Songs for the Dusk: The Quiet Year, Session 1

[dismallyoriented]

ghostqueens has been running a Songs for the Dusk campaign for me, metamour, and a loose collection of other friends. Earlier this month we finally met for the first session, a round of The Quiet Year by Avery Alder. It's a map-drawing and worldbuilding game, where you use a deck of cards to play out one year in the life of a community, before the Frost Shepherds arrive in winter and end everything. The deck is split out by suits, one for each season, and each card is a prompt describing what happens each week of the titular year.

It's a game I like a lot; I'll be bringing a copy with me to a new year's eve party I'm attending next week. It's been a fun way to get everyone used to being at a table together, and riffing off of each other's ideas. We've managed to make a really Songs-ass community

Highlights

- Our town borders the Resolution Lake in the Meridian Valley. Both of these are part of the existing SftD setting. It’s flanked by a swamp, and there’s another tech restoration community living in a canyon to the north of us, who have settled into caves in the canyon walls.
- A large potentially pre-Radiant pump station lies at the edge of the lake - it’s old, abandoned, and completely untouched by nature even after centuries. There are a lot of other underground caverns and passage to an underground portion of the lake
- the oldest community member is Distributed Intelligence One, aka DIONE. She is an AI who was stolen from unknown previous creators/owners.

- By distributed I mean that she has nodes which are either normal servers or portable nodes carried by community members. She needs a minimum of 5-6 nodes within 10m of each other to achieve full sapience.
- Nodes which fall below that concentration can still record input/retrieve data, those just behave more like Siri-level programs, and return information to the whole when brought back within range.

- A coming of age ceremony for children involves being granted their own personal node to carry.

- there are flowers in the area that attract a lot of Transcendent and/or spirit beasts. we’ve yet to elaborate on this detail

- other notable fauna include the crocodiles who live in the lake (one of which has gone and laid a whole nest in the middle of our town), and a large pack of wolves who are a eusocial hivemind

We're only 10 weeks into Spring, because one of our players couldn't make it, and we want to make sure it has a chance to play in the starting season before we move on to Summer. But mannn I'm so excited to find out more about our lil town and to keep playing in this setting together. DIONE is everyone's favorite NPC already (including passerby I've told about the campaign), one of the players wants to make her familiar an active mobile node, and her maintenance needs are an Immediate good hook for our crew (Magpies, techies and scrappers). It's gonna be real fun to figure out how each of our players fits in with the community and what each of our social connections are.

Comments

[synecdoches]

Oh, I've played A Quiet Year! It was very interesting! Less serious in tone than your session, from the sound of things. We kept turns quite short and ended up with a lot of jokes. Including a character that I think was named Unkillable Greg by the end.

[dismallyoriented]

Oh, my first time playing TQY ended up with a society driven by a height-based hierarchy due to settling in the mountains (the other 6'2"-6'4" players were all very ready to make jokes when everyone stood up to leave for the night, looming over my 5'3" ass). That game ended with the community falling to pieces after a character named Cousin Throckmorton began brewing a beer out of mystery black goop that was bubbling out of the ground, and the beer began turning everyone into Throckmorton clones. We joked that when the Frost Shepherds came at the end of Winter, they took one look and noped right on out of there. That's the fun part - you can do a lot of goofy shit with it, especially as a standalone game, or you can approach it with intent and both will produce fun and interesting things, even of wildly different flavors.

Also like. Especially since we're playing over roll20 and everyone is drawing on the map with mouse and/or trackpads. We all end up with some very silly visual gags over time.