When Prelate Hulrun first hears about the radio, he can hardly bring himself to care. The Desnans are always nattering on about some nonsense, and while them spending money on trinkets to give out to farming communities is obviously a waste at least it means they aren't getting in his way. It's not like you could expect better of them anyway. This state of affairs continues blissfully unimpeded for months until Mendev starts handing out radios as a method of keeping in contact across long distances, at which point both the potential and why the Desnans would bother with it becomes more obvious. It's not, frankly, all that better than sendings since it's not secure against being listened in on, but it is cheap and and means he no longer has to choose between spending one of his fourth circle slots on it, buying extra scrolls, or paying Rathimus to keep a fourth circle slot open in case he needs to buy one. It's hardly a game changer, but as wizard inventions go it's rather practical, so he can't find it in himself to disapprove too much. There's some nonsense on a few of the other channels about freedom or some such, but he can just keep it tuned to the emergency line and it won't interrupt him. He has one of his subordinates do random check ins of other frequencies to make sure that demon cultists haven't started using it to coordinate, but at least thus far they seem to have not managed it.

When Karen Marsden encounters the radio, it is as a minor boon. She can comprehend the value of what the Abadarans are doing with prices, and understand the appeal of sports and adventuring stories, but the biggest value apparent to her is how it predicts the weather. She feels a moment of longing for just how much better a tool it would be, were prophecy not broken and oracles like her able to give far more advanced warning, but even only tracking where rains and winds are is still a useful accomplishment. And perhaps this limitation is only temporary; while prophecy will not repair itself, that's not a guarantee that mortals will not get better at tracking and predicting the whims of the skies. She puts some time into her schedule, to learn how radio receivers are constructed and ensure their distribution throughout her father's duchy.

Radio Free Avistan, by contrast, may well be the most important thing to happen since the conquest of Cheliax by Hell. She knows a lot of her fellow nobles will dismiss its power, but that kind of pretension is for people who don't understand the value of the spoken word. For someone like Karen, who heavily leans on her splendor to mediate disputes and end conflicts and convince people to do good, such a stance is lunacy. The spoken word has no more power than the skill and knowledge of the speaker and the abilities of those that hear, yes, but Freedom is nearly as good at public speaking as she is - maybe even better, since this is what she sounds like without the ability to tailor her words to her audience - and her audience is larger than anyone mortal has commanded since at least the shining crusade. If Freedom was accepting applications, she would volunteer to help on the spot, but the young woman is sensibly almost unreachable and her family's territory is hardly wealthy enough to send their own mass broadcasts across the continent, though she does see about having one with more local range constructed. She will still adventure, because it is necessary to help keep people safe, but for the first time she seriously considers whether her plans to rule should instead be plans to abdicate - she finds she cannot refute many of the arguments advanced, and it is not as though being descended from the last ruler is half so good a reason as being chosen by Iomedae to reign. It's not as though she'd have a shortage of work, after all; Lawful Good adventurers with healing are always in high demand.