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dismallyorientedYou ever play a worldbuilding game and then some players make a pitch that turns into a 30 min discussion that proceeds to define the entire rest of the campaign?
Needless to say. A lot of TQY happened since my initial post, so now I'm making this general summary of events for personal reference and to holler at folks about it. You can see my previous recap of the first chunk of Spring at [this link].
Some important Spring details I left out
Now for the rest of the seasons!
Summer
Autumn
Winter
---
In the wake of how relations with the Parish have devolved in Autumn and Winter, me and another player suggest that the community kicks the Parish out. This is a big enough swing that everyone stops play to try and reach consensus on what happens next. The GM/my wife proposes two potential campaign outcomes: 1) either we interpret the prompt differently and continue TQY, and she uses what we already have as the basis for the campaign, or 2) The Parish and its followers get exiled, and the campaign now becomes about these twin communities, the tensions between them, and how that relationship develops as our party get involved between them.
Three of us, me included, were broadly interested in the idea. On my part, I thought it was a super interesting and juicy central conflict to set up, I liked how directly it emerged from the narrative threads we'd made so far, and like. My wife pitched this campaign to bring a bunch of disparate friends together and as a way to get through the opening rounds of Trump Mk. 2. It may not come as a surprise that I wanted a story about repairing a community divide that is Not about white supremacist bigotry. Songs for the Dusk, a game with a strong thematic throughline of community building and making a new and better world in the wreckage of the old, seemed like a system well-suited to this exact situation.
The other two players had two primary concerns. One overarching one was that Songs for the Dusk is not really a game about intracommunity violence. Setting up a civil war at the heart of the community seemed incompatible with the core premise of the game system. The other one was that this also felt counterproductive to the point of our TQY game. We’d set out to build the community we were going to set the campaign in, so that we went in already familiar with and caring about the place and the people in it. Wildly revamping the community with a civil war at the very end risked turning half of the community into an antagonistic force, throwing out the development and care we’d put into them over 4 sessions, and creating a whole new blank space surrounding this new second community.
In the following discussion, we settled on the idea that the Parish would travel north and join the cavern community, now that they’d been decimated by the dragonpox. These groups together would become the second community, since the cavern folks had their own existing beef with the community from Autumn, and the Parish would have their exile. This way the core of the existing community would remain the same (now with the complication of the feud), and the second community had some established history instead of just being the blank space of the Parish.
Another concern raised was that we as players would be less emotionally invested in the second community, due to the fractious nature of its formation. The GM agreed to make her first GM principle, “Make the players want to love both communities.” Keeping that guiding principle at top of mind would ensure that she wouldn’t make either place too much of a villain or a definitive Bad Guy when she was prepping missions and running the campaign. Both communities were coming out of TQY in pretty rough shape, so there would be plenty of ways to create tension and sympathy pretty much no matter what.
---
After we wrapped the discussion, the GM asked if people wanted to end TQY now. Strictly speaking you're supposed to play until you draw the King of Spades in Winter, but the narrative move we'd just decided on felt like a big enough climax to end the game on. The players were still curious about the next card would've been, so the GM pulled the next card - which was the King of Spades.
Games good, it turns out.
There wasn't quite a good way to fit this in at the end of Winter, but. After we answered the card prompt, I still had to take a basic player action. The very last move I made in the game was to start a project led by the children of the community to keep in touch between the OG town and the Parish offshoot. Because that's both a very Kid thing to do, to want to keep in touch with members of the group who are moving away (and the head named kid, Trinity Escapade, would Super want to do that). But also because even in the case of this community literally falling apart, here were the seeds of continued connection. I think we built a very Songs community, and I'm really excited to play the campaign proper and see the fruits of our worldbuilding labor.
---
[1]: Songs for the Dusk is very explicit about Tamaris being a post-cataclysm Earth. The Radiant Era that preceded the current time was a technomagic utopia (with an exploitative underbelly, same as the world now). [return]
[2]: The text of the card: "Winter is harsh, and desperation gives rise to fear mongering. Choose one: Spend the week calming the masses and dispelling their violent sentiments. The week ends immediately. [Or]: Declare war on someone or something. This counts as starting a project."[return]
Needless to say. A lot of TQY happened since my initial post, so now I'm making this general summary of events for personal reference and to holler at folks about it. You can see my previous recap of the first chunk of Spring at [this link].
Some important Spring details I left out
- Our scarcities were History, Lake Ecology, Fuel, and Familiarity with the Landscape. Our abundance was Wild Game
- The teens, who were doing a secret mapping project to learn about the area, landed themselves in huge trouble when one of them fell into the canyon while carrying a DIONE node they weren't supposed to. Thus making contact with the tech restoration community in the canyons, and \*also* revealing DIONE's existence to them. The adults elected to revoke node access to all the kids due to this recklessness
- General attitude toward the cavern community is "cautious interest". People are very protective of DIONE and don't know if these techies can be trusted yet. We successfully establish communications, a relationship of information sharing, and DIONE grants them a single node for communication
Now for the rest of the seasons!
Summer
- The dragon-gator eggs hatch, producing three baby dragons that now inhabit the lake alongside their gator mom
- They get up to some shenanigans, including Eating the pile of cursed technology that some of us had tossed in the lake during Spring.
- Opinions are mixed on whether their presence is a good thing, a dangerous thing, or whether we should curry favor by leaving offerings
- The Ominous pump station continues to be ominous. Some specific happenings
- Some people from the caves community have been salvaging parts for it
- Our community repairs the pumps, and find out the pumps are Directly Extracting transcendent (magic) energy from the lake. This will proceed to have No Consequences Whatsoever
- We discover a large Radiant-era bunker at the underground lake - an ancient Man Cave apocalypse bunker with a large generator and this one rich eccentric's hoard of Things
- The town constructs a library, which is where DIONE's core set of nodes reside
- The teens hold a sit-in at said library, to demand access to personal nodes. After a bunch of adult waffling, proposing a behavior-ranking system to determine trustworthiness, DIONE interjects, "Actually, I would like to have my children back, please" and shuts down all the adults' nodes until they cooperate.
- A well-traveled stranger wanders into town, collapsing from exhaustion. He's wearing strangely garish, high-quality clothing and carrying a large backpack. He's exceptionally lost, speaking a language nobody has heard before - because he's Dave Smith, a 50yo USAmerican dad who accidentally isekai'd himself here from Pre-Radiant times[1] while on a hiking trip. Those are cargo shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and a half-empty bag of Doritos in his backpack.
- We spend 6 weeks learning how to communicate, with DIONE's help (analyzing his language, digging through Radiant-era files). He's given a node to help translate between us
- He spends 2 weeks staring into the middle distance before going outside and teaching the village kids how to play American football. Some villagers try to figure out how to reverse engineer his "favorite food" (the Doritos)
- Two of the hunters in the town go missing after a eusocial wolves encounter. They're twin siblings - one is found mute and starving up a tree. No one ever sees the second twin, but there are reports of a new wolf with strangely human eyes
- Pump station consequences happen
- The pumps suck up one of the dragons, trapping it in the mechanisms. The remaining two begin attacking the pump station, setting lots of fires
- A militant coalition of the community bands together with the intent of taking out the dragons. Arguments break out, and a competing group tries to stop them and rescue the dragons. The militia shoots and drives off the two dragons, and the rescue group retrieves the third from the pump station before it dies
- A foolish kid tries to drink the magic pump station water in the middle of all the chaos, mutating into a magic dragon-kid hybrid. The surviving dragon baby sticks with Dragonkid, as they've absorbed most of its essence from the pump water, and their connection is necessary for it to stay active.
- Pump station shenanigans have supercharged the air with Magic, causing a lot of tech to fail, including DIONE's nodes.
- The community builds a Faraday cage around DIONE in the library, so those nodes can still communicate and she can stay alive
- The cavern community, upset by the tech disruption, comes to confront us about the pump station shenanigans. We assure them that we can fix things, and they leave some representatives with us to work on a solution together
Autumn
- Library catches fire and a third of it burns down. Great start to autumn. Several of DIONE's nodes are damaged or nonfunctional
- The community launches an investigation and Immediately finds out that the culprits were from the cavern community - the node we gifted to them was found charred and abandoned in the woods
- We confront the other community and request their help in tracking down the perpetrators
- A solar flare dragon blasts through the area, likely in retaliation to the pump station & hunters incident. It kills most of the Wild Game in the area and wrecks part of the underground bunker
- A strange new disease strikes the area, turning health & fertility into a scarcity. Dragonpox, a disease with general flu symptoms and wild changes in skin pigmentation
- The community debates whether to leave the area or not. General consensus is that while things are bad, nobody is in a state to try migrating elsewhere
- In the wake of all this, the transcendent flora in the area begin growing like crazy, producing a great abundance of Wild Forage to replace the Wild Game. The community begins researching the forage to see if it can be derived into medicine for Dragonpox
- Unfortunately, the research is disrupted and stolen by desperate people from the cavern community before a cure can be developed. Several people die and the cavern community gets blamed
- Several community projects commence
- A new mapping project begins - it finishes earlier than expected when the surviving hunter twin returns with a fully detailed map, refusing to tell anyone how they figured it out
- A teen library assistant begins working on a historical Chronicle of the community. People get really involved in the project and it produces a multi-volume account
- The town constructs watch towers to better address the many physical threats that have accosted the community over the year
- The Parish arrive - a community of dragon-worshippers who followed sightings of the solar flare dragon back to this area
- They fixate on Dragonkid, elevating them to a messiah figure due to their connection to dragons. Dragonkid is extremely wigged out and avoids them aggressively
- The Parish construct a church, preaching to the community and erecting an elaborate statue of Dragonkid
- Dragonkid leaves the community for good, issuing dire warnings of future Dragon Incidents. They aim to prevent draconic disasters from impacting the community
Winter
- The community finally fences off the pump station entirely, to try to prevent people from causing more trouble
- The onset of winter fully destroys our supply of Wild Game
- We get to work trying to render the Wild Forage into a good food supply. This proceeds to raise the ambient magic sensitivity & capacity of everyone in town
- A debate breaks out between the Parish and the rest of the community. The Parish believes that Dragonkid's departure has brought misfortune and want to bring their messiah back. The rest of the town is split between wanting Dragonkid back for the kid's safety, leaving them alone because they wanted to leave, or focusing on Solving the community problems directly
- A survivor from the cavern community returns, reporting that their community has been devastated by dragonpox, and offering information
- The Parish bars them from entry, and our own outbreak rages on without the treatment information they had to offer
- Here I break the 4th wall to describe the campaign-defining moment at the end of the game. I draw a card that prompts conflict breaking out in the community.[2] This is where the 30 min campaign pitch comes to the fore.
---
In the wake of how relations with the Parish have devolved in Autumn and Winter, me and another player suggest that the community kicks the Parish out. This is a big enough swing that everyone stops play to try and reach consensus on what happens next. The GM/my wife proposes two potential campaign outcomes: 1) either we interpret the prompt differently and continue TQY, and she uses what we already have as the basis for the campaign, or 2) The Parish and its followers get exiled, and the campaign now becomes about these twin communities, the tensions between them, and how that relationship develops as our party get involved between them.
Three of us, me included, were broadly interested in the idea. On my part, I thought it was a super interesting and juicy central conflict to set up, I liked how directly it emerged from the narrative threads we'd made so far, and like. My wife pitched this campaign to bring a bunch of disparate friends together and as a way to get through the opening rounds of Trump Mk. 2. It may not come as a surprise that I wanted a story about repairing a community divide that is Not about white supremacist bigotry. Songs for the Dusk, a game with a strong thematic throughline of community building and making a new and better world in the wreckage of the old, seemed like a system well-suited to this exact situation.
The other two players had two primary concerns. One overarching one was that Songs for the Dusk is not really a game about intracommunity violence. Setting up a civil war at the heart of the community seemed incompatible with the core premise of the game system. The other one was that this also felt counterproductive to the point of our TQY game. We’d set out to build the community we were going to set the campaign in, so that we went in already familiar with and caring about the place and the people in it. Wildly revamping the community with a civil war at the very end risked turning half of the community into an antagonistic force, throwing out the development and care we’d put into them over 4 sessions, and creating a whole new blank space surrounding this new second community.
In the following discussion, we settled on the idea that the Parish would travel north and join the cavern community, now that they’d been decimated by the dragonpox. These groups together would become the second community, since the cavern folks had their own existing beef with the community from Autumn, and the Parish would have their exile. This way the core of the existing community would remain the same (now with the complication of the feud), and the second community had some established history instead of just being the blank space of the Parish.
Another concern raised was that we as players would be less emotionally invested in the second community, due to the fractious nature of its formation. The GM agreed to make her first GM principle, “Make the players want to love both communities.” Keeping that guiding principle at top of mind would ensure that she wouldn’t make either place too much of a villain or a definitive Bad Guy when she was prepping missions and running the campaign. Both communities were coming out of TQY in pretty rough shape, so there would be plenty of ways to create tension and sympathy pretty much no matter what.
---
After we wrapped the discussion, the GM asked if people wanted to end TQY now. Strictly speaking you're supposed to play until you draw the King of Spades in Winter, but the narrative move we'd just decided on felt like a big enough climax to end the game on. The players were still curious about the next card would've been, so the GM pulled the next card - which was the King of Spades.
Games good, it turns out.
There wasn't quite a good way to fit this in at the end of Winter, but. After we answered the card prompt, I still had to take a basic player action. The very last move I made in the game was to start a project led by the children of the community to keep in touch between the OG town and the Parish offshoot. Because that's both a very Kid thing to do, to want to keep in touch with members of the group who are moving away (and the head named kid, Trinity Escapade, would Super want to do that). But also because even in the case of this community literally falling apart, here were the seeds of continued connection. I think we built a very Songs community, and I'm really excited to play the campaign proper and see the fruits of our worldbuilding labor.
---
[1]: Songs for the Dusk is very explicit about Tamaris being a post-cataclysm Earth. The Radiant Era that preceded the current time was a technomagic utopia (with an exploitative underbelly, same as the world now). [return]
[2]: The text of the card: "Winter is harsh, and desperation gives rise to fear mongering. Choose one: Spend the week calming the masses and dispelling their violent sentiments. The week ends immediately. [Or]: Declare war on someone or something. This counts as starting a project."[return]
