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Autumn -- Week 8quote:A group goes out to explore the map more thoroughly and finds something that had been previously overlooked. While on a trip to the herb fields, Daniel stumbles through a weakened patch of earth and discovers a small system of shallow caves. Within is a wondrous find: several beehives, many more than just the ones we had been using before. With careful cultivation honey should no longer be in short supply. Action -- Start A Project: Lana says the time for talk is through. Her cadre begin working with the salvaged metal to fashion it into weapons to be used against the Scarred men.   Projects: Tory uncovers the branch's secrets (1); Building weapons (2) Abundances: Fishing Nets, Shelter, Faith, Fruit [u[Scarcities:[/u] Needles & Thread, Guns, Wood Contempt: UnCO3 (0); Everything Counts (0); Josef Bugman (0); One Tall Fellow (1); Blurrymystr (0) Everything Counts fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Apr 4, 2015 |
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Apr 3, 2015 02:47
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Autumn -- Week 9quote:The Parish Arrives. Who Are they? Why have they chosen your community? And for what? Also known as the Wandering Conclave the books before the end talk of them. They are all tall and thin and appear to walk with a very odd almost birdlike gait. They come with caged ravens and release them around the tree before heading into the forest with smiles on their faces. They return and tell us that we are to be commended about the way we have worked, and that we should be ready for anything. Action -- Discover something New: The parish has left us a gift. In the centre of the forest there now rises a gigantic tree, its bark fresh and clean and its leaves the colour of gold. Some are saying that it means we should create a second temple.   Projects: Tory uncovers the branch's secrets (0); Building weapons (?) Abundances: Fishing Nets, Shelter, Faith, Fruit [u[Scarcities:[/u] Needles & Thread, Guns, Wood Contempt: UnCO3 (0); Everything Counts (0); Josef Bugman (0); One Tall Fellow (1); Blurrymystr (0) [/quote]
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Apr 3, 2015 10:18
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Project Completed: It's night when Tory staggers out of the temple, blearily claiming to have seen her grandfather alive and well. We give her food and water and she recounts how, after days of shaking the branch with little sustenance, she saw Kalen walking downriver and looking over the old camp. These were not signs and runes to be interpreted, but true visions, she claims.
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Apr 3, 2015 12:49
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OOC: Has anyone accidentally drawn more cards than they were supposed to? My turn is only week 10, but there aren't any cards to draw from the Autumn deck. e: Looks like 2, 7, 10, J are the cards that are missing. One Tall Fellow fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Apr 4, 2015 |
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Apr 4, 2015 01:39
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I've only got the three. Maybe the "discard" option from summer overlapped?
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Apr 4, 2015 07:43
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OOC: Here's how it should go:
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Apr 4, 2015 08:57
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Rechecked, just got 2 it seems.
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Apr 4, 2015 18:31
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Same.
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Apr 4, 2015 19:14
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Autumn -- Week 10quote:Someone returns to the community. Who? Where were they? After stealing away in the night during the summer, Ashtun returns to us a changed man. He tells us that he was accosted by venom dogs; the Silent People he feared saved him, but not before he was bitten. They were able to save his life, but not his leg. He had been recuperating in their camp, but he is now strong enough to return. Action -- Start a Project:  Given the improving good will between our people and the looming winter, Orenthal commissions a small party to take some those goods that we have in abundance to see if we might make an exchange with the Silent folk.  Projects: Building weapons (0); Establish trade with the Silent People (2) Abundances: Fishing Nets, Shelter, Faith, Fruit Scarcities: Needles & Thread, Guns, Wood Contempt: UnCO3 (0); Everything Counts (0); Josef Bugman (0); One Tall Fellow (1); Blurrymystr (0)
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Apr 4, 2015 20:43
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Complete a project: There's only so much that can be done without a furnace, but after a couple of weeks Lana's group has some repurposed hatchets, sawblades, and several ever-reliable nail-studded clubs.
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Apr 7, 2015 04:59
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Autumn -- Week 11quote:A project just isn't working out as expected. Action: Discover Something New - It is not noticed right away, but the enormous stone face carved into the mountains north of us has been defaced. A pair of deep, jagged grooves have been carved out of either cheek. There was no sign of anyone performing this task, which must have taken considerable coordination. It simply appeared overnight.  Projects: Locate the Silent People (2) Abundances: Fishing Nets, Shelter, Faith, Fruit Scarcities: Needles & Thread, Guns, Wood Contempt: UnCO3 (0); Everything Counts (0); Josef Bugman (0); One Tall Fellow (1); Blurrymystr (0)
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Apr 7, 2015 19:13
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OOC: We're coming up to Winter (the turn after next), where one of the cards will tell us that the Frost Shepherds have arrived and the game is over. If you draw it, you quote the text and end the game immediately – no narration, no action or anything else. Once the game is over we can speculate on what really happened and who/what the Frost Shepherds were, but no-one can say for sure. Autumn – Week 12 quote:A project finishes early. Which one? Why? Action – Start a Project: Lana and her compatriots sharpen their new weapons, prepare healing salves, pack what little ammunition we have left for our few killing rods and begin the trek upriver, clinging to the edge of the trees on the far side. The disease-ridden people will be driven away from this place.   Projects: Drive out the diseased scarred folk (1) Abundances: Fishing Nets, Shelter, Faith, Fruit Scarcities: Needles & Thread, Guns, Wood Contempt: UnCO3 (0); Everything Counts (0); Josef Bugman (0); One Tall Fellow (1); Blurrymystr (0)
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Apr 7, 2015 21:35
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Taking one Contempt because of Lana. Autumn - Week 13 quote:Harvest is here, and plentiful. Add an Abundance. The recently discovered bees are fat and docile. Several jars are filled with honey and brought back to camp; even whole sections of honeycomb are cut out without any reaction from the bees. Action - Discover Something New: With only one leg, Ashtun obviously isn't able to move around much, so he spends his time at the river manning the nets and keeping an eye out on things. Perhaps its this extra time spent here that allows him to notice a glint in the water. He and his friend Tash investigate, digging around in the silt, and find large chips and flecks of gold.   Projects: Drive out the diseased scarred folk (0) Abundances: Fishing Nets, Shelter, Faith, Fruit, Honey Scarcities: Needles & Thread, Guns, Wood Contempt: UnCO3 (0); Everything Counts (1); Josef Bugman (0); One Tall Fellow (1); Blurrymystr (0)
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Apr 8, 2015 04:38
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Project Completed: Lana and her band find fewer of the scarred folk upriver than expected – mostly the surviving sick and the elderly, and a few caretakers still in their camp. After a brief, but tense standoff with our heavily-armed rangers they agree to leave. The whole event is watched with uncertainty and fear by the healthy scarred folk living near us.
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Apr 8, 2015 10:31
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Winter- Week 1quote:In preparation for the coming year the community begins a huge undertaking. Start a project that will take at least 5 weeks. The fight against the scarred men has worried many and even after the parishes visit it is decided that to defend ourselves we will need walls. The old and burned trees are to be torn down and used to make a wall around our land to both mark it and to protect us. Action- Start a new project: We have an untapped wealth of metal now remaining behind after the fighting. It is decided that there will be time now to beat swords into plowshares, and to make things that the community needs.   Projects: Build a wall around the village (5). Make needle and thread (2) Abundances: Fishing Nets, Shelter, Faith, Fruit, Honey Scarcities: Needles & Thread, Guns, Wood Contempt: UnCO3 (0); Everything Counts (1); Josef Bugman (0); One Tall Fellow (1); Blurrymystr (0)
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Apr 8, 2015 11:16
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Winter -- Week 2quote:Now is the time to conserve energy and resources. A project fails, but gain an Abundance. After preparing the lion's share of stakes that will form the wall, we find that the ground already is too frozen to dig into with ease -- we cannot lay posts. Unable to proceed, the wall goes unfinished; the stakes will provide us with a wealth of firewood for the coming cold. Action -- Hold a Discussion: What can we do to protect ourselves and our camp now that the wall has stalled?  Projects: Make needle and thread (1) Abundances: Fishing Nets, Shelter, Faith, Fruit, Honey, Firewood Scarcities: Needles & Thread, Guns Contempt: UnCO3 (0); Everything Counts (1); Josef Bugman (0); One Tall Fellow (1); Blurrymystr (0)
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Apr 8, 2015 16:06
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We now have weapons and people with the will to use them - let them be sentries and warriors both.
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Apr 8, 2015 17:04
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We must not look vulnerable. We should convert the venom dog skulls into something our sentries can wear to put fear in the hearts of those who would take what is ours.
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Apr 8, 2015 18:01
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Use the extra manpower as scouts and diplomats, we need to find what has happened to our silent friends and to make the closer scarred people aware of our friendship.
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Apr 8, 2015 20:43
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We should run drills and sparring matches; let every citizen become an able defender.
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Apr 9, 2015 02:20
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Agreed all around. We seem to have many enough who are already able and willing to defend us.
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Apr 9, 2015 02:38
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Winter -- Week 3quote:A headstrong community member tries to take control of the community. How are they prevented from doing this? Orenthal had been brooding since his trade expedition returned in failure. He has spent long hours sitting in the shade of the temple, starring at the scarred face of the man carved into the mountain. Then, one evening shortly after the sun had set, he starts screaming and ranting about how we can't stay here anymore, we have to leave before it's too late. We must find a new safe place to live or we will disappear like the Silent Folk, he cries. He grabs a torch from a sentry and tries to burn the temple down but he is quickly subdued. Action - Start a Project: The old man's ravings are mostly disregarded, but some on the Council think back on the hardships that followed the destruction of our previous settlement. If the worst were to happen - if we were to be driven out again - it would be wise to have a plan in place. They dispatch a small team of three hunters to scout out potential new settlement locations. Hopefully it will be unnecessary.   Projects: Make needle and thread (1), Scout potential settlement location (4) Abundances: Fishing Nets, Shelter, Faith, Fruit, Honey, Firewood Scarcities: Needles & Thread, Guns Contempt: UnCO3 (0); Everything Counts (1); Josef Bugman (0); One Tall Fellow (1); Blurrymystr (0)
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Apr 9, 2015 18:22
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Winter – Week 4
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Apr 9, 2015 18:39
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And that's the end of the game. So what does everyone think – about the ending, the Frost Shepherds, how the game ran, the choices we made, the things left undone? If you've been reading along as we've been playing and have any comments, feel free to post them now too. I'm gonna wait a little before posting my own thoughts on this game, but I will say that despite one or two rough patches (in my view) I'm pretty pleased with how it all turned out. EDIT: I've drawn the remaining cards in the tabletop and left them out in the order we would have drawn them (starting with "all the animals and young children are crying and won't stop" and finishing with "someone comes up with an ingenious solution to a big problem") so you guys can check out what we would have contended with had the Frost Shepherds arrived later. UnCO3 fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Apr 9, 2015 |
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Apr 9, 2015 18:39
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I like to hope that they are just here to talk and to bring in the new year, sort of like the Parish. But I doubt it.
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Apr 9, 2015 21:27
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This was my first time playing The Quiet Year so my initial thoughts are about the gameplay experience rather than the content of the game. This was very different from anything I've played before - there's something simultaneously scary and liberating about having such total power during your turn and such lack of power when it's someone else's turn. I really enjoyed it! I think everyone came up with great stuff. There was a lot on the table - just look at that map, my god - for us to play with. As far as our little community... for a long time I felt like they weren't going to make it. But starting sometime in the Autumn, I changed my mind. If the Frost Shepards are as menacing as they sound, I think a few of them would have survived, enough to start over again somewhere else.
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Apr 9, 2015 23:08
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This was pretty intense. Definitely a very unpredictable game in terms of outcome. I agree with BlurryMystr; having everyone in charge, simultaneously helping and hindering, led to some exciting gaming.
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Apr 10, 2015 06:38
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Like Blurrymystr, it was my first time playing. I didn't really feel like I had the hang of how contempt was supposed to work, but other than that, I thought it was a pretty darn good game. As for the fate of our community, I am a little worried. Even if the Frost Shepherds aren't some deadly force (which I am unconvinced of, because what if they took the Silent People?) the game ended before our folks could finish needle and thread, and they need to think about clothing for winter 
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Apr 10, 2015 14:00
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Yeah Contempt is a little tricky. It doesn't mechanically force or enable you to do anything. All it is is a sign that you think the community has internal issues that need to be resolved. That's going to affect the way you (and others) play, but it's not a restriction in any way, which has upsides and downsides. As for the Frost Shepherds, the game text is very sparse on them and the only real information we have - that we 'might not survive' - doesn't strongly indicate anything one way or the other (unlike, say, 'it's unlikely we'll survive'). Their arrival might not actually be a bad thing. They could be allegorical. The term could be a stand-in for a disease or disaster. In the first game I played in on SA (linked in the recruit thread OP) things turned out very differently from how they did here - when I think of the Frost Shepherds and their arrival in this game I think of people cowering around the hearths of their stone huts and of great and terrible noises in the darkness, echoing between the mountain ranges. I'm kind of interested in playing this by starting in Winter, either swapping the Frost Shepherds card with an Autumn card (and renaming them the Rain/Cloud/Mist/Fog Shepherds or something) or picking an Autumn card to end the game on and letting the Frost Shepherd be another group in the game like the Silent People and the scarred men were here. The tone of the game would be fairly different, what with the ending being in Autumn, where the oracle is full of fear, death and devastation. Anyway, I'll have my full thoughts up soon.
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Apr 10, 2015 16:23
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Okay, organised my thoughts. First off, the game took quite a different path from the previous one I was in. Here we started off doing well, successfully dealt with a social conflict, gathered resources and then things started going terribly wrong. Autumn was a massive downward spiral and I think we were still descending, albeit slower than before, in what little of Winter we played. The dramatic irony of knowing that the Frost Shepherds will arrive becomes kind of sad as the end approaches. There's so much to do and you don't know how much time you have, only that it's probably all for nothing. I was thinking of having Barton and Daniel preserve our fruit with honey and herbs, Mezem write a new history, Tory use the branch to see (hallucinate?) what happened to the Silent People etc., but the nature of the game is things get left unfinished. That said, I think in hindsight we told an overarching story. My take is that our community was traumatised by the Jackals (who got progressively more disturbing) and struggled to decide between kindness and violence when faced with new or unknown tribes. Ultimately their uncertainty and fear isolated them from everyone else and their attempts to reach out to the Silent People seemingly came too late. Within that was the story of the discontented and suddenly-empowered Storm Oak worshippers getting more and more vocal until the Council had to admit its rule wasn't the best way and distributed power more evenly, peacefully ending a potential powderkeg situation (though not without remnants of the conflict as the seasons went by). A few of the things I liked about the game: Mezem revealing that he killed his brother. The kid must have been pretty messed up by then – living through the war, fighting Sameal and seeing him leave and return stronger twice over, being at the forefront of the Council/temple conflict, and of course watching his family slowly die. Then, with a complete absence of childish naivete, he murders his own brother, cops to the crime and asks that people just punish him so they have more time to prepare for winter. That was pretty brutal, and inevitably the community did nothing because there was no easy answer. The way the scarred folk were trouble even though they weren't a direct threat. They appeared and gave us a potential enemy until concerns about them were quashed, then became disease-ridden and started dying near us, then interrupted the trade-mission-turned-search... I figure they were the ones who scarred the stone face, and were probably responsible for another problem (see spoilers below). Most of them upped and left (presumably interrupting Orenthal's search) and all we did was threaten the sick until they left too. Something mentioned a few times but never properly touched on was that they were all men – possibly a raiding party for a larger tribe. The fact that a lot of people were openly pushing for us to prepare for Winter for so long and little ever got successfully done until the season arrived. The Autumn oracle sure is a motherfucker, huh? I don't think we successfully got anything worthwhile done that whole season, not even burying our dead. The only good stuff happened by chance or due to others. The community always wanted to do the prudent, sensible thing, but they rarely got the chance due to circumstances outside their control. The attempt to write a new book (a history of our community, even) and the burning of that book. I said during setup that I wanted to see the full potential of using 'books' as a resource and making it an issue for the community – those two events (as well as Sameal's earlier destruction of a book) were great answers. Also, a secret: the Scarred folk were responsible for the forest fire. The beast's head was charred because, lacking our firearms and Sameal's skill, they burnt down the whole forest to trap and kill it, inadvertently threatening our works and killing our leaders. I left this very much up in the air so people could take things in whatever direction they saw fit, if they chose to. In a later turn I considered taking things in the spoilered direction, but chose to leave it hanging in the end. It's interesting to go back and read this over now that we're done. A lot of things come together in one way or another, even across seasons – things like the interpretations of the death of the ravens.
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Apr 10, 2015 19:13
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Agreed on all counts. The tension between the different factions within the community (young/old, Council/Storm Oak worshippers) was a great resource to draw upon because even though a lot of those differences were resolved, there's always something under the surface that can come bubbling up again later. I made a concerted effort to add voices within the community who were trying to get everyone to prepare for winter and I love how little actually got done. It's a universal story - the voices of reason get drowned out by the voices of passion. When you think about pure survival, how important is building a temple around a tree? To some it's very important, but to others it's time that could have been spent fashioning tools or preserving food. I want to thank you all for a great game! I am really glad that we managed to keep the tone of the game pretty consistent from beginning to end. And I am really really glad that we all seemed on the same page about playing the game "right" - as in, no one used their Discover Something New action to skirt around problems or resolve problems easily. So many complications!
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Apr 10, 2015 21:39
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I was actually worried I would be shutting out discussion with my votes and things. I am just glad that it all worked out. Even if I did see my favorite guy get murdered (Sameal  )I noticed I thought a lot about keeping it together, I didn't want to get in the way of the falling apart but I did kind of want to see us survive at least partially. I liked the fact that I didn't manage to get one of my jobs that I had set myself right from the start (the building a fence thing) done.
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Apr 10, 2015 21:57
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I do like the way we dealt with the social issues even though we didn't act enough on the material ones. Even though quite a few of us were ramping up the tension (I thought the scarcity of guns would get someone killed) things turned out alright in the end. That said, we weren't doing too badly on the pressing material problems either. We had preservable food, clean water, firewood, medicine and shelter and were on the cusp of resolving our one remaining proper scarcity. The major problems would be the lack of a decent and varied diet, proper tools or defences. We had only one major food source for the winter the community would have been in trouble if it was contaminated or destroyed.BlurryMystr posted:I want to thank you all for a great game! I am really glad that we managed to keep the tone of the game pretty consistent from beginning to end. And I am really really glad that we all seemed on the same page about playing the game "right" - as in, no one used their Discover Something New action to skirt around problems or resolve problems easily. So many complications! About the fence, I got the community in my first game to build a wall (eventually) and it didn't do us any good.
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Apr 10, 2015 23:02
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I especially liked the times when we had a project to create something that we needed and when the project was completed, it resolved along the lines of "well we don't NOT have this stuff anymore, but it's not like we have enough of it to do much with." It's tempting to resolve a project like that and declare that we've got an Abundance of that thing now, yay problem solved, but we pretty much resisted that temptation and I think the game benefited for it.
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Apr 10, 2015 23:18
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