|
Autumn - Week 8quote:Conflict flares up among community members. The tales Sarangerel and Munkherel of calling down divine aid do not please Aspas and her acolytes. Furious, the priestess accosts Munkherel and accuses her of heresy and wild boasts. Sangerel shoves Aspas away, and her acolytes beat the old warrior savagely. The brawl slowly engulfs the rest of the community, feeding on insecurity and loss, and giving the enraged mobs a sense of power for the first time in months. In all this commotion, the nets and traps are not maintained, and animals get into the stock of preserved fish. We have lost our new food supplies.  Action - Discover Something New The Demons and Angels seldom stab at each with lances of fire and light, and their strange whines and screams are mostly quiet now. But now the Colossus moves. We can do nothing as it plods through the boglands toward our hill. And then it is upon us, but stops just outside our camp. Bright lights from its shoulders banishes darkness or thought of hiding. The voice of Buris erupts, louder than a choir of chanting priests. "We are all children of the Binding Light. There are no gods or spirits. Only the dancing light that moves within and animates the machine. Service means freedom from skin and bone. Think and reflect on these words." And the Colossus says nothing more, does nothing more, but waits, shining its light upon us every night, humming softly in the day.   Projects: Claim our proper place in this new land (1) Abundances: grazing land, fear Scarcities: horses, hunting birds, food Contempt: UnCO3 (1), Tyrannosaurus (0), ibntumart (1)
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2016 03:09
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 24, 2024 10:07 |
|
|
Autumn – Week 9
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2016 04:06
|
|
|
OK, now that the game is over the ban on OOC talk about the story is lifted! That also applies to people just reading the thread. I've got quite a lot of notes and thoughts about this game that I'll put into order in a little while. For now, I'll just say that this has been one of my favourite games of TQY, so thank you both. I've also put out the remaining 4 Autumn cards in the order they would have been drawn, if you want to check that. UnCO3 fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Jul 6, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2016 04:13
|
|
|
So, firstly, this game was an experiment in that we started in Winter and finished in Autumn. This had some kind of weird effects, most prominently in Winter, which mainly has cards that:
Secondly, as I said above, I really liked this story. We weren't afraid to put the community in peril or have them do unpleasant things, and we managed to tie a lot of details into a couple of general threads – the internal strife and the external problem of the Colossus. Overall, the story works pretty well: Our community starts out moderately xenophobic and warlike, then escalates in Spring to the point where all the people who encounter us are enslaved as resources in our internal conflict, because we're king poo poo of gently caress steppe. Even when we re-unite, our sense of supremacy only deepens. Then we take the fateful plunge of trying to eradicate our former slaves and everything goes to hell (almost literally). 'Demons' descend on us and disempower us by (perhaps incidentally) slaughtering our horses, putting us on the same level as our thralls. Then a couple of us call down 'gods' from the sky, who meet the 'demons' in battle as our community escapes. At this point we're reduced to a footnote in this war between powers so incomprehensibly vaster than our own that we perceive their human combatants as gods and demons. When we try to go back, we find that we can't; our home has been rendered lethally and invisibly impassable by the escalating battle. These factions have almost incidentally taken everything from us. We've come not full circle, but through a full turn of the helix – doing thralls' work, disheartened and disunited, and lamenting the suffering and loss of our steeds. If the Mist Shepherds were human, they could well have been the tribe that left the mysterious hoofprints coming to enslave us as we'd done to so many others. Though we managed to tie a lot of stuff into the long-running strands of the story, there were several that we lost or that never got pursued. There's the plane where Lisandru took shelter way back in Winter. Then there's the dome, which we unfortunately never revisited after the community reunited. There were also the bog beasts, walking snakes, the legendary leviathan, most of which never got explained (other than that the beasts were probably regular crocodiles). The refinery. Did either of you have any plans for these?
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2016 05:14
|
|
|
Scattered thoughts: - Our community was pretty terrible; at least, as far as anyone around us was concerned. But I loved that even when they got so mad at each other that they split up, with one community building spike traps for horses, and the other building bridges so they could still ride over, in the end the big stand-off was resolved by everyone just wanting to shake hands and be one community again already. - We never saw how the original community treated its thralls/slaves, but the implications from how the Ziyarites nonchalantly slew and enslaved the bog people, and how quickly people suggested human sacrifice in the temple, give us a stark picture of a slave's life under the community's rule. I wonder what happened to them when the community decided to flee: were they left behind? Used as beasts of burden to carry yurts and supplies since the horses couldn't be spared? Or did they form the final sacrifice in the temple? - The dome was a dormant geothermal station. I revisited the dome much later and hinted that if the community put in some work, they could figure out how to power the refinery (actually a water purification plant). But given how disastrously their trusting None turned out to be, coupled with the Binding Light Dancer and then the Demons and Angels, the chance that anyone in the community would want to further interact with ancient technology was remote. - The walking snakes were probably genetically altered animals some pre-apocalypse nation's army devised to use against whoever lived on the steppes before. But they could also have mutated. They may have been under the control of the Blue Promise Breakers, but at any rate, they were meant to not be in danger from any of the dangerous beasts in the area. My thinking was that the Binding Light Dancer implanted them with transmitters that made the animals not want to approach them. - I kept meaning to do something with the plane, but nothing cool or particularly interesting ever came to mind. - This may have changed if we had more time: at the moment of writing Buris visiting the transplanted community, she was sincere. If the community came back with her and agreed to unify with the Blue Promise Breakers, they would have forgiven their invasion, fitted them with implants, and integrated them with the Binding Light Dancer. I'm not sure what that would have meant exactly, though, and honestly, I probably would have deliberately avoided a direct answer. Painting them as alien and only seeing them through the original community's eyes would have been my preference. - Probably obvious, but the Binding Light Dancer was an AI. I wonder if it was in communication with other AIs, either friendly or hostile, and what the relation of the Angels and Demons would be to those AIs. - Was the man in the capsule from a neglected space station? Or was he from a human colony off-world, trying to reach Earth and communicate to us? And did the tortured, colorful sky damage his ship? Chaining on that, were the Demons and Angels from human factions or were they left over machines, waiting in orbit for the right signal to ping them and call them back? - I think the Mist Shepherds were the people who left behind those mysterious footprints. I think they went west in the hope of finding someplace better, partially because our community made it impossible for anyone else to live peacefully or build anything permanent, and because the Blue Promise Breakers were too weird to join up with. I don't know what they did to our community. I like to think they were kinder than our community would have been, that they adopted children, took in adults who agreed to break and burn their weapons, and taught us other ways to earn our bread. But I suspect they simply killed us and drove off the survivors, trusting that we would never accept anyone outside our community as worthy.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2016 10:25
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 24, 2024 10:07 |
|
|
I got that the dome was a geothermal station - it's just that we never really did anything more with it after that revelation. It's more a glimpse of what the community could have achieved if it was more open to technology. Speaking of the traditionalists' slaves, I had the idea that Zaaya's raid on the ex-slaves would bring back a couple of Blue Promise Breakers. They'd still refuse to obey us, creating a tense situation where a slave revolt would get more likely every week. Tyrannosaurus took that project in a very different direction, though. I figure a lot of the community's remaining thralls just fled while everything was going to poo poo. So, on the advanced technology and the history of the world, I do have a coherent theory that ties a lot of stuff together, but posting that seems like it might go against the spirit of the game and also it's got a whole load of speculation where I ignored or kind of smudged quite a few things that conflicted with it. I will say, though, that if this was an action movie I'd pitch None as the anti-heroic protagonist. I also took a very different interpretation of Buris' final offer and state. Finally, I thought that our community took the wrong view or had the wrong interpretation of basically everything outside the mundane. In lieu of that, here are some notes I took during the game.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2016 21:10
|
|