We’ve had our first session of the tenatively titled “Sifting Through The Ashes” campaign. We had a good starting session of The Quiet Year (By Avery Alder) and while it took most of our session to get through Spring, there was a bunch of slowly figuring things out as we played and periods of thoughtful silence, so I’m hoping this next session (the day I’m writing this, actually) will go a bit faster [it did! But more on that next week]. Not that I’m in any kind of hurry, I just want to keep things moving along and there’s plenty of ground left to cover. I want to keep us moving so that we aren’t still working up to the actual game we’ll be playing by the time next year rolls around. After all, we only have one regular session a month and up to two additional sessions scheduled as/if we find a day to hold them. That’s not nothing. Three sessions in a single month is pretty good even for a weekly campaign, in my experience, and we’ve definitely gotten that this month, so it looks like we’re moving at a pretty good pace. And yet I don’t want to risk us faltering or losing steam at a crucial moment. I also want to pace things so that my players have enough time to start thinking about whatever game we’re going to play next and getting through two seasons of The Quiet Year tonight (the day I wrote this, not the day it gets posted) would mean that they have two weeks before our next session and can spend that time reading the rules for the next game we’ll play. I’ve got it all planned out and being able to stick to that plan would be nice. Not essential, of course, just nice.
Our first full session went pretty well, also. Everyone seemed to get along, everyone had ideas, and while I had to break some of the rules of The Quiet Year to keep things going and encourage my players to speak up more, I was able to largely refrain from suggesting things to people. I mostly helped expand their horizons, in terms of what they might consider, and backed them up when they seemed to feel that their idea wasn’t a good one. Some day, maybe, I’ll finally play The Quiet Year in the quick-and-quiet manner it was originally intended, but for now I’m still speaking up to offer guidance as I continue the often-necessary work of being the facilitator in a “GM-less” game. Most people, even those not new to tabletop gaming entirely, aren’t used to being the storytellers when presented with a world. They’re used to video games and books and movies, of following a narrative or acting within clearly defined boundaries with varying degrees of freedom. Even the most experienced players would stuggle to produce their own boundaries if prompted to tell a story, let alone learn how to operate without them. It takes practice to be able to fill in a world, one single pencil-scratch at a time as everyone passes the paper around, and that’s not a skill most people develop. But I’ve spent my life developing it–learning to live within and embrace uncertainty not as a thing to fear or flail against but as something to play with. It’s like learning to draw with negative space. Adding something, a little bit at a time, until a shape suddenly emerges from the nothingness, made almost entirely of what you haven’t done pressed up against the little you have.
Drawing with negative space is maybe my favorite way to think about this sort of thing. Mostly because we’re all operating by drawing one bit of boundary at a time, each of us contributing to whatever will finally arise from the blank page we started with as we operate without knowledge of what everyone else is trying to make. It is the work of the skilled artist to shape an image from that kind of chaos, and the work of the skilled narrative weaver to draw the various threads into a single tapestry, and it’s some of my favorite work to do. So I add my little boxes to the void, steering things one tiny bit at a time when things start to wander and letting the group flow unimpeded the rest of the time. After all, we all want to see a picture in the end. We all want it to come together. Like seeing faces in random marks on a wall, knots in bark, swirls in paint, or folds in fabric, everyone can easily grasp the shape of a story as it emerges and everyone playing in good faith (which they all seem to be doing so far) will start to lean into this stuff when it finally begins to show up. I won’t have to guide much. All I’ve got to do is make sure that some of the shapes I want involved make their way into the drawing if my players wind up not adding them on their own. Which I think some of them might do on account of the minimal but still specific pitch I’ve given them.
Outside of that, I’ve been ruminating on where things will end up. I’ve had a lot of ideas about how to shift the scale of things, on how to create convincing micro and macro villains for the shifting scales we’ll eventually arrive at, and how to make it all FEEL like something they should care about. It remains to be seen if they will care about it, but I think I’ve come up with a compelling micro villain, complete with macro counterparts and some kind of part to play up and down the scale, wherever we eventually wind up. I’ve never actually done something like this before, so I’m a little nervous. I’ve had campaigns where the scale has gone wildly out of control and what was supposed to be a super local campaign wound up going world-wide much sooner than I expected, but I’ve never explicitly planned a shift in scale and tone like this one is going to be, nor have I ever successfully (by my own metrics, which are admittedly quiet harsh when applied to me) pulled off such a shift in scale, so who knows what will happen. All the plans in the world won’t help me if I fail to take advantage of them or properly execute the transition. Vision is not enough: skill and practice matter more and I have had precious little of the latter. I think I can do it. Heck, I even believe I can do it (I wouldn’t be attempting it at all if I didn’t believe that). I just… Need to keep preparing. Just in case. Which is why these dev logs will continue.