Due to one of the three players in this group being unavailable and me not wanting to start the game without them, we’re on session two of side-game stuff. Last time, we used the Heroic Chronicle and some session time to build characters and this time we started a game of The Quiet Year to help build up the community that would eventually include the characters we made last time. We only got through two seasons since getting the game going took a bit of work and we used Spring to get into the swing of things, so we’ll be returning to this game for at least part of our next session to wrap it up, probably do a little character stuff, and then likely end early since I’ll need time to draw the lines on the timeline between where The Quiet Year ends and the Dungeons and Dragons campaign begins. I’m good at improvising and getting things going with little to no lead time, but I know things will work better if I take the time to actually prepare rather than try to bust out a decent half-session immediately. Since this group has attendance issues and is still relatively new to working together (without the instant chemistry that my other campaign, The Magical Millennium, had), I want to make sure the sessions really stick the landing, especially since I need to do more directing and game running work than I do with my other group. With The Magical Millennium, I’m pretty sure they’d play without me if I couldn’t make it, roleplaying scenes and making up a new events to put themselves through as they went. With The Rotten, I need to work to draw some of the players out a bit more and pull them toward creativity, a fact that was pretty apparent this past weekend.

Now, it’s not that my players aren’t creative people with active, interesting imaginations that come up with some pretty cool stuff, I just have to do a decent amount of poking, prodding, and prompting to get them to actively participate. They work a bit better within the more rigid and rules-oriented confines of Dungeons and Dragons, where they have a degree of familiarity with said rules and a firm grasp on the way they believe D&D sessions should go, but I’m more interested in the collaborative storytelling I’ve been chasing (and repeatedly getting) in The Magical Millennium. To get it here, I have to oil the wheels until things start running smoothly. We’ll have to see if I’ll have to do this work every session we actually have or if they’ll get into the swing of things eventually, but right now, while playing the more open-ended game that is The Quiet Year, it took a bit of prompting and some very specific examples to get things going.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, The Quiet Year is a game by Avery Alder that uses a deck of cards to play through the weeks of a year between one conflict and another while a community rebuilds itself in this time of relative peace and stability. The deck is sorted into suits to represent each season (or, if you buy a hard copy of the game, you can use the special deck of seasons that comes with it) and the players take turns drawing cards from the deck, following one of the prompts on the card (or sometimes following the only prompt on the card). All the while, they’re drawing things on a map prepared at the start of the game to represent notable events that happen over the course of the game, such as a shift in the abundances and scarcities set while making the map or new discoveries made by the community, while taking turns starting and resolving community projects, holding discussions, and discovering the world around the land they’ve begun to occupy. This process starts in Spring and Continues into Winter, ending when the King of Spades (the suit associated with Winter) is drawn and the Frost Shepherds (a purposefully vague entity) arrives, heralding the end of the game and the end to this year of relative quiet and peace. It’s a pretty fun game that is GREAT for building out a location and the people who live there.

For our game, I’m setting the community we build as point in the world’s timeline and then drawing lines between it and the Sylum our characters will start the campaign in, nominally as at least semi-permanent residents. I’ve got some ideas of what the “Frost Shepherds” might be for our game, but I’m holding off on any kind of firm decision until after we’ve finished the game. I want to leave myself open to new and potentially more interesting ideas, after all, though I know it will need to be something that is at least kind of disastrous in order to prevent the Sylum my players are building from being too secure, happy, and comfortable right out of the gate. Which means that the two fixed points on my timeline probably won’t be that similar–since the version of the Sylum from when the game starts needs to be at least stable enough to trade with an undestroyed Haven. All of which gives me plenty of stuff to fuel ideas about what has gone on in the thirty-odd years between the two moments in time and tons of building blocks with which to build out the greater area around this community that they’re going to be supporting and protecting. It’ll also help me figure out what kind of resources the community will need, what they’ll have plenty of that they can trade with other communities, and what kind of local dangers the community is set up to deal with, since that’s baked directly into The Quiet Year and I can just keep an abstracted version of that system in place. I’ve got a ton of ideas on how that stuff might be used for upgrades to the Sylum, their gear, or their allies and how proactively keeping things abundant will be more beneficial than burning resources down to scarcities before topping them off again. We just need to get through the latter half of this game and then actually have a full, proper session of the campaign before I can introduce it to my players. I don’t want them trying to game The Quiet Year, after all. Not that I think they would. I just don’t want to tempt them with meta play like that.