Creative sidebar

Spent the morning having brunch with some friends and then played a game of The Quiet Year to stretch our creative muscles before Sarah had to head back to Cleveland.

The basic premise of TQY is to collaboratively generate a world setting and then push it through events week by week for a year. You start with the notion of “A post-civilization society of about 60-80 people who have just finished dealing with The Jackals,” and a blank sheet of paper. You add details and content round-robin, drawing on the paper each time you do. We had to finish our game shortly before the end of summer.

Maggie suggested an underwater setting and drew a dome-encapsuled city. Sarah added a damaged submarine nearby. Justin marked the edge of the map as “The Dry Lands” (only spoken in a raspy voice) and I added a maze-like coral reef structure to another edge of the map. Next, you pick resources, later choosing which are Abundant and which are Scarce. Maggie suggested Rabbits, and then the rest of us added Breathable Air, Fuel and Light — we quickly agreed that we should have plenty of rabbits, but the rest should be in scarce supply.

As the game evolved through Spring, we established that the society was very rabbit focused. Prestige was determined by how Snuggled you were by the rabbits, while those who were rejected by our velvety soft overlords were called The Sad. A brief exploration of the coral reef maze created only more mysteries, which we promptly forgot as we devolved into rabbit-driven politics. Johnny Kribble formed The Squid Riders, an extremely conservative group of soldiers who were hellbent on keeping life EXACTLY the way it was when they were kids. Mindy The More-Snuggled-Than-Anyone-Else was worried about the Rabbit Dome’s structural stability, while others tried to harness the rabbity love of wheels to generate power and light for us.

A distant underwater “lake” of some unknown viscous substance turned out to be a viable fuel source that generated a thick miasma (-breathable air) which would drive rabbits into a murderous frenzy (-rabbit), creating a schism within our population that lead a third of our number to move out into some under-tunnels which were (inexplicably) filled with fresh air and blind strangers who had never even heard of rabbits.

Ignoring our many worldly problems, including mysterious water-dwelling creatures which abducted our Squid Riders, the lack of important resources, and the disturbing ramifications of snuggle-centric longevity technologies, our citizens moved into summer obsessed with insane experiments of the social and genetic varieties! Some people wanted to force some of the rabbits into the newly-occupied tunnels (to integrate those blind people into our culture). Other people clamored for a more coherent and scientifically measurable system of governance. Yet others discovered strange new uses for our felted-fur textiles, including dome maintenance (the fur, when subjected to the smoke from the Blacklake Fuel, hardened in a sturdy, flexible polymer-like material with all sorts of uses). A cache of squid-control devices wreaked havoc on the newly developed Squid Riders by making squid-transport available to everyone!

Four humans emerged from the long-abandoned, long-broken submarine with only the haziest memories of who they were. A faction within our society refused to even let them near a rabbit, out of suspicion, while others protested. Denied even the opportunity to be snuggled by a rabbit, many were unsure of these strangers and their place in society. Unsnuggled, how could we know whether to trust them or not?

As an attempt to cross breed rabbits with squid goes hideously awry, one of The Final Four (“stop calling them that!” screams Maggie) suddenly recalls fleeing from an alien invasion by strange rabbit-like creatures from another planet, but the population is too busy running from The Rampaging Squabbit to pay much heed. Besides, the Bio-Luminescent Fur project and Rabbit-powered Fan Systems are nearing completion!

Sadly, we had to stop here, just as we revealed the maze-dwelling Octo-dudes, and a coalition of anti-rabbit humanists in single-man submarines.

We hope to pick up this game again and finish it off. I’m still trying to find an online collaborative drawing tool that would let me play The Quiet Year over email.

Originally published at Amul Kumar Photography. Please leave any comments there.