BlackwoodGame Design

Hacking The Quiet Year

It’s been a busy few months over here! I got married and went on a honeymoon, I’ve been hosting a new podcast, Jianghu Hustle (more on that in a later post, probably), and I’m working to get our first products of the year ready to go. That includes a couple maps and our first supplment for The Blackwood: a regional guide to adventuring in the frontier province of Denvorn.

While the supplement is for Savage Worlds, I want The Blackwood to spread its tangled wilderness out into other systems as well. I was pretty excited to get permission from Avery Alder to develop a Blackwood hack for her story game, The Quiet Year. If you’re not familiar with The Quiet Year, Avery says it best on her website:

For a long time, we were at war with The Jackals. But now we’ve driven them of, and we have this – a year of relative peace. One quiet year, with which to build our community up and learn once again how to work together. Come Winter, the Frost Shepherds will arrive and we might not survive beyond that. But we don’t know about that yet. What we know is that right now, in this moment, there is an opportunity to build something.

It’s a game about communities, how the people within them coexist (or not), and what they do (or fail to do) to survive in a dangerous land. It’s the perfect premise for The Blackwood. My intention is to use the rules as-written, and to adapt the game’s story seeds to tell stories of errants in the wilderness. Here are a few thoughts I’ve had in the design process so far.

The Summer Greening

In The Quiet Year, the year proceeds from early spring through the following winter. Players draw cards from a standard deck of playing cards (52 cards in a deck and 52 weeks in a year, conveniently) and consult the “Oracle,” a set of tables tied to card suits. The Oracle results on each card reveal a story of increasing trials. Each new season is a little harder than the last one, until the winter is abruptly ended by the arrival of the Frost Shepherds. But in The Blackwood, winter is a blessing. The cold weather drives humans indoors but it also sends the forest into a kind of hibernation. Instead, we know from the Starflower Festival adventures in The Blackwood Errantry Codex that elves are at their strongest in summer. For this hack, the first season in the Oracle is autumn, then winter, then spring, then summer at last.

Once upon a time, the Spearwood Fellowship struck out from Denvorn Province to open the eastern wilds for settlement. Then the Elder King disappeared, the forest grew dark, and dreams of expansion crumbled. Now the Spearwood Fellowship trains to move through the treetops quickly with the magic of Leaf Step and to fight off creatures several times their size with coordinated polearm tactics. Without this band of outcasts and drifters, the Elder Kingdom might be overrun.

It is the first week of autumn. The Fellowship has less than a year before the next summer’s Greening, when the magic of the forest reaches its most malevolent heights. Will the Spearwood Fellowship overcome the trials of life in the Blackwood, or will they falter like the dreams of expansion from which they were born?

In The Quiet Year, each of the results in the Oracle are setting-neutral but narrative-rich: they plant a lot of seeds without telling you specifically what plants will grow from them. That’s for you to decide as a group of players. All I needed for a playable rough draft was to tweak those seeds so they point toward a more specifically Blackwood story.

The First Playtest

Snowed in here in Chicago, my wife at I ran a quick playtest this past weekend.

Toward the end of our game.

As always, The Quiet Year did not disappoint. Our Spearwood Fellowship discovered enchanting sites like a clearing with a giant ruby outcropping in the center. It discovered a troll standing in between them and a slew of wild game. When they couldn’t displace the troll, they went into the mountains and learned to grind dried insect husks into meal instead. A nearby pagan coven began putting up warning totems all over the forest. A hunting party discovered a cursed dagger, then disappeared. Changes in leadership brought huge changes (and instability) to the Spearwood way of life. A firecat—the deadliest animal in the wilderness—arrived in the northern mountains. The Summer Greening came early (the first card of summer!), right in the middle of a couple important projects. Honestly, I don’t think the Fellowship survived this year’s Greening.

Lessons Learned

I was right that a viable Blackwood game can be made by simply reskinning The Quiet Year. That said, I definitely want to increase the focus of the Oracle results. There were a few prompts I left mostly intact:

  • “Are romantic partnerships allowed among the Spearwood Fellowship? If so, what ritual is performed during the commitment ceremony?”
  • “Someone new arrives. Who? Why are they in distress?”
  • “The weakest among you dies. Who’s to blame for their death?”

I kept these and a few others in because they did something important in The Quiet Year: they told us about the people in the community and stragglers out on their own in the post apocalypse. There is civilization beyond the Spearwood Fellowship (the whole Elder Kingdom still exists to the west), but I realized that doesn’t mean these communities are well-suited to the same story seeds. Learning more about romantic partnerships was interesting, but more than anything it wasn’t making me think of hunters flying through the wilderness managing monster populations. Maybe a question asking about how hunters reinforce camaraderie on the trail would be a more interesting detail for this story than whether any of them ever fall in love (because of course they do).

In The Quiet Year, the different seasons accomplish different meta-tasks. Spring introduces you to the world and the community. Summer is a time to start a lot of projects and introduce conflict. In autumn, challenges increase before the uncertain and anxious winter arrives. Each season’s Oracle is geared toward these themes and I want to reinforce them. But I noticed the first season of The Summer Greening seemed to tell us more about the community than the world outside it. Either there aren’t enough “world” cards or we chose to focus on “community” cards. Either way, I want to tweak things to impose a little more balance in that first season. There are tweaks I want to make in the other seasons too, but I know this is going to be a big one.

Now that my life outside of gaming has calmed down a little, I’ll be posting more often on the site because I enjoy sharing the steps of my creative process with folks. Is anyone else doing any hacking projects right now? How are they going?