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.
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Sifting Through The Ashes Dev Log: The Not-So-Quiet Year
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.
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