Eyes Unclouded - Session 18
The week before last we had only two players for our ongoing Cairn game. Since we left off with a cliffhanger, we decided to play a game of The Quiet Year by Avery Alder. Lately, we've seen a few flashbacks to the days of Alfiann, the young healer from Wealdstone who wed Eirnos, the forest god. We decided to investigate what the coastal town of Wealdstone was like back in her day, focusing on one fateful year a few hundred years ago.
Setup
We started with a map of the coast, just south of the Blue Woods. A wide river curved inland, flowing down from the mountains to the east. On the north bank was a yam-shaped ruin that our players would recognize as a Mal-Aqat structure.
The people of Wealdstone were fisherfolk and shepherds. Their society privileged mothers and motherhood. Women who had many children were revered and attended to in the village council. Children were raised communally, often cared for by the tweens and teens of the village.
What Wealdstone lacked was decent soil, stable access to lumber, and contact with the outside world. The village had no neighbors to speak of, for good or ill.
Spring
Spring passed in the blink of an eye. We met two representatives of Wealdstone's older generation - Aethelrad and Aeferwic. Tensions flared between the younger generation, who wanted more self determination and more contact with the outside world, and the older generation who saw community and the village's established social order as sources of stability and safety.
Summer
These tensions were exacerbated by the arrival of Alfiann. Wandering north from points unknown, she brought strange herbs and medicinal knowledge that immediately made her both immensely useful and deeply suspect to the older generation. In particular, she had knowledge of contraceptives, deeply at odds with the values of the established social order.
In the months following her arrival, the village was busy with activity. A project to build a bridge across the river to claim more living space was sabotaged by Aeferwic. A group of young people began building an exploration barge to sail down the coast.
Defense-minded villagers began constructing a curtain wall along the southern edge of the village. When their efforts proved insufficient, Alfiann helped - planting briars and other clinging plants to bind the stones together.
Aeferwic stood trial for his act of sabotage. After some debate, the council saw fit to punish him for his transgression against the community, but only lightly. He was tasked with minding the newly completed bridge across the river.
Villagers found omenous footprints on the northern bank - large and sometimes monstrous.
Autumn
The autumn was marked with tragedy and unexpected disaster. A young child named Leofwine went missing in the hills north of the village. Search parties found evidence of great wolves prowling the area.
The villagers constructed a religious hermitage for young adults. The idea was that those coming of age needed a private place to explore their identity in relative isolation. This structure was built on the north side of the river, and reflected the foreign design of Alfiann's hut.
Mid-Autumn, a typhoon surged inland from Turtle Rock in the northwest. It lashed the village with violent winds. Aeferwic died in the process of protecting the bridge he had once tried to sabotage. When the weather settled, the villagers decided to claim the Mal-Aqat ruin as a shelter and holdfast. They began the dangerous process of clearing and retro-fitting the interior. They built artificial floors and walls to seal the parts of the ancient structure they couldn't safely demolish.
The exploration barge sank under suspicious circumstances. While no culprit was ever caught, many in the older generation approved of the sabotage. A symbolic judicial hearing sentenced the boat to serve as a mocking monument, and forbade future attempts to explore by sea.
A search party was organized to find Leofwine and hunt the wolves of the Blue Woods to the north. As they gathered, rumors swirled around Alfiann. She seemed to know about such things, so why wasn't she helping? Cognizant of the rumors, she agreed to lead the hunting party into the woods, but made no promises about their success or safety.
They returned without Leofwine but with a great wolf cub. The cub rapidly became a beloved and mischievous part of the community. Alfiann returned long after the search party.
A great elk was spotted at the treeline. A good omen as the villagers had recently begun to hunt venison to supplement their larders.
Winter
As winter settled over the village, sheep from the south side of the river were found dead on the north. Concerned villagers began the project of expanding the walls to surround the new north bank structures. As the weather grew colder, hunting elk became something of a fashion...
GM Notes
I technically didn't GM this session, since The Quiet Year is a GM-less system, but I did introduce the game and facilitate throughout. We played with a few major modifications to the rules:
- Before the game, I pruned 4 cards from each season, ensuring that the Ace remained in each pile.
- In each season, when we drew the ace, the next season began. I didn't realize this was a house rule until well after the session proper.
- We invented three abundances and three scarcities, instead of inventing three resources and choosing one to be in abundance. I think this might be how it works in The Deep Forest, a sequel of sorts.
Overall, these changes made for a brisker game, which was good, but I maybe would have stacked the decks a little more so we at least got to 6 or so cards in each season.
Players expressed a little bit of concern about making hard moves with characters that were already claimed by our collaborative fiction. It didn't even really occur to me as a potential issue. Coming from a PBtA background as a GM, I tend to have a light touch with lore and character history. I have a few things that are absolutely true about them in my prep, but mostly I leave space to find out more about them at the table.
I think our setting is richer for having played this game, even if we didn't resolve any significant questions about the timeline or Alfiann's relationship with the spirits of the woods. All the landmarks we made will absolutely be incorporated into Wealdstone proper (or at least its history) if and when we ever return there.