The Quiet Year: keeping your community alive in the apocalypse

I'm breaking this post up into two parts: first, some explanation on what The Quiet Year is, followed by a brief summing up of our first experience of the game, and some ideas on where to take it next.

The Quiet Year, published by Buried Without Ceremony and created by Avery Alder, is an unusual beast which sits somewhere between a co-op board game and an RPG. Up to four players take it in turns to tell the story of a post-apocalypse community struggling to survive over 52 weeks. This is done with the use of a map, a deck of cards, and some dice.

There is no GM in the game, and each player takes it in turns to narrate what is happening to the community, using the cards as prompts. This includes the creation of new characters, and the discovery of new resources and locations in the vicinity of the settlement. Dice are used to keep track of 'projects' which can last from one to six weeks. Players agree between themselves how long a project lasts. These need not be infrastructure projects - although one of our early projects was to build a bridge - but can include diplomatic missions or the hunt for missing people, for example.

The game is played over four seasons. We only managed the spring and summer seasons in our first session, but we completed the whole thing after a second sitting.

You start by defining some of the characteristics of the settlement. The community is assumed to be somewhere in the region of 60-80 people. In our case we went with a group of survivors who had recently arrived in a ruined city which was once home to over 200,000 people. A river ran through the city. The apocalypse was decided on as a lethal virus, now passed, which meant there had not been much damage to infrastructure, although there was a level of deterioration. There was a maximum security prison on the outskirts of the city.

This was a bit of an eye opener for me: I'd been curious about these games for some time, and took the opportunity to play one. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. None of us had played The Quiet  Year before. There were three of us playing, with a spectator in the second session.

An abundance of tools: defining the setting

We started the spring phase with an abundance of tools, having found an abandoned superstore which was still relatively well-stocked. Each draw of the card is considered to be one week of time. The spring season is really set up to help the players to outline the environment before getting on with the narrative.

The prison was found to be still occupied by the convicts, who were led by a former serial killer called Red Bob. We had shortages in livestock and tinned food. During the game shortages and abundances in key commodities and/or resources will change. It does not have a huge mechanical effect, but provides another dimension for players to interact with. For example, we did create an animal husbandry project which in turn spawned the character of a half-trained vet who became the settlement's medic.

A buried suitcase was found by one of our kids, a boy called Colin, which turned out to be full of books, many of them self help guides which looked like they had been selected by a survivalist. There was, however, some porn, and Colin and one of his friends fought over that!

The community was led by Big Dave, assisted by Sue the mediator. They were not a couple, but most of the power was centralised in their hands. There was pressure within the community for a more democratic decision making process, of which more later.

One of the teens, a girl called Harriet, started a death cult among the younger people, which worshipped the virus as a tool of God to punish mankind. This was suppressed by Sue and Dave. Harriet subsequently ran away, and had to be hunted for. She was found living in a secret hermitage, which someone had created behind a large statue of the Grim Reaper. This massive statue has been carved into a cliff overlooking the city. We were not sure which mad artist was responsible for it, but it was over 50 feet high.

Not all plot elements get resolved in a game of A Quiet Year, hence my thoughts on its possibility as a tool for helping to create an RPG setting.

The summer phase: the mysterious Father Patrick

The big themes once the settlement had been defined in the spring phase, emerged in the summer months. The community managed to engage with the prison inmates, who were largely keeping to themselves. A flood led to our main food supply, a supermarket, being isolated in a lake. We managed to get a tower block wired up with a generator, moving the bulk of the population in there, from the tool store where they had been living previously.

A blind priest wandered into the settlement, called Father Patrick. He had been blinded and was also delirious. Before he could say much more about where he had come from, he was murdered, his body found with a screw driver in his back. This set the theme for a couple of other unsolved killings, with the elderly engineer, Old Steve, who had restored the generator needed to power the tower block, also being killed. But who by?

We also became aware of other human settlements in the region - by this stage we had decided that the settlement was in fact Lewes in Sussex. A group of explorers reached us from Haywards Heath led by Sue's long-lost son, who helped us to establish commercial links with that town. We also found Eastbourne was under the control of a cult of religious fanatics who were in the mood for militant expansionism. The Father Patrick plotline was quickly tied to them.

Autumn arrives and trouble for Big Dave

As we moved through autumn we began to resolve one of the big themes, which was the challenge to the leadership of Sue and Big Dave. There was a strong lobby among the survivors to establish a council which could better represent the desires of the people. Big Dave resisted this and it eventually evolved into an attempted coup by Vlad. This failed, Dave tried to have Vlad executed, but was talked out of it by Sue. Vlad was placed under house arrest, only to eventually die by 'falling' off his balcony in the tower block. We never got to the bottom of who was responsible for this.

The other big plotline, the threat from Eastbourne, was resolved near the end, with the settlement being fortified as a project, and the prisoners being persuaded to reinforce the local militia. Sadly Red Bob died of a fatal disease before the Eastbourne attack came in. 

A game of A Quiet Year typically ends with an attack of this kind by a group called the Shepherds: it is meant to conclude the game and there is no requirement for a 'result' per se, although I can see it being an entertaining wargames scenario of some description. In our case the Shepherds fitted nearly into the cult-like structure of our Eastbourne neighbours.

The other thing A Quiet Year could be used for is as the basis for the creation of an RPG campaign. Two sessions would probably need to be set aside for this, but it could end with the players establishing their characters, either as individuals who were already determined during the game, or as new characters from among the population. It provides the players with a well-defined setting which they are intimately familiar with and have played an active role in developing. Somehow we found ourselves much more engaged with these characters and their fates than from reading a third party published setting.

Beyond the post-apocalyptic setting postulated here, I can easily see this system being adapted for building a fantasy city or barony. The GM would need to potentially edit some of the cards, especially if he/she wanted to include some setting specific elements - e.g. you want the settlement to exist within a specific campaign world. As mentioned above, it could also be used to set up a wargames scenario as well, which ends the initial world building phase. Players and GM pick up the narrative after the battle is ended. It is a project I may work on this winter.