silversandbea

Ha, so I ended up locking my one and only entry because it involved a plot point in my D&D game that never actually came up. And then there have been other things I've considered making posts about and . . . haven't?

Happy New Years'. Posting in this isn't a resolution, but I'm going to try to do it anyway.

I ended up ringing in the new year by playing the Deep Forest - a Quiet Year reskin involving less post-apocalypse and more monsters. It seemed thematically appropriate, plus I rarely have gatherings with four or fewer people that are up to playing one game for hours.

So the Deep Forest is a cooperative game about groups of disparate people (well, monsters) trying to build a community together, with some literal building by drawing on maps and some not-so-literal building by talking shit out and passive-aggressiveness. You've got a year to do what you can before the next threat comes (thus the quiet year).

We ended up playing it slightly differently from the rules - the agreements became more discussions naturally - partially because group dynamics meant that we're all more the type to debate rather than be silent, partially because I sort of reject the idea that the only way that the only way to maintain community is through never voicing disagreements. We also ended up playing as our group more often than not - we could control others, but the person who came up with the monster group ended up having the final say, and some of the monster groups had some hidden knowledge that created conflict.

Dan decided right away that our setting was an abandoned temple to a lovecraftian god, and that sort of set the horror feel for the rest of the game- more than even the monsters. It came about that all of the monsters had been brought/bred by the cultist humans, and they found themselves trying to muddle their way through maintaining a land (and a seal preventing apocalyptic doom) that they know little about.

The cute bunny-like monsters ended up pokemon evolving to get larger and sharp teeth (and occasionally eating the other monsters), the fire-spirits fought addiction to the geothermal vents that would bring euphoria and make them grow out of control, the bird people ended up being able to get what they wanted most of the time, and the mole people horrified everyone else by eventually falling back into the same routines of subservience and amorality: when a group of mole people were found to be mind-controlled by Ood who were working to release the creatures of the deep, the rest of the mole people just shrugged and didn't see the issue.

Anyway, it was fun! I'm always worried that stuff like this is going to be too free form and people won't have a place to start, but it seemed to work just fine.