Originally posted to Medium.com Aug 22, 2020 Huge apologies for the image quality here - I (stupidly) didn’t keep backups of the originals, and all I’ve got is the compressed versions from Medium.com directly. Hopefully they’re legible enough to enjoy the read.
The Quiet Year defines itself as a “map game”. In it, you narrate a year in the life of a post apocalyptic community of people — the twist being, you do it entirely with cartography. Their struggles, achievements, successes, everything; whatever happens to these people, it is represented, and ONLY represented, on a map.
I absolutely love the idea, a while it doesn’t work perfectly as a solo game, I figured it would be a pretty great creative exercise to have a go at on a weekend.
I’m keeping a journal of choices and decisions as I go, and you, dear reader, can see the community rise and fall as I did.
I like the idea of a coastal community, scratching out an existence after some end-of-the-world scenario. So, we have a land mass and a sea.
We then list the communities “Abundances” and “Scarcities”; 1 of the former, 3 of the latter, and represent each of them.
I’m into them having loads of fuel/energy/etc. but no real application of it, so I listed our Abundance as “energy”. How? Coastal wind turbines. I drew some wind turbines in the sea, and a little power management/control station on the coast.
What is our community lacking? Proper housing and healthy food, for sure. They live in hollowed out machines of war — tanks, armoured vehicles, that sort of thing. And forage for what food they can. I added some bushes with flecks of colour to represent the berries, mushrooms, etc. they live off.
Hey, maybe some of the miscellaneous machines of war are futuristic? Like giant, dead mechs, jutting out of the landscape. I had a sudden flash of a sky scraper sized robot, stood completely still by the coast, seagulls flocking around it. Shit, I’m into that.
I draw a dead mech by the coast, and some armoured vehicles further inland. I add ropes, tarpaulins, details to make it feel like each has become a sort of broken campsite. I like the idea of the people naming the giant dead mech based on something they don’t understand. A chipped serial code on the back of the mech reads “83-N” — so they call it Ben.
Last scarcity? I wanted something a bit different, abstract. Ooh; immunity. Idea — these people have literally been altered in some way that they easily give each other diseases. (Accidentally topical here, guys). What happened to them? Some kind of bio-weapon, stripping them of white blood cells or something? No idea. Guess we’ll find out.
I represented immunity by moving the house/vehicles apart. They need each other, but they can’t risk living near each other.
And that’s the setup complete! We’ve got a community of people living inside hollowed-out tanks, armoured vehicles and a giant combat mech. They have all the energy they could ever need, but are stuck eating berries, fruit, and whatever they can forage for. What will happen to them next?
And we’re off! So, the community discovers an old piece of machinery, and it can be good or bad. I’m going to go with good — lets give these guys a bit of hope, shall we?