The Quiet Year from Joe Mcdaldno (Monsterhearts) is funding on IndieGoGo right now.
If you have visited Futile Position before, you probably know that I am fascinated with roleplaying games that try to take the general idea that we think of as ‘roleplaying games’ and tries to do something new and interesting with the paradigm. The Quiet Year is really more of a ‘storytelling game’ than an RPG, but it still looks like it might fit in that mold quite nicely. Instead of playing as a character (or even narrating a group of characters) like you do in the vast majority of RPGs, The Quiet Year tasks you with creating the history of a community. As you play The Quiet Year, you chart the story of your community on a map as you play (apparently using actual cartography as well as symbolic cartography showing where important events happen) and work together to challenge the community and how it reacts to those challenges. The game is not completely free-form, however. Instead, players draw a card that gives you specific actions that occur as well as asking a question about your small, quiet post-apocalyptic community and then the player chooses an action to occur from a short list. Joe Mcdaldno, through the game’s IndieGoGo campaign, stated that The Quiet Year has been play-tested over a hundred times. It certainly looks like it brings some really interesting ideas to the storytelling game table, and I’m going to be watching it with great interest. You can check out The Quiet Year IndieGoGo page for more information.
