Welcome to the Podcast of Ice and Fire, the longest running podcast dedicated to George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire Series. If you are a new listener, we strongly recommend that you read this guide before listening to our episodes.

First of all, almost every podcast episode contains spoilers for all published A Song of Ice and Fire books. There are a couple of episodes that are the exception, and this is mentioned in the text posts accompanying these episodes, but otherwise we strongly recommend reading to the end of A Dance with Dragons before listening to our shows or posting in our forums. If you are a TV series viewer, but not a reader of the books, you should particularly avoid our episodes and forums for now, unless we make one of our TV episode recap episode spoiler free, which will be listed in the episode’s text description.

There are also references and spoilers to the three Hedge Knight short stories based in the same world of Westeros, mainly in our chapter reread episodes. If you are concerned about spoilers from these works, then you may want to read these works beforehand (links to the easiest place to purchase hard copies are at the end of this post, but they may also be available in ebook format).

Second, many of our episodes contain (discussion of) explicit content on par with the book series’ content. Just like the books, our podcast is for adults and parental guidance (PG25) is advised. Our podcast is an acquired taste and will never (and could never) suit everyone. In general, our podcast has always been similar to the type of environment you have casually chatting with your close friends at the dinner table or around the campfire. Now, we release the end result for the enjoyment of our listeners, but that factor needs to be kept in consideration. There is a lot that any one of us says (or any of our guest hosts say) that can be stripped of its sarcasm, taken out of context, or too seriously in general. If you hear something on the podcast that makes you laugh, cry or howl in rage, feel free to join our forums and join the discussion there and let us know. We have a very laid back community and we welcome both constructive criticism and (respectful) discussions and debates. Some of our most ardent fans started out as people who initially disliked or criticised the podcast {Apocalypse Dan, Lex, etc}.

Third, we have had a large collection of guest hosts during our run and look forward to podcasting with many more in the future. Many of our guest hosts are our listeners and members of our discussion forums. Other guest hosts have been established members of the ASOIAF community, from Westeros.org, WinterisComing.net, Tower of the Hand, and so forth. If you are interesting in guest hosting with the podcast, check out the guest host guide here - viewtopic.php?f=3&t=315

Fourth, our podcast has been running for 4 years and a lot of things have happened since the first episode. When we started podcasting, both A Dance with Dragons and HBO’s Game of Thrones were merely faint glimmers in the horizon. The current majority of our episodes (everything up to episode 61) were recorded before A Dance with Dragons was released. We have added and lost a collection of hosts to our podcasting crew throughout that period. We have reread the books several times since then and become more comfortable podcasting with each other and podcasting in general.

So, is it a good idea to listen through the episodes straight from the first one to the last one? That is definitely an option and many of our current listeners have followed that path. But there are other options as well. I personally feel that we didn’t really get going until about 10 episodes in (with exceptions such as episode 3 & 7) and we didn’t really hit our stride until the mid 30’s episodes. Similarly with our ongoing chapter re-read, we started off shaky with a 4-5 chapters per episode format, but have now settled on a more in-depth 2 chapter per episode format that got going well late in A Game of Thrones and now in A Clash of Kings. That is my opinion, and others may disagree at when exactly the podcast hit its stride. The point is, don’t be afraid to listen to the episodes out of order and to listen to some of our best ones first. We have a lot of standalone episodes that can be listened easily out of order –if you don’t understand some of the terminology or inside jokes, check out here - http://podcastoficeandfire.com/?page_id=2 and feel free to post in the forums if you want recommendations or other points of view on this. Make sure to check out the Podcast Statistics thread for some very interesting stats and info on the episodes gathered by Podcast historian Brynden: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1045

Finally, if you start to become a fan of our podcast, feel free to help us out with the current “Best of the Podcast of Ice and Fire” project. Check out details here - viewtopic.php?f=8&t=864 Also, try your hand in the current art project that is drawing the book series in MS paint, here - viewtopic.php?f=4&t=356.. In general, feel free to join our forums and add to our discussions.

Thanks for reading and happy listening!

Also: Add APOIAF to skype. Sometimes we draw upon listeners randomly during episodes, so that gives you the chance to be pulled into a podcast recording without warning.

Notes: To follow some of the forum links above, you need to register an account in our forums (the announcement forum is the only one that shows up to unregistered users)