming the immortal vampire queen of Sapodilla.
• Tempting Fate: Chine, Hazard, and Lyke go ashore at Marrowcreek despite multiple, very clear warnings not to. Needless to say, this turns out to be a bad idea.
• Town with a Dark Secret:
  • Eastern Folly is cursed so that the mines occasionally eat people. The townsfolk would very much like to not have a dark secret, and are always trying to protect the miners, but unfortunately the curse also prevents them from talking about it.
  • Yellowfield, the town which purportedly makes every candle in Sangfielle, is run by a megalomaniac body-hopping vampire vicar made of wax. All the townspeople are also made of wax—they're real, not mindless constructs, but they're unfortunately doomed to be used as emergency backup bodies in a crisis.
• Reality Is Out to Lunch: Reality in Sangfielle is...flexible...and it's not uncommon to wake up and find the sky is just a different color today, or to go mining and find a vein of ham (and those are the nice things). The moon is always full, and gets closer instead of waxing and waning; the Shape is a semi-sentient railway that will occasionally just decide it wants to stop in your town, so a train station will appear overnight. Occasionally terrible reality storms will roll through and screw up everything. Also, time is broken.
• Remember the New Guy?: Lampshaded in "What Happened At Bell Metal Station", when Keith J. Carberry realizes that he gave Lyke a talking fish sidekick and then forgot for all 16-odd previous episodes.
  Keith J. Carberry: Hey guys, remember Tombo?
• Ribcage Ridge: Eastern Folly/Blackwick is built around an abbey built by some beast-worshiping nuns built inside the gigantic ribs of an unknown monster. The nuns have since departed, but the abbey is still around. The rest of the monster, a colossal seven-legged dragon, is still intact and possibly still alive, buried beneath the abbey.
• Shining City: Zevunzolia, a hypothetical utopian, paradaisical city introduced in the Bell Metal arc, which shines because it's built above (held aloft by?) the seventh sun of Sangfielle. Note that Sangfielle only has six of them right now, but there's a secret society bent on fixing that and making Zevunzolia real.
• Stealth Pun: The schedule for the two-week riverboat cruise on the Jade Moon concludes with "Day Fourteen: Final arrival, scuttling." The steamship turns into a swarm of bugs at the end of the trip and flies away over the hills.
• Symbiotic Possession: How heritrixes work. They're incorporeal spirits who make contracts with humans to borrow their bodies for a set amount of time. The human gets something out of this as well—in the case of Es's host, adventure and excitement.
• Tongue-Tied: Dyre Ode wants the various parts of his skeleton that have been scattered across Sangfielle back, but he's magically forbidden both from getting the bones himself and from talking about the situation directly. Getting his sternum back seems to lift this restriction, or at least allow him to talk freely with the specific people who now know.
• Visionary Villain: The villain of “The Candle Factory” arc, High Vicar Regan Alaway, intends to use Blackwick’s dragon egg as a power source to bring electricity and industrialization to Sangfielle and Concentus, starting with with electric lighting to make the night as bright as day. However, he’s also a vampire, so his motives aren’t considered entirely altruistic.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: Things go fairly well during the mission to find Janek right up until the group actually get to him and have to deal with the Pale Magistrate who's chasing him. Ezzek Semm is extremely tough, and deals out a lot of damage both physical and mental, poisoning Marn on a metaphysical level with his horns and removing Virtue's religion skill by yelling at her. The group has to abandon their original goal of not killing him until they're out the Pocket Dimension and just go all out, and even then, it takes everything they have to put Semm down and they've all taken nasty amounts of stress.
• Was Once a Man: The Awful Truth about the Red Zephyr: it was once Fezh, a Shape Knight transformed by their own best friend Calen into the very thing they dedicated their life to fighting. The Red Zephyr is not taking this well, although Pickman's letter (that this transformation is irreversible, but that embracing their trainhood might give them peace and power) seems to help.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • Omera of the Bell Metal Band loses it at Lyke for his accidental insinuation that the Band should have known Calen, who they'd all been friends with for years, was a traitor and responsible for Fezh's death.
  • Erm, the leader of the Bell Metal Band, goes ballistic and exiles Pickman from their station when she manhandles Calen and violently threatens him for the above crime. Laying hands on a fellow Shape Knight is a huge no-no for the order.
• The Worm That Walks: Duvall is mostly bees—he pissed off the Sleeping City by somehow entering it outside of schedule, and the bees of the Structure colonized him as a result. He doesn't mind the Body Horror so much as the question of who he even is if he's outnumbered in his own body by bees who occasionally run the show. Bee-Bee Gun and Literal Surveillance Bug come part and parcel with his condition.
• Wound That Will Not Heal: In the last part of the "Hymn of the Mother-beast" mission, the Pale Magistrate poisons Marn so hard that being poisoned becomes part of her. And they don't have anything in Blackwick that heals that kind of stress.

Season 7.5: The Road to PALISADE

Like the Road to PARTIZAN, this is an interstitial season of one-shots setting up major NPCs and events that effect PALISADE. It tells the story of the Divine Principality's ongoing civil war between the conservative Curtain of Divinity (later renamed the Bilateral Intercession) and the reformist Pact of Necessary Venture (later the Pact of Free States), the continued efforts of Millennium Break to combat the Principality, and those caught between these warring factions. In particular, the season's events largely revolve around Palisade - the newly-rediscovered planet on the edge of the Twilight Mirage, where the Divine Principality was first founded all those millennia ago.

Games played:

• HOUNDS, which tells the story of the young Elect Veronique and her Divine Fealty, who turn on Stel Nideo to conceal the secret of entering the Twilight Mirage, and must flee before they are punished.
• Stealing The Throne, which tells the story a daring Millennium Break heist to steal the Divine Discernment.
• Last Shooting, which is a story within a story about rival pilots from Apostolos and Nideo clashing on Palisade. The story itself comes from an in-universe novel that was banned by both Stels for defamation.
• Wagon Wheel, which tells the story of how Millennium Break first allied with Palisade resistance movements.
• Lancer, which tells the story of a group of Hypha (the people Thisbe's appearance is based on) fighting against the Pact.
• Orbital, which tells the story of how the Twilight Mirage became involved with Palisade.
• Serious Reading, which is an in-universe episode of the fictional politics podcast CENTRE/line.
• My Way, which tells the story of a professional wrestler, again through the medium of an in-universe podcast.
• Upstairs & Downstairs, which tells the story of a very important Kesh dinner party, and the beleaguered staff who have to make it actually happen.
• City Planning Department, which tells the story of the construction of the Crown of Glass.

The Road to PALISADE contains examples of:

• Affectionate Nickname: Veronique and Fealty call each other "Anchor".
• Cain and Abel: Vigna, an Elect, is Fingers Crossed's "ex-sibling". On top of already bitter sibling rivalry, they end up fighting to the death.
• Caper Crew: Stealing the Throne has Omi, master of precision timing; Fingers Crossed, the forger; Kinoki, the hacker; and Robet Schpace, the security specialist.
• Combat Pragmatist: In the Stealing the Throne episode, after getting disarmed in a dramatic swordfight with their twin, Fingers Crossed simply takes out a gun and shoots their opponent after said opponent makes the mistake of stopping to gloat.
• Dysfunctional Family: The Solstice family in Upstairs & Downstairs is composed of variations on the Upper-Class Twit: a foolish pushover father, three spoiled constantly-squabbling siblings, and a mother who's absent two-thirds of the time and steamrolling the entire household the rest of the time. They drive each other and the staff insane. When one of the siblings accidentally shoots their father during a hunt, his first reaction is to start arguing with his sister about how it was really her fault because she got in his way, rather than, you know, concern for the paterfamilias bleeding to death.
• Framing Device: In a meta twist, The Road to PALISADE is presented as a season of an in-universe podcast called "Perfect Imperfect" - a historical series which details the end of the Divine Principality's Perfect Millennium.
• Hostility on the Set: In-universe example on CENTRE/line. Ostensibly the hosts are all friends, as this is the main premise of the podcast, but cracks start to show, culminating in, memorably, Gala threatening to shit on Continental's lawn and Continental coldly reminding Gala that they're in Stel Orion space.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • After their defection, Fealty pointedly starts calling Veronique their Excerpt, the Twilight-Mirage-era term, rather than the Principality-standard "Elect".
  • The comma in "The Divine, Arbitrage" is always spoken aloud as though it were a word.
• Is This Thing Still On?: After things on CENTRE/line get increasingly tense, Continental, the lead host, cuts the mic of Gala, the sole Apostolosian host, and then cuts his own mic to handle Gala when they refuse to go quietly. The other hosts try to pretend everything is fine and go to an ad read while Gala and Continental shout at each other, all of them unaware that the entire increasingly vitriolic argument is still being recorded.
• Meaningful Rename:
  • The Curtain of Divinity is renamed the Bilateral Intercession, largely as a PR effort to move away from the shadowy and sinister image the Curtain cultivated.
  • The Pact of Necessary Venture likewise renames itself to the Pact of Free States in order to emphasise their goal of reforming the Divine Principality from a singular empire into a more decentralised coalition of independent political entities.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Before she and Fealty fully defect, Veronique reflexively opens fire on some ships who try to bring them back, and is immediately horrified at herself for firing on what she still considers to be her own people.
• Show Within a Show:
  • Perfect Imperfect - a podcast about the Perfect Millennium, the Divine Principality as it stood then, and the slow, stumbling road to what came next.
  • CENTRE/line - a political podcast featuring a number of wealthy Principality centrists from different Stels discussing the issues of the day. Notably, this makes the show a podcast-within-a-podcast-within-a-podcast.

Season 8: PALISADE

Seven hundred days' slow travel from the nearest Principality outpost,
It glittered unwatched, like a diamond in a closet - PALISADE.
A world once home to hope, ruined and turned to gravel by those who saw it more as foothold or springboard or open invitation to invasion.
PALISADE, the gateway to the Twilight Mirage.
A birthplace misremembered on purpose. A paradise in the sights of empire.

But do not forget PALISADE, itself a destination. Oh, how could you?
Slipping warships into orbit, dropping bombs and boots both
Onto PALISADE, where people don't have time for big questions.
On PALISADE, where the war isn't on its way: it's already here.
On PALISADE, where yesterday's ransom runs out tomorrow.
On PALISADE, where open doors make for open fears.

Do not demand emergence unless you're ready for emergency!
Do not lift up your hands if you ain't ready for a fight!
Don't say you're sorry for that shit you all sound so proud of!
Don't raise your voice at us, then say we're not polite!

We have held our breath, we have closed our eyes,
We have tied ourselves down with rope and wire,
We have flown in retrograde, we have swum against the tide,
We've tried every last trip to stop the clock's stride.

But nothing is stationary.
No, nothing is stationary.
I said nothing is stationary.
They're moving on us now.
Nothing is stationary.
History ain't stationary.
Not even corpses are stationary,
So we've got to start moving now!

Fifteen hundred days since they first landed on our planet.
Fifteen hundred days since Kesh started trying to steal our past.
Fifteen hundred days since their priest called our homes their gardens.
Fifteen hundred days since that first frontier telecast.
How many days until they know us by name?
How many days until we're the ones chasing them?
How many days until we're loud in the streets?
How many days?
How many days?

— Episode 1 opening narration

PALISADE is a direct sequel to PARTISAN, continuing on roughly five years after the events of that season. The war dividing the Divine Principality rages on, but the frontline has shifted elsewhere; Palisade - the ancient birthplace of the Principality, floating in space on the very edge of the Twilight Mirage. The Bilateral Intercession has gained a major foothold on the planet, in the hopes of gaining entry into the Mirage itself and seizing control of its power. They are opposed by a loose but fierce coalition of resistance groups, including Millennium Break, who have been assisting local rebels in combatting both the Bilats and any other imperialists with designs on Palisade.
The season is played in Armour Astir: Advent and, for the first time since COUNTER/Weight, is divided into both a ground game - featuring a squadron of Millennium Break fighters on Palisade - and a faction game navigating the large-scale events of the war. The ground game follows the crew of the Blue Channel.

The Blue Channel crew consists of:

• Kalvin Brnine: Captain of the ship, having changed their name from "Kal'Mera Broun" after the events of the ''PARTIZAN' finale, played by Ali Acampora.
• Thisbe: A synthetic person crafted to resemble a Hypha, played by Janine Hawkins.
• The Figure in Bismuth: A semi-crystalline, reanimated battle casualty "on-loan" from the Witch in Glass to Millennium Break, played by Andrew Lee Swan.
  • Levitation Cascabel-Gardner: A hotblooded young employee of the Cascabel-Gardner Catering Company who wields a Pile Bunker, also played by Andrew Lee Swan in the wake of Figure's demise.
• Phrygian: A Branched scientist looking to deal a lasting blow against the Principality, played by Keith J. Carberry.
  • Eclectic Opposition: A Delegate detective investigating the Bilateral Intercession's operations on Palisade, played by Keith J. Carberry following the death of Phrygian.
• Coriolis Sunset: An enthusiastic girl who resembles an angel and serves the mysterious Divine Devotion, played by Sylvi Bullet.

The faction game is played by Jack de Quidt and Art Martinez-Tebbel, with Austin Walker once again acting as GM for both games.

PALISADE features examples of:

• Accidental Murder: Coriolis accidentally kills her own father by swinging too wide with her mech's hammer on a decisive strike - the spike on the back of her hammer pierces him on the backswing.
• Apocalyptic Log: The first part of "Today Is A Monday" is the final transmission from the leader of the Bilat mech squad the Blue Channel and the Affliction destroy. It cuts off just as the Affliction's language-corrupting influence starts to work and the squad leader's words turn into nonsense.
• The Bait: In an early sortie, the crew of the Blue Channel are sent to prevent the Lost Duchess from reaching her coronation by assaulting the train she's being transported in. Unbeknownst to them, however, the actual purpose of their mission is to act as a diversion and lure the bulk of Stel Nideo's forces away from the Bontive Valley, with the Cause's true goal being to steal this strategic location out from under the Bilateral Intercession's noses. The fact that the majority of the Cause voted in favour of this plan and, crucially, voted against telling the Blue Channel the actual purpose of their mission, becomes a source of conflict.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Five Afflictions - unnatural creatures that rampage across Palisade and act as a threat to every other faction on the planet. They're later revealed to be ancient Divines from the pre-Twilight Mirage era of the Divine Fleet, who have been on Palisade (itself a massive Divine) since its creation.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Armour Astir: Advent features a system of five "approaches" to combat, each of which is strong against one other approach and weak to another, forming a sort of pentagon. Each of these different approaches is given an in-universe explanation in PALISADE as being different methods of harnessing Kalmeria - the newly-created source of magic. Different approaches are used by different factions, with each Stel of the Divine Principality favouring a different approach. In addition to this, each approach is associated with one of the five senses, resulting in peculiar sensations when encountered.
  • The Null Approach (or the Mundane Approach): Using Kalmeria and the Perennial Wave's natural technological negation attributes to cancel out or reduce magical effects. Commonly used by Stel Kesh and certain factions of Millennium Break (such as the Oxblood Clan and the Company of the Spade). Associated with a curious dampening of sound and light as though the world itself has become muffled. Effective against Arcane, but less effective against Elemental.
  • The Arcane Approach: Blending Kalmeria with older sources of power - such as the Chorus Bond, Q-Glass, Hyphan strati tech, and more. Tends to be used by Stel Columnar and the Frontier Syndicate in the form of independently-moving bits, funnels, and drones, and by Millennium Break in the form of more old-fashioned staves, orbs, and potions. Associated with strange visual phenomena such as eye floaters and optical auras. Effective against Divine, but less effective against Null.
  • The Divine Approach: Using Kalmeria as a medium to directly harness the power of a Divine. Used by all the Stels - particularly Nideo - as well as the people of the Twilight Mirage. Associated with a variety of smells, including ash, incense, sugar, mint, and sulfur. Effective against Profane, but less effective against Arcane.
  • The Profane Approach: Using Kalmeria to craft things out of the raw Perennial Wave - amorphous materials that shift rapidly between different states. Favoured by Stel Orion, as well as the Crown of Glass. Associated with sharp and unusual tastes, such as blood or berries. Effective against Elemental, but less effective against Divine.
  • The Elemental Approach: Bringing together Kalmeria and the powers of the Branched to create effects that tap into the environment - firing lightning, turning flesh to stone, and so on. Used primarily by the Branched, of course, as well as Stel Apostolos. Associated with sourceless physical sensations, such as an itch that can't be scratched, or the feeling of a finger running down one's back. Effective against Null, but less effective against Profane.
• Exact Words: Austin informs Sylvi that, as a consequence of a partially-successful attack, she can choose to make Coriolis "strike carelessly, causing collateral damage beyond your expectations." Sylvi chooses to make Cori accidentally attack her own father, Griesel Sunset, which kills him in addition to the foe she was targeting. After the fact, both Ali and Sylvi express astonishment at just how catastrophic the collateral damage was, which prompts Austin to draw their attention back to the text.
  Austin: You hear how you both said "I didn't expect that he'd be dead?" Beyond your expectations!
  Sylvi: You nailed it, man!
• Fun with Acronyms: The Hyper-Stealth Vehicle, or "HSV" for short.
• Gallows Humour: The characters (and the players, by extension) spend much of the high-stakes, high-intensity mission to disarm the Stellar Combustor cracking ridiculous jokes and having Seinfeldian Conversations about food and slurpees, much to the exasperation of the GM.
  Austin: I'm losing my mind! The next roll could end the season!
  Sylvi: You know what? I hope it does!
• Genius Loci: The planet of Palisade itself turns out to be a gargantuan Divine created thousands of years ago to serve as a potential new home for the people of the Divine Fleet.
• Godzilla Threshold: The Divine Principality deploys military officials called "Stargraves" to each solar system under their control. The Stargrave's role, in addition to being a high-ranking military leader, is to detonate the local stellar combustor in the event of an "existential threat to the Principality" - wiping out billions (if not trillions) of lives in the process. Elcessor is the Stargrave not just for the Palisade system, but for the Twilight Mirage and everything in it. The actions of the Hexagon on Palisade, including a failed assassination attempt on the Stargrave, lead her to broadcast a message to the entire planet informing them that the stellar combustor has been armed, and will be detonated if any further trangressions are made.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Phrygian gives their life to destroy not just the Stellar Combustor threatening Palisade and the Twilight Mirage, but every other Stellar Combustor in the galaxy.
• I Have Many Names: The Five Afflictions each have four different names: their original name as former Divines of the Divine Fleet, their "true" name, as well as the name given to them by the New Earth Hegemony thousands of years ago, and the name given to them by the fledgling Divine Principality some time after that.
  • "Reflection" or "Dust," also known as "Pride's Mirror," or the "Looking Glass."
  • "Antiquity" or "Refrain," also known as "Yesterday's Reprise," or the "Ghastly Chorus."
  • "Logic" or "Ravel," also known as "Labyrinth's Thread," or the "Hedge Maze."
  • "Decisiveness" or "Cleave," also known as "Whetstone's Opposite," or the "Sanguine Hatchet."
  • "Affection" or "Oversight," also known as "Hell's Facade," or the "Empty Garden."
• Magic from Technology: Kalmeria is a form of nanite or particle that has been spread across the galaxy thanks to the events of the finale of PARTIZAN. Having only been around for five years by the time PALISADE begins, Kalmeria is poorly-understood, but commonly used as a source of what is for all intents and purposes magical power.
• Meaningful Name: The Chimeric Cadent is a creature made up of three different beings melded into one, much like the mythological beast.
• Playing Both Sides: The capitalistic Divine, Arbitrage serves as one of the key pillars of the Frontier Syndicate - one of the Bilateral Intercession's three divisions on Palisade - while also directly influencing the Cause through their loyal servant, Mustard Red.
• Poor Communication Kills: Enforced. The knife-dragon Affliction causes language-based communication to break down—any attempt to talk while inside its range just comes out as a random string of words. In the middle of a mech battle, this is the last thing you want, since it makes it impossible to coordinate strategy or call for backup. Or, in the case of Cori, to offer terms of surrender. Cori's tenets call for her to destroy Devotion's enemies with impunity, so if her opponent doesn't explicitly yield, she can't spare them. She feels bad because the enemy pilot is so young, but still turns them into, as Sylvi says, "red mist".
• Put on a Bus: As discussed in the first faction game episode, while PALISADE focuses mainly on the conflict taking place on the titular planet, the civil war that has rent the Divine Principality is still ongoing throughout the galaxy. As a result, it's anticipated from the season's beginning that certain characters from PARTIZAN won't be returning in this season, as they simply are busy elsewhere.
• Rhymes on a Dime: Almost all of the season's opening narrations (such as the one at the start of this folder) have a unique, often lyrical style to them, which is implied to be a side-effect of Connodine's plan to get the entire planet of Palisade on-cycle.
• Robot Buddy: Brnine has a robotic companion who can be fitted into their backpack. Unfortunately, said companion is Asepsis, a Divine obsessed with purity and cleanliness.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After the stellar combuster is armed, many of the spies captured by the Blue Channel suddenly flip and promise to spill everything in exchange for a ride off-world.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The last of the Iconoclasts were sealed away in a concrete prison on Palisade by the Rapid Evening, sometime after the events of Twilight Mirage. Shortly before PALISADE begins, however, the Bilateral Intercession unintentionally opens the can up and releases them - now referring to themselves as The Usher of Truth. They disguise themselves as The Lost Duchess, Constantina Malady - a figure from Palisade myth — but their true form is revealed when the Blue Channel arrive to prevent the "duchess" from attending her coronation.
• Shaped Like Itself: City City, the City city.

They're inventing the perfect city - a divine city. The Divine City. The City city: City, the city. What's past a Divine? The City, the city. City City is the next city to be built on Palisade. It's also the Next City to be built on Palisade. City City is the future. City City is the Past. City City comes next. City. City City is the city. I imagine your Curtain folks could see this as the City city, too; a city where City happens. A city where tomorrow is Tuesday and today, it's Monday City. "City" is a verb in City City, but "city?" In City City, "city" is a noun, too. You're city. I'm city. Welcome to City.

• Theme Naming: The different factions of the Cause each have a name that is comprised of a colour followed by a body of water (eg. Blue Channel, Violet Cove, Rose River).

Bluff City

A campaign set in a profoundly weird fictional mid-Atlantic casino town. The series is released through Patreon, though the entire season was released for free during 2020 through a downloadable zip file. It uses different games roughly for each session, and explores a different side and a different time of Bluff City in every arc, connected by background events & characters. This goes from conspiracy theorist sleuths, petty criminals in over their heads, paranormal investigators, wrestlers, superheroes, & queer mystics building havens in the not-too-distant apocalypse.

Bluff City features examples of:

• Standard Police Motto: Played with — the Bluff City Police Department's motto is 'They protect us, they serve us, they protect and serve us'. At least according to the mayor.
• Louis Cypher: Mr. B. is from Hell.