Eyes Unclouded - Session 21
The week before last, we were again down to only a couple of players for our ongoing Cairn game. We decided to continue exploring the blank spaces on our map of the Blue Woods using The Deep Forest, Avery Alder's post-colonial reimagining of The Quiet Year. Unlike last time, we didn't set a specific time or location—just the nebulous idea that we were roleplaying a year in the life of monsters somewhere deep in the forest.
We played this session a few weeks ago, and I find these kinds of map-making games harder to remember the details of than our usual character-centric sessions. I'll try to hit the key details, but some events might drift a little as I reconstruct the game from our map.
Spring
We begin our year with a monster victory! The local creatures have driven off the humans who dwelled in a small library monastery and successfully reclaimed their settlement. This left them with:
- A library full of human texts.
- An abandoned scriptorium.
- An irrigated orchard of fruit-bearing trees.
- The crashed wreckage of a hot air balloon.
The monsters were an unlikely group of allies:
- A clan of kobolds who love yapping and jumping off of tall objects.
- Squonks who will dissolve into a puddle if ever seen by a human.
- Crafty kitsune with magical powers.
- At least one giant raccoon that was somewhat sad to see the humans go.
- Six-legged deer who hate loud noises (and only came up once in play...)
In Spring, the monsters cautiously explored the site, except for the kobolds, who quickly folded the ruins into their coming-of-age ceremony. A would-be adult must hurl themselves from a tall structure, testing both their mettle and their ability to gauge just how much trouble they can handle.
Summer
As the days grew longer, the monsters began projects to repurpose the ruins. They began emptying the scriptorium for use as shelter. Some enterprising monsters began a project of learning the human language, discovering some magical tomes in the process. These spells were written in a language eerily like their own.
The giant raccoon began a garbage collection service, hoping to bring back the golden days of eating human scraps. Kobolds claimed a huge silo, but never figured out how to get inside it.
The most notable event was the arrival of a new band of monsters: a small family of trolls, ancient and stony. They settled on the east side of the monster village.
Some social rifts began to form between the monsters. Kobolds loudly expressed their derision for the squonks, who had necessarily done little to drive off the humans. This, in turn, set the newly arrived trolls on edge, since they hadn't either.
Fall
Fall was marked by disasters.
Someone, though it never became clear who, burned the contents of the human library just before the monster scholars could really crack their language. From the ashes emerged a baby unicorn.
Perhaps even more troubling, one of the newly arrived trolls was found murdered. Trolls are very difficult to kill, as they regenerate, don't sleep, and are seemingly made of stone, but someone had done it. Rumors swirled that humans might be involved.
With conspicuous timing, a human arrived in the settlement seeking shelter — a grey-haired woman carrying a huge pack of herbs and charms. She introduced herself as Alfiann and seemed to respect the monsters' ways well enough, settling a respectful distance from the squonks.
Despite their troubles, the monsters' spirits were lifted by a great harvest of apples from their orchard. They celebrated with a harvest festival, carving the fruit into leering faces for the kitsune to levitate around the village.
At this point, we discovered (confirmed? decided?) that this site had been in the Woods Inverted all along.
Winter
As the air grew colder, the monsters returned to the problems their community faced.
A squonk was appointed to investigate the troll murder. In the process of the investigation, it was revealed that the outlying woods were filled with troll graves — dolmen-like structures intended to collapse and appear as naturally occurring outcrops of stone.
After much deliberation, the squonk declared the culprit to be another troll. The community hummed with arguments about what to do. Before any evidence could be presented or a decision reached, human adventurers arrived, throwing the community into panicked disarray.
GM Notes
This game has a couple of big ramifications for our setting lore:
- Human settlements in the Woods Inverted in the time of Alfiann (several hundred years before current events)! Who lived there?
- Monsters! So far, we've only seen spirits, elementals, and animals. This is the first arrival of some D&D-esque creatures on camera.
- Another Alfiann sighting! Is this before or after her stay at Wealdstone? Or her marriage to Eirnos? Or the death of the deer god?
I'm comfortable saying that all of this information was discovered by the PCs during their recent visit to Eleutheria. We can frame that in at the beginning of our next session.
The Deep Forest definitely feels like an iteration on The Quiet Year. The oracle deck has more interaction points with the other systems, adding monsters and human structures or manipulating projects. The game loop felt tighter as a result.
One key pivot that I'm not sure about was a change to the town meeting. In The Quiet Year, a player could spend a turn calling together characters to discuss recent events. In The Deep Forest, you can only stage an "agreement," asking each player to pick a character to agree or describe how they remain silent. This produced a lot of contempt tokens when players didn't just agree or remain silent, but perhaps more importantly, it produced less specific personalities and more general attitudes.