I’m a bit behind on these “Dev Logs,” but Sifting Through The Ashes has finished its second and third full sessions. We got through Spring of The Quiet Year in our first full session, Our second session saw us through Summer and Fall, and now our third session got us through a rather quick Winter and the entirety of World Ending Game (by Everest Pipkin). We had a lot of good world development, got to add some interesting tidbits, and even my players helped me build in the direction I’d indicated we were going to travel, so I was able to get more stuff done on my turns that wasn’t just strictly advancing the worldbuilding required to set up the vision I’d pitched. I was also able to get a little free-form with it. We expanded the bird cult, found some magic crystals, learned about a geothermal plant, saw a volcano cool, failed to cure a rampant disease, catalogued a lot of plants, discovered a crystal-powered mech, and even learned about some cool anti-gravity rocks. We had a pretty good run before the stars fell, the war ended, and the world began to get coated in the ash of disintegrating space debree. And then we even had five killer scenes as we turned the arrival of the “frost shepherds” (the undefined force that brings an end to The Quiet Year’s gameplay that, in our world, was drifting boats carrying refuges from all over the world) into the gradual end of the world in which we’d built our small slice of continued life. It was good. And incredibly melancholy.

Thanks to all of this work on everyone’s part, huge chunks of the upcoming campaign have locked in for me. There’s still plenty to go and tons of work to be done, but I feel like I’ve gotten a better grasp on the core of what all that will be thanks to the world we did. And boy howdy did we do work! We weren’t all exactly on the same page (though my long-time player and I were, which felt great), but we were all pushing or pulling in the same direction and got quite a bit of progress made as we slowly worked our way through the various problems the game made for us, the issues we made for ourselves, and the inevitable frustrations of living out one’s days is a slowly dying world. I was pleased to see how often my players chose to interpret the “end of a project” that happens so much in The Quiet Year as something other than a full success. Many times these projects we all started and followed to their conclusions ended not with a solution so much as a step taken toward what might one day be a solution. I mean, our community got some kind of strange disease supposedly from exploring the ruins beneath the island we chose as the main settlement and while it was worked on multiple times throughout the course of the game, it was never quite cured. There was a project to finall cure that was just a week or two away from being done by the end of the game, but there was no more time with which to complete it. More refugees had arrived, after all, and there was more urgent work to attend to. Which means it’s going to have implications for the upcoming campaign.

I might not carry everything forward. Not every little thing that happened is something we spent much time or energy on, nor is everything we did spend time and energy on interesting in the kind of way it needs to be for me to consider brining it forward through the unknown reaches of time between the end of that first game and the start of the campaign proper with Dungeons and Dragons 5e (2014). Enough of it is that I’ve got the framework figured out, but I’m willing to let a lot of stuff slip through the cracks. The obsidian and anti-gravity stones are definietly coming with, for instance, but the island full of isolationist psychic people probably won’t, even if I didn’t already have the perfect justification for why it would vanish over the years. There will definitely be some element of them worked into the world on the micro-scale, but nothing as influential as that disease we never cured or the strange, nearly-unavigable ruins beneath the island that seemed to swallow ninety percent of the explorers who decided to check them out. Or the fact that the community spent a lot of time and effort cataloging all the new plants on the island and figuring out how to use them as medicines and poisons. Not sure how that last bit is going to show up in game, but I’m sure I’ll think of something more interesting than “robust alchemcy and herbalism industries/cultures” by the time we start the campaign proper in however many weeks.

Which I say because that’s where we’re at. There’s no knowing how long the next two games are going to take us. Sanctuary (of Sanctuary and Sentinel) could be quick or it could take a long time, depending on the dice and rolls and whatnot, and I haven’t even read Sentinel yet. So I need to start seriously preparing for D&D and Armour Astir: Advent since those will take a long time to prepare, even just mechanically and I can’t count on the last games taking us much later than May or June. Hell, I’d be surprised if we weren’t already running the D&D portion of the game by the time June rolls around. We’re only on our second month and, thanks to everyone’s interest in scheduling extra sessions, through two of our four pre-campaign games. I need to start figuring out how to get people digital access to all of my D&D information without giving Wizard of the Coast more money and how all of that will map to Amour Astir once we’ve built our Armour Astir characters and have to build them backwards into Level 1 D&D characters. It’ll be a fun challenge, for sure, but I can’t let this one go unaddressed for very long since I, personally, as the GM, must be prepared before my players start asking questions. Not entirely prepared, of course, just prepared enough that I can provide answers or even just have a strong enough foundation to make things up as necessary. I’d prefer the former, but I’ve spent years working from the latter position and am quite comfortable with it. I just, you know, need to do the groundwork.