The Quiet Year goes full "Aloha!"

I got to play The Quiet Year again, which is a map-making co-op RPG with no GM and only limited use of dice. You can ready about my original excursion with The Quiet Year on this blog. This time around I had Kelvin and Ben who took the game in a very different direction.

What you can end up with is a mish-mash of competing ideas on the direction of the plot, at least initially, but I feel we all three settled into the game after the first hour and got more involved in what was happening. In some respects I feel we had more of a resolution by the time the winter phase ended.

We started out with a tropical island, in the rough shape of a skull. It was located in a boundless ocean but exposed also to visits from inter-planar travellers. A lot of the island was covered in jungle and inhabited by poisonous snakes and carnivorous apes. There was a central volcano.

So far so Isle of Dread, but things began to get very odd. Initially one of the younger villagers, a girl called Shasha, and some of her friends, built a bigger, ocean-going boat with the plan of seeking out new lands and adventure. This was opposed by many of the elders in the community in our first council session, but nobody seemed in a mood to delay Shasha's project, and so she sailed away into the west.

I introduced Kronos, a fish-man prophet and shaman figure who claimed to be an agent of the all-important sea god. Kronos proved to be a divisive force, especially with some of the more reactionary fishermen, who hunted harpies on a nearby islet as part of their coming of age ceremonies, and wore harpy feather necklaces. Kronos' plans to make peace with the harpies came to nought as this faction acted against him in the village council.

Note: We had a few good turns where key issues facing the community were debated. I think this mechanic could do with some work though, as it does not seem to have a huge degree of immediate influence over the course of the story. That said, it did serve to crystallise some of the factions within the village, including the emerging group of disciples of Kronos and the fishermen who hunted haripes.

Another notable sub-plot was that of the Baron, a roving pirate and explorer, who turned up in his ship and managed to persuade the community to give him some land to build a mansion on. Kronos was for attacking the Baron and driving him away, but again the fish-man simply did not have the leverage in the village council.

The Baron ended up exploring the coast of the island, including its large lagoon, and penetrating the northern jungles, cut off from the farmed part of the island by a large - and expanding chasm. The Baron and his men were responsible for exterminating the carnivorous apes (Kronos had previously led a successful expedition to slay the great white shark Mako which haunted the waters around the island). The Baron also attempted to seize control of an abandoned mine, left by the island's previous inhabitants, but here he ran into the gnomes.

Yes, the gnomes. They had come to the island from a different plane, in a submarine. They had run out of fuel and found a new source of the material in an abandoned mine on the island. They defeated the Baron in a battle and went on to launch an unsuccessful assault on the village. They accepted a negotiated peace with the villagers and also helped the village treat the victims of a mysterious disease which may/may not have been caused by the gnomes in the first place (there was speculation about a radiation leak from the submarine).

A great cravasse that spread across the island started spouting a mysterious fog which might in turn have been symptomatic of a rift in the 'wall' with another plane. Kronos was able to contain it but it was becoming obvious that the canyon was getting bigger and the sea was beginning to flood in from one end.

A couple of exploratory expeditions were mounted at this point. One went to assist the Baron and his crew in exploring a mysterious ziggurat the Baron had found in the jungle while hunting the carnivorous apes in the northern reaches of the island. It was while exploring the tunnels under the ziggurat that Kronos died, possibly the victim of a trap of some kind. The other expedition was sent to explore a strange building on the slopes of the volcano which turned out to be a CIA electronic eavesdropping post from the 1950s. It also contained some kind of cryogenic pod with a person inside. 

Luckily for us, the volcano erupted, destroyed the building and killing much of the expedition as well. By this stage though the villagers had built a number of ocean going boats on the west side of the island. The disciples of Kronos were pesuaded to give up on the huge funeral pyre they were building for their icthyic prophet in the middle of the village and flee the island before it sank beneath the waves. A small number of villagers left the island with the gnomes in their submarine, which plunged into the mysterious whirlpool in the ocean southeast of the island. The rest of the community and the Baron saild away to the west with Shasa.

Suggested PCs for a Skull Island campaign

Here are some ideas I had for a Skull Island RPG campaign, probably using Savage Worlds, based on the premise that the island does not sink beneath the waves. This would leverage the setting as things stood when most of the villagers departed.

• A member of the Baron's crew, left for dead in the jungle
• A disciple of Kronos who has sworn to remain on the island to complete the funeral pyre
• A gnome from the submarine who decided to stay behind
• A fisherman and harpy slayer (good skills in boat handling, navigation and combat)
• The man/woman/thing that was in the cryogenic pod in the CIA station

And here are some plot ideas for this motley crew:

• The ziggurat was never fully explored: what's down there?
• What is causing the mysterious fog, and can Kronos' wards hold?
• Some mass graves were found on one of the smaller islands, with the remains of the island's previous inhabitants - who were they and why have mysterious lights been seen on the atoll?
• Is the mysterious whirlpool still there and what is causing it?
• Did the CIA listening post survive the volcano's eruption and if so, what is inside it?
• What is the massive crystalline spike that sits in the sea to the southwest of the island?
• Can the harpies be reasoned with, or will they seek to now take control of the main island?