tag: The Quiet Year

Finally, finally, attended Dragonmeet! This was its first time in ExCeL, which is very easy to get to, with the Elizabeth line skipping the previous changes I’ve had at Bank/Monument1. I stayed nearby so I could make the 9am morning game session start. The train drama coming down from Northampton the night before was therefore moderated by merely cancelling my Friday-evening plans 😮‍💨. I wasn’t given a programme on the way in, but I forgot it had anything other than the hall layout, so I didn’t pick one up after my game. This was a mistake, I forgot all the seminars that were on. There were three tracks, somewhere. ...

Time for another impromptu game of The Quiet Year! Much like last time, I offered it into a roll20 session when we realised we didn’t want to continue a campaign without one of the players. Steampunk guinea-pigs need water and coal.. ...

Tried having a quick game of The Quiet Year due to a last minute cancellation in a regular game. I normally like planning ahead, even a “no prep” game, so this is a big deal for me. Can I actually just set up a game and go? Well, yes! 😌 Player: Is this game dark and miserable? Me: No, someone told me they played as meerkats in a zoo. It’s as light or as dark as you want. Behold the tale of the brutal religious civil war of the penguins… 🐧🐧🐧 ...

The Quiet Year is a sort-of-coop map-drawing and story-telling game. You use a deck of cards (special printed deck or there’s a lookup table for a normal playing card deck) to draw events, and use them to tell a story. I say sort-of-coop, in that it’s more like Roman consuls where each day/month it would swap who was “in charge” rather than agree or compromise on a single coherent course of action. In fact you’re explicitly not supposed to actually talk through each event together and agree it. You draw on the map the result of each event to build a recording of the story, and you can start building projects to fix the problems beset by your tiny community. The events are things like: An old piece of machinery is discovered, broken but perhaps repairable. What is it? What would it be useful for? As the seasons turn towards Winter, they get darker: The weakest among you dies. Who’s to blame for their death? There are other better reviews, and I don’t really want to do that here. Although I suppose this is a small review of the roll20 module that I used. ...