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dismallyoriented) wrote2025-07-10 10:36 am
dismallyoriented) wrote2025-07-10 10:36 am
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Songs for the Dusk: Downtime 1 Recap
Realized only just now I typo'd the title of my last recap post. Boo. At the time of writing this draft, I was trying to make sure I got this one out before we finished Mission 2. I did not finish this before we finished Mission 2 lmao. [Wife's note: HE SO PROFOUNDLY DID NOT DO THAT] Anyway, delays aside, it's time for Downtime!
For those of you who don't play Forged in the Dark games (FitD), games that use that system have a codified Downtime phase that occurs between missions. It's time for PCs to rest and recover from whatever stress & harm they've racked up, work on long term projects for themselves, and deal with any other complications and random events that the GM rolls up. It's also a fantastic time for character interactions between party members and NPCs. Each player has two actions to spend working on those aforementioned things.
All FitD games (as far as I'm aware) have a Complication that occurs during downtime. The GM rolls for a random occurrence off a table, based on certain in-game conditions like "how much trouble have you caused with your missions." Crews that have accrued more heat and bad attention will have more troublesome random events, some of which will involve factions that they've pissed off coming to. Resolve their problems, let's say. For example, we've taken -1 rep with Children of the Fault, the group that Isaiah belongs to, because even if you have really good reasons to scrub a mission it's still not a good look to take on a job and then say "Actually, never mind." Despite that we're still within the most basic heat level, so we would've been fine - had our GM not rolled the "reroll on a higher danger table" option and landed on "Quintessent Life - troublesome spirits and magical creatures".[1] Which, to be fair. We did bring home a wholeass dragon wisp, so.
Because Songs for the Dusk is so community focused, it adds another feature to its downtime phase called "Threads". At the start of the downtime, you pick a broad theme or concept about your community that you can build your downtime scenes around. For this downtime, we chose, "How does gossip work in this town?" and began filling in the different avenues of how news spreads in our community, and how people talk to each other.
In addition to the regular downtime phase, the GM opted to do some one-on-one side story prompts with each PC to tie in some additional narrative threads. Those of you who are familiar with Apocalypse World/PbtA games may recognize the practice of Love Letters, little personalized scenes with a basic mechanical choice or skill check to resolve.
I wanted to shout out the love letters, both because they were fun character moments and good collaboration with the GM, but also because of how distinctly each player responded. All of them had a little bit of OOC discussion while people brainstormed and figured things out, but we had a mix of fully in-character epistolary letters, some folks narrating their character choices OOC, long writers' room brainstorming sessions to sketch out a final scene, and some shortform fiction prose. I was just as delighted with the variety of responses that this enabled as much as I was happy with the story beats themselves.
Thread: How does gossip in this town work?
Complication: Quintessent Life - well, we did bring back a fucking dragon wisp
- Momo’s familiars start going unresponsive, she feels under the weather as the wisp stored in her dragonfly ring is putting out interference and the spillover is going into Momo’s connection to them
- Familiars will be at Less Effect unless this issue is fixed
- DIONE is also experiencing some Difficulties - difficulties with nodes connecting, she’s gotten distracted, forgetful, less responsive
Session events
We end downtime with a vignette teasing the next mission. A stranger shows up at the Crashpad, collapsed in the doorway. They're hairless, with pale skin and faint yellow eyes. Momo’s the first person up and about, and goes to fetch them water while Gail and Yara make their way to the common area. The team fetch some leftovers from the team dinner, and the Stranger polishes off 4 full plates of food including the entirety of the onion cookies.[5] Once they recover themselves (fairly rapidly after the prodigious meal), they thank everyone for their hospitality - they're in town on "some business" but needed somewhere discrete to stay. The Stranger refuses to elaborate on what their mysterious business is, so Momo asks if what they're planning will get anyone hurt. The Stranger replies no, in full sincerity, but Momo gets the exact same feeling of Danger she did when encountering the dragon at the facility.
With that, we close off Downtime! Once again really happy with everything, especially with how well the Thread at the start of session ended up...well, threading its way through play. I pitched the topic both from the love letter and because it's exactly the sort of small town mundanity that fleshes out a community and that I love to think about. New Haven feels much more real as a result. Tune in soon-ish (hopefully) for the second mission, which immediately became my favorite arc of the campaign thusfar.
----
[1]: This particular downtime entanglement has some really funny history with me and my wife. Years ago I ran a play-by-post campaign in this system, and for whatever reason we ended up rolling "Quintessent Life" (or the beta-edition equivalent) three downtimes in a row, each time escalating the severity of the problem to the point that it spontaneously became a follow-up mission where a town-wide infestation of EMF-eating spirit moths knocked out the power supply. [return]
[2]: You only get one name joke like this per campaign and I'm glad we cashed it in so early and to such great effect. [return]
[3]: Overindulgence is a spectacular mechanic and I really like how flavorful and interesting some of your options are for this system. You get different options for "hanging out with the crew" vs. "hanging out with an NPC". Crew-related overindulgence centers around debuffs for the upcoming mission (reduced harmony, extra trouble, less dice for the next engagement roll), while NPC-related overindulgence has some interesting character-related complications - the funniest of which is "Commitment", where you're embroiled in helping someone with a personal project like organizing a wedding or doing some other favor. I love fictional consequences like that and my god have I landed myself into some Commitments irl after hanging with people, lmao. [return]
[4]: To elaborate - Imogen had a very lonely childhood as someone without any same-age peers. She spent a lot of time in the library, including reading the town history from its founding and the adventures that Trinity Escapade went on. As lonely kids do, Imogen thought, Man, it'd be so cool to have a friend like that, and then. Sometimes your brain decides to spout a factive and you do not have the tools or framework to fully understand what is happening. [return]
[5] I believe Yara's player when she says the recipe actually tastes good, but viscerally disagree. Glad they did not go to waste, however.[return]
For those of you who don't play Forged in the Dark games (FitD), games that use that system have a codified Downtime phase that occurs between missions. It's time for PCs to rest and recover from whatever stress & harm they've racked up, work on long term projects for themselves, and deal with any other complications and random events that the GM rolls up. It's also a fantastic time for character interactions between party members and NPCs. Each player has two actions to spend working on those aforementioned things.
All FitD games (as far as I'm aware) have a Complication that occurs during downtime. The GM rolls for a random occurrence off a table, based on certain in-game conditions like "how much trouble have you caused with your missions." Crews that have accrued more heat and bad attention will have more troublesome random events, some of which will involve factions that they've pissed off coming to. Resolve their problems, let's say. For example, we've taken -1 rep with Children of the Fault, the group that Isaiah belongs to, because even if you have really good reasons to scrub a mission it's still not a good look to take on a job and then say "Actually, never mind." Despite that we're still within the most basic heat level, so we would've been fine - had our GM not rolled the "reroll on a higher danger table" option and landed on "Quintessent Life - troublesome spirits and magical creatures".[1] Which, to be fair. We did bring home a wholeass dragon wisp, so.
Because Songs for the Dusk is so community focused, it adds another feature to its downtime phase called "Threads". At the start of the downtime, you pick a broad theme or concept about your community that you can build your downtime scenes around. For this downtime, we chose, "How does gossip work in this town?" and began filling in the different avenues of how news spreads in our community, and how people talk to each other.
In addition to the regular downtime phase, the GM opted to do some one-on-one side story prompts with each PC to tie in some additional narrative threads. Those of you who are familiar with Apocalypse World/PbtA games may recognize the practice of Love Letters, little personalized scenes with a basic mechanical choice or skill check to resolve.
- Our Witch was given DIONE's blessing to become a proper team and given a base of operations (okay, a junkyard to fix up, but it's a start)
- Our Scholar received notice that her old rival and local turbobitch was coming to investigate the area as "help" to sift through all the data from Mission 1
- Our Scrapper snuck back into the Observatory to explore a little more, finding a strange talisman from a bygone era (as well as taking mechanical harm from pulling an all-nighter while already exhausted and injured)
- Our Charter (hey, hi, how's it going) took in the rumors around town and noted them all down, relieved that nobody was blaming his team for any of the events (yet)
- Our Aegis repaired its gun, but mostly yapped the days away with an old friend and client, in major contrast to how professional it is when out on missions.
I wanted to shout out the love letters, both because they were fun character moments and good collaboration with the GM, but also because of how distinctly each player responded. All of them had a little bit of OOC discussion while people brainstormed and figured things out, but we had a mix of fully in-character epistolary letters, some folks narrating their character choices OOC, long writers' room brainstorming sessions to sketch out a final scene, and some shortform fiction prose. I was just as delighted with the variety of responses that this enabled as much as I was happy with the story beats themselves.
Thread: How does gossip in this town work?
Complication: Quintessent Life - well, we did bring back a fucking dragon wisp
- Momo’s familiars start going unresponsive, she feels under the weather as the wisp stored in her dragonfly ring is putting out interference and the spillover is going into Momo’s connection to them
- Familiars will be at Less Effect unless this issue is fixed
- DIONE is also experiencing some Difficulties - difficulties with nodes connecting, she’s gotten distracted, forgetful, less responsive
Session events
- First action: Momo - Synthesis (Building a new piece of equipment/tech)
- Momo decides to build a shielded container for the wisp to temporarily house it without letting its unshielded energy levels wreak havoc on the town. We convert one of the pieces of equipment on her character sheet, removing it from her loadout.
- Gail offers to assist, due to its interest in dragons and mechanical expertise. What follows is a montage of two unmedicated ADHDers trying to build something and getting distracted, accidentally making three of the same component and other such shenanigans. They do manage to get most of the way done, however.
- All synthesized pieces of equipment have one mechanical flaw of some kind. We choose the option "Conspicuous" - anyone who looks at it can tell it’s containing a very powerful spirit
- Second action: Gail - Recover (Reduce all harms by one level)
- Gail, who sustained one harm from the mission and another from her impulsive all-nighter, spends a week feeling Exhausted, but focuses on getting sleep and fixing its leg
- At the start of the campaign, we'd established that she was staying in some manner of out-of-town visitor lodging. We figured New Haven was a little too small for a dedicated boarding house or community hostel, but it did have Community Hostell (he/him) - resident magnanimous man with a spare room open to anyone who needed it.[2]
- True to fashion, when Mr. Hostell notices that Gail has been ensconced in its room, he drops by to ask how it's doing. Once he finds out about its injuries, he starts making it soup and sharing lunches with her in her room, keeping her company and sharing idle gossip about town goings-on.
- Third action: Yara - Construct Foundations (Installing a new mechanical feature for the homebase and town)
- While trying to communicate with Cat, the Lithobreakers' technie, about what happened with the dragon at the end of the last mission, Yara gets frustrated with the difficulties of privately talking with them and decides to do something about it. Working together with Cat, she starts setting up a permanent communication route between New Haven and Dragon’s Rest.
- She builds a fucked up looking radio tower on the roof of the scrapyard, with the crew's permission, but gets stopped from completing it when other New Haven bigwigs see it and go, "Hey what the fuck." Completion of the project gets delayed while she has to sort out town zoning restrictions.
- Fourth action: Marl - Recover
- Marl, much like Gail, spends some time replacing its armor and doing parts maintenance after the mission. She happens to be sitting on her front porch for some of this, such that some kids wander over and start asking what she's up to and she got so beat up.
- Because children are so rare in New Haven due to lingering health and fertility issues from TQY's bout of dragonpox, they're handled very communally by the whole town, as a form of parenting by proxy for those who cannot have their own children. Children are passed around frequently and many of the adults are very involved in their lives. And as is the way of children in a tightly knit community full of adults they trust, they are chatty and animated creatures. So they are a huge vector for gossip.
- A lot of kid rumors about fights Marl has gotten into percolate out from this encounter. Someone is Very convinced our crew fought and defeated a dragon.
- Fifth action: Quentim - Cut Loose (Reducing stress with crewmates)
- Quentim decides to hold a Crew Dinner to break in the new base, as well as do some cleaning up to get everything into more habitable/usable shape. In keeping theme with Cut Loose however, the cleanup turns into improvised scrapyard bowling with sufficiently round pieces of metal.
- Each of us rolled to see how well our characters did. Quentim got a 4, Momo got a 1, Gail and Marl got 3s, and Yara was crowned Scrap Bowling queen with a 6.
- For the potluck, Momo made a stew, Yara made some chocolate-chip onion cookies (courtesy of a recipe her player had stumbled upon), Gail brought dishes, cutlery, and soup from Hostell, Quentim baked a very nice loaf of bread, and Marl made some camp-out rations dish best summarized as "Hot Stuff with potato"
- Gail brings up her midnight excursion back to the observatory, showing the talisman to Momo and asking what it is. It essentially acts as a calling card of sorts - showing spirits that the bearer (presumably) is skilled in transcendent arts and holds affiliation with whatever organization produced these in the first place.
- As with other FitD games, all Stress-reducing actions in downtime require you to roll to see how much Stress you remove. There's a bonus mechanic known as "overindulgence," which occurs when you roll a higher than the amount of stress you currently have. You must take some sort of penalty as something goes wrong.[3] I mention this because, hey, guess who overindulged on his first fucking downtime.
- I pick the consequence "Internal Strain", which means one of us says something cruel and sparks tension and conflict within the Crew and everyone regains 1 stress.
- After Gail reveals she snuck off to get the talisman, Quentim gets into an argument with her about not doing reckless things, including some of her flustered blunders during the mission itself. Gail tries to justify her actions but Quentim doubles down and eventually says, “If you want to be a part of the team you should stop doing such reckless things.” Gail goes quiet and then storms out from the dinner
- As part of the resolution of the Cut Loose action, all the PCs who participated write a one-sentence Memory about what happened. We get a mix of reactions, from shame (Quentim), anger (Gail), disappointment (Yara), and two very touchingly optimistic takeaways from Marl and Momo.
- Sixth action: Momo - Synthesis
- Momo successfully completes her Synthesis project, and we flesh out some details about the wisp container. When initially brainstorming, Momo's player made it clear that she wanted it to be a comfortable place for the wisp to be - a sort of high quality spirit fish tank, or something of comparable comfort to the way pokeballs are described.
- The final design was a backpack-shaped lava lamp, a clear container not dissimilar to the tubing from the facility which Momo could carry with her.
- Seventh action: Marl - Training (Mark XP for playbook abilities or the 3 skill types)
- Songs for the Dusk has three potential XP tracks to fill - playbook XP, which unlocks new class abilities, skill XP, which is split across the three overarching skill types and allows you to permanently add a die to any skill in that category, and crew XP, which unlocks abilities for the entire crew. The Training downtime action allows players to mark XP for the first two tracks.
- Marl's player opts to train playbook XP, and she and the GM discuss what that looks like, before settling on Marl practicing with its newly-repaired gun at a firing range. New Haven has a stretch of land near the scrapyard where people can go to safely practice with firearms. We're in a dangerous wilderness area after all, and the town scouts need to stay sharp.
- For some background explanation - you may remember Imogen Constant, the forgetful teenage girl who summoned us all to the library at the start of the first mission. In between sessions, the GM (who is my wife) decided to make Imogen plural and fleshed out her headmate, Senary (she/they), a much more adventurous and overconfident kid.[4]
- Senary shows up to the firing range and marches up to ask Marl if she Really fought a dragon. Marl, after a moment's thought, replies, "No, I didn't fight one, but I can show you how I *would* fight one." They spend the day together with Marl demonstrating combat techniques, and showing Senary how to fire the sparkrifle (after dialing down the power to absolute minimum to ensure the kickback didn't obliterate this child).
- Marl notices the discrepancy in character between the shy girl from the library and the boldness today, but chooses not to ask - it's used to interacting with unusual people through its former guard clientele and chalks it up to personal idiosyncrasy. Senary is too excited by Cool Big Gun to say anything. We will most definitely be returning to this pair of NPCs in future downtimes and missions.
- Eighth action: Gail - Training
- In the days following the team dinner and the argument, Gail begins tinkering with the talisman, trying to figure out how it works and see if there's anything cool she can learn to do with it.
- One day Quentim sees her setting up in the market square and just quietly closes up shop for the day, in order to avoid her. Love to juice an awkward interpersonal dynamic
- Ninth action: Quentim - Construct Foundations
- For my last action, I didn't have any character-specific things I wanted to do, so I opted to continue developing the Crashpad by building a Tool Depot, which would upgrade all the toolkits on our character sheets and grant mechanical bonus to rolls. We flavored this as opening a tool library in a new wing of the Library library
- Momo helps, as resident library worker. They bring the idea to Methuselah, the head librarian (the kid back in TQY who compiled a community history) and it is So Fucking Hype
- In theory we were supposed to decide on a cool mosaic that decorated the walls of this wing, as part of New Haven's visual character. We have not yet. Whoops.
- Tenth action: Yara - Unwind (Reducing stress with NPCs)
- Yara goes to meet Vanessa Deirdret (she/her), the visiting member of Nowhere. During the Love Letters, Yara had framed Deirdret as a rival in methods and philosophy, being someone much harsher and mercenary in the lengths she would go to secure artifacts and her attitudes toward the communities she was sent to. Also in true "hot mean girl with a gun" fashion, a very messy ex
- To quote the notes directly: They hook up in the shooting range. So many rumors sprout up
We end downtime with a vignette teasing the next mission. A stranger shows up at the Crashpad, collapsed in the doorway. They're hairless, with pale skin and faint yellow eyes. Momo’s the first person up and about, and goes to fetch them water while Gail and Yara make their way to the common area. The team fetch some leftovers from the team dinner, and the Stranger polishes off 4 full plates of food including the entirety of the onion cookies.[5] Once they recover themselves (fairly rapidly after the prodigious meal), they thank everyone for their hospitality - they're in town on "some business" but needed somewhere discrete to stay. The Stranger refuses to elaborate on what their mysterious business is, so Momo asks if what they're planning will get anyone hurt. The Stranger replies no, in full sincerity, but Momo gets the exact same feeling of Danger she did when encountering the dragon at the facility.
With that, we close off Downtime! Once again really happy with everything, especially with how well the Thread at the start of session ended up...well, threading its way through play. I pitched the topic both from the love letter and because it's exactly the sort of small town mundanity that fleshes out a community and that I love to think about. New Haven feels much more real as a result. Tune in soon-ish (hopefully) for the second mission, which immediately became my favorite arc of the campaign thusfar.
----
[1]: This particular downtime entanglement has some really funny history with me and my wife. Years ago I ran a play-by-post campaign in this system, and for whatever reason we ended up rolling "Quintessent Life" (or the beta-edition equivalent) three downtimes in a row, each time escalating the severity of the problem to the point that it spontaneously became a follow-up mission where a town-wide infestation of EMF-eating spirit moths knocked out the power supply. [return]
[2]: You only get one name joke like this per campaign and I'm glad we cashed it in so early and to such great effect. [return]
[3]: Overindulgence is a spectacular mechanic and I really like how flavorful and interesting some of your options are for this system. You get different options for "hanging out with the crew" vs. "hanging out with an NPC". Crew-related overindulgence centers around debuffs for the upcoming mission (reduced harmony, extra trouble, less dice for the next engagement roll), while NPC-related overindulgence has some interesting character-related complications - the funniest of which is "Commitment", where you're embroiled in helping someone with a personal project like organizing a wedding or doing some other favor. I love fictional consequences like that and my god have I landed myself into some Commitments irl after hanging with people, lmao. [return]
[4]: To elaborate - Imogen had a very lonely childhood as someone without any same-age peers. She spent a lot of time in the library, including reading the town history from its founding and the adventures that Trinity Escapade went on. As lonely kids do, Imogen thought, Man, it'd be so cool to have a friend like that, and then. Sometimes your brain decides to spout a factive and you do not have the tools or framework to fully understand what is happening. [return]
[5] I believe Yara's player when she says the recipe actually tastes good, but viscerally disagree. Glad they did not go to waste, however.[return]